It was a cool mail day today. First off, I finally got my passport back. It looks so.. so... Official! Now I'm more psyched than ever to get all sorts of foreign stamps in it!

Second cool thing was a response from Asimov's on a story I'd sent back in January. Yes, it was a rejection, but it was a two-page-single-spaced-typed-personal rejection. I don't know that I would have received such an in-depth critique if he was not going to be one of my Clarion instructors, but I'm gratified all the same. He had some very encouraging and very cogent things to say about the story and my writing. "It's well-crafted for one; this is written at a fully professional level, line-by-line," absolutely made my day. Of course then for the rest of the two pages he went into what was wrong with the story, but it was still encouraging because some of the things were aspects that I'd noticed myself (three months after I'd sent it off, of course), and others were things where I went, "Oh! Okay, I can work with that." All in all, even though it was a rejection, it was completely encouraging to me as a writer.

The third piece of mail I had today was yet more proof that the housing bureau in Baltimore is comprised of numbnuts who can't find their asses with both hands. I'd called (for the millionth time) last week to check again on the availability of rooms for August 4th and 5th, and while I had the woman on the phone I said, "Oh, by the way, I received the confirmation form, but you misspelled my street name. It's spelled with an 'F' not an 'S'." Okay, she responds, we'll send you a new confirmation form with the corrected address on it. It came today telling me that they'd corrected my information, with, you guessed it, the street name spelled with an "S".

I give up. At least my mail-carrier is smart enough to figure out where it goes. I'm not going to tempt the fates any more.