David Gillon

First short story rejection of the year, bah humbug. But the stats, eeek!

"Please keep in mind that we had nearly 1400 submissions and we accepted 20 stories total"

That's for the Derelict anthology. Presumably they had similar numbers for the other two anthologies they were doing.

My mother's central heating broke down on Thursday, which isn't ideal for an 81yo at this time of year, but kudos to her central heating guy who came out on Friday morning (apologising that he hadn't been able to come on Thursday evening), spent a while working on it, determined it probably needed a new PCB, and then told her it would be cheaper to sign up to the manufacturer's service plan and have them come out and fix it than for him to do it, and refused to take any money (and he'd be losing the annual service, not just the one job). And he was spot on, they came out on Saturday and replaced the PCB and her house is warm again. Thankfully my sister was able to deal with everything without needing me to get involved beyond agreeing what the engineer was saying made sense.

And as well as that being fixed, my clinically extremely vulnerable brother-in-law had his vaccination (AZ) on Sunday, so that's one less worry for both him and my sister. Judging by a graphic in the Guardian on Monday, she and I are likely to get our jabs in the last week of March if progression continues as currently.

Not much of substance happening at this end. Gamewise I've been playing Ark again for the past few weeks, I hadn't played since April-ish due to a corrupted save file, but finally got around to rolling back to the previous save. And I promptly fell off my giant owl in the dark, in the deadliest spot on the Ragnorak map, the Murder Murder Snow* - hypothermia actually killed me before I hit the ground. As my character had all my good gear on it, I needed to recover the body.  Unfortunately all my good gear included my best set of insulating fur armour. So recovery had to be dash in wearing my second-best set, grab the stuff, and dash out again before hypothermia killed me, and before the body and its gear faded in a couple of gameplay hours. To make things even worse, it had landed right on the spawn-spot for a pack of direwolves, so I didn't even dare hop off to get it. Trying to take the direwolves out cost me three good flyers and more sets of gear - I lost count of the number of times I died. I finally decided the only way to do it was to build a base on top of my body, block by block, by flying in and placing them from the air. Initially I'd planned just a raised platform where I could land, a couple of campfires to keep the hypothermia at bay, and a ladder dropping down to the body, but I ended up building first a shack on the platform and then a wall around the body for safety's sake. And so now I have my gear back, and a base in the middle of the Murder Murder Snow. I'm not sure that I can do anything practical with it, but it's a fantastic spot for watching the daily war between the direwolves and the mammoths.

* So-called because at -60C it's even worse than the -40C Murder Snow.

The fixed price repair deal isn't actually bad, I had repairs on the old boiler that would have cost three times as much but for cover, but that "Oh, I'll do it when I get home" is going to cost me about £200.

Bah!

* It's now up to a reasonable temperature courtesy of a couple of fan heaters.