Monday

I finally gave in, cancelled my Amazon order for Crystal Soldier, and immediately re-ordered it along with one of my April picks. Now they allow as how I might get it by the end of the month, rather than the middle of the month after next. Sometimes their system just seems to get stuck on things they don't have immediately to hand at the time I order, and cancelling is the only way to unstick it.

In other Amazon news, a box arrived today, solving for the next year or two a small lingerie difficulty I've been having.

My boss reports he saw AF-1 flying over this morning.

I am mildly amused to note that the cover-image credit on my copy of Banks' The Algebraist (UK edition, of course) includes an institution not a hundred (or even ten) miles from here. (Wonders what the US edition will look like.) (Is disconcerted to notice that the US edition appears to be coming out from obscure small publisher.) (Realizes that almost entire Banks collection is UK editions anyway.)

Tuesday

I have a California quarter, which our coffee vendor saved for me.

I continue to be intrigued by the way my digital camera renders deep purples as blue and deep reds as lighter reds. (Bright reds are not a problem; it isn't a colour cast thing.) It doesn't seem to be anything I can fix by fiddling with the colour balance in Photoshop; it looks as though maybe the CCD just cuts off at slightly shorter wavelengths than the human eye. The pansy in my icon, for example, was a lot purpler than than that in real life. Film tends to have the opposite problem, tinting the purest flower-blues with pink.

It's been a pleasant day, with the sky just lightly feathered with cirrus. The orange blossom is almost over, though the air is still sweet with it, and whatever was bothering my allergies has receded a lot. The mallows are magnificent this year, with stray or feral stalks of orange blooms popping up everywhere and the tamer pink ones bowed and sprawling under the weight of their flowers. Still to come are the palo verde, which has has lovely little yellow flowers and very tickly pollen, and the oleanders clotted with blossom, milk-white and rose-pink and deep red, and the creamy saguaro blooms, lovely and incongruous atop the twenty-foot spiny columns, and the brief red-gold glory of prickly-pear flowers.