Hibernation ends, and I poke my head up above ground to see if things have changed since I bedded down for the winter. Not really, I guess—George W. Bush is still president, the Republicans are still running roughshod over traditional American values, and the world continues to deteriorate. Give up.
I still don't have a reliable connection with the internet, by the way, but I guess I'm going to try to resurrect this blog, despite horrendous setbacks. Readers may remember my griping about my notes and library being in storage. I'd like to report that I've successfully recovered them and am ready to get down to some serious work—but alas, that's not true, and the news is bad. Very bad.
All my decades of work on various projects—the Dubious Documents book for one—are irretrievably lost. The same goes for the bulk of my library—my encyclopedias, reference works, and small specialized collections on subjects that interested me. My shelf of writings by the American founding fathers. All gone. I'm still frankly in a state of shock over it. Some of the older and rarer items, ironically, are relatively easily replaced, thanks to being able to download PDFs from Google Books and Archive.org. Some items I'd only recently acquired and was looking forward to enjoying when I could retrieve them are particularly galling—my 1950 edition of Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, for example. And I was really looking forward to spending time with some of my old sf favorites—I had a complete collection of Galaxy and ASFs going back to 1941.
Sorry to bore you all with my problems. I'm trying to count my blessings. I still have my family, and my dog, and the remnants of my library (my Western Americana collection and my ancient religions stuff are still mainly intact, for example). But I'm having a hard time of it, and I'm not sure how I'm going to start over.
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