In case you hadn't noticed, things just got very very different around here. And yes, I'm aware some things aren't working quite the way they are supposed to. Working on it!

I had actually been wanting to re-design my site for some time, and have been puttering around with it for a few months now. I meant to get it up in January, actually. However, my life was pretty much taken over by the Save Jake 2.0 Campaign the past few weeks. For those of you who may not have heard, UPN and Viacom halted production of the series in January and pulled it from the schedule. So if you would like to see the final four episodes (or, for that matter, the remainder of season one and perhaps even a season two), join the fight!

In other news, I had a whirlwind trip with Poppy to the UK, for my grand-uncle Lewis Leo's 80th birthday. The entire Leo clan was there, and my father and I stayed quite late talking with Lewis and his wife Jean, primarily about my grandmother Dorothy who was killed during an air raid in 1943, the day before my father's 3rd birthday. Lewis was only 19 at the time, and we went through an enormous file of family photos, birth, death, and marriage certificates, and so on. It was actually quite lovely--as was catching up with my Leo cousins. We stayed in Bristol with a fellow Halton apprentice and his wife, and thought the weather was awful (really, it's winter in England. I don't know what either of us expected. And, to be fair, it was still 30° F warmer than Chicago, which was -20° windchill when I left) but we had a lovely lovely visit with John and Rose, and their beautiful grandchildren. And I finally got to meet their son Austin and daughter Siân, so that was nifty.

Before I left, I hit Rick's and picked up a stack of used books, and am currently deeply in love with The Continental Op stories. I read Red Harvest on the bus from Bristol to Heathrow Monday morning, and then read half of an anthology on the flight back. Love me some Dashiell Hammett. I also read The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, written in 1972 by Michael Dibdin. Having read Alan Moore's From Hell, I think the impact of the Whitechappel murders in the Holmes novella was lessened slightly--if only because I knew all of the grisly details already. Still, it was fascinating and wow, Holmes can be a bitchy little coke-head sometimes.

Since I haven't mentioned it yet, I thought I would say that Onion Soup was fabulous, and I shall be posting pictures soon.