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So, Val Kilmer ogled a friend of mine at the (tiny) Santa Fe airport today.

Well, okay.  It wasn’t really ogling.  There was nothing creepy about it.  I guess it was more of a curious glance.  But it was definitely directed at Melinda, or at least her toenail polish, and it was definitely definitely Val Kilmer.

World traveler and blog reader Dawn S. sent me the following photograph, which she and her husband took on a street in Beijing, China. 

For strange and complicated writing reasons, I’ve been doing Google image searches on “confusing parking signs”.  The results have been OK, but not spectacular.  I haven’t yet found something that makes me sit up and make strange noises.   

And, frankly, if I don’t find something confusing, it has to be pretty straightforward.   I’m easily confused.  It’s my curse.

My friend and colleague, E. E. Giorgi, is a mathematician by day and a novelist by night.  (Keep your eyes open for the Chimeras books.  They are destined for great things.)   EEG also maintains a blog that features interviews with interesting writers who juggle creative and technical endeavors in different parts of their lives.  (Witness the recent interview with multi-award-nominee and writing powerhouse Aliette de Bodard.)

The really fascinating people weren’t available this week, but I did my best to be a decent followup to Aliette’s interview.  Our conversation is posted here.

When I was 20, I spent much of that year getting about 4 hours of sleep per night.   I was in school at the time, and I was younger, and that sort of thing was more or less the norm.  And somehow I was able to function that way.  Maybe not brilliantly, but somehow I managed.  I did well in school, and worked on the side, and found time to have friends.  That isn’t to say it was fun; it did catch up with me from time to time.  (Like the time I slept through a presentation my lab partner and I were supposed to give at our Experimental Methods class.  The problem being that I had the poster.)  But somehow, for the most part, I knew that as long as I had at least 4 hours of sleep I could make it through the following day.  Painfully, perhaps, but I’d manage.

I’ve never been a big fan of the bona fide all nighter.  I did that only rarely.   Even so, I didn’t get a lot of sleep that year.

Until near the end of the academic year, when I contracted a very mild case of mononucleosis.