Out of my hands

Finally, my book would seem to be done. I have just fired off the last fourteen errata, along with my index, to the publisher. I just had about 20 minutes of panic thinking that I had lost my index file, which was composed with a great deal of hair-pulling tedium over the last three days. But then I found it. All is okay.

I'm sunburned, like Philip Sidney's brain. I went to the somethingth annual "Battle for Nevada" today, the football game between Nevada and UNLV, and although the Nevada autumn hit with a vengeance last night with squishy horizontal snow, the summer had one or two last attacks left in reserve. I was lulled into a false sense of helial security and now my pale, freckly, Scottish epidermis is bubbling and cracking and fomenting a melanoma. I can feel it coming, like foreshadowing in a terrible vampire novel. My dad just had his fourth skin tumor removed last week. And now he may have a prostate thing. The biopsy is next week, so we're trying to be cheerful, a project that is helped by the inherent funniness of the phrase "butt cancer."

Oh, but the football game was magnificent, and we (i.e. the large, frightening, linebacking, wide-receiving 20-year-olds who sometimes, though infrequently, sulk through my classes while waiting for Saturday to come) won with a last-minute touchdown, despite some shocking defensive blunders.

And then I came home and did the traditional American post-game celebration, that is, I catalogued all occurrences of the phrase "Corporation of London" in my proofs while swilling scornfully cheap Shiraz.