Ah, the first cold I’ve had in months. I so have not missed being sick. The general ache, the out-of-it feeling due to the sinus pressure, the boxes and boxes of tissue….

Thursday night I had a dynamic pair of students in a workshop, which was an enjoyable switch from the usual silent note-taking type. Friday night I got to make a flying visit to the first Montreal NaNo coffee gathering and met some terrific new people while re-acquainting myself with terrific people I’d met last year. And, as a result of a highly amusing misunderstanding, I have resolved that my story will have a psychic ferret involved in it somewhere (you just had to be there). (And I called Tal insane. Ah, well. There’s a reason we’re related by choice.)

It was a lovely Thanksgiving weekend (apart from the cold, of course, which ensured that I couldn’t taste my in-laws’ wonderful harvest feast to the degree it deserved), with a nice gift at the end: Salem, my favourite local cat-who-is-not-mine, ate about 30 ccs of food after refusing to eat for a period of days. Sure, it took three of us to hold her (including one and a half animal techs), but she ate; she even ate willingly after being force-fed a bit of it. Then I got to cuddle a corn snake while I watched the new trailers for Matrix Revolutions and The Return of the King.

This afternoon is a legal presence at the Palais de Justice (no worries, it’s all good), and then an intimate get-together at Hurley’s to celebrate a few different milestones achieved over the past three months.

(Palais de Justice, for our non-Quebec-resident readership, is the fancy French term for the city courthouse. It does not, in fact, have anything to do with a superhero team. More’s the pity.)

Slowly but surely, I’m getting my mind back into the writing mode. I managed to get my printer working again (using the popular kick-it-hard method combined with replacing an ink cartridge) and printed out the existing copy of two half-finished stories, then took them to the Second Cup with me Friday afternoon to edit and add to them. Re-reading work that I haven’t touched in months is a remarkably good carrot to use when I’m stuck; it’s often better than I remember it being. Must stop drinking lattes and mochas while doing it, though. Herbal tea all the way!