This last week has been one of many headaches, but everything is going to be fine. I had strep throat and missed lots of school, but now I am well. Work-wise, the largest headache has been mxterminator, a sentence-boundary finder which suffers from minimal documentation and not being open source. OK, I'll be fair; I also suffer from only knowing enough about Unix to get myself in trouble. (We call this learning.) For some inexplicable reason, the shell script which is supposed to invoke the program completely refuses to do so, and for some time, I was getting thoroughly inexplicable errors which turned out to have been the fault of an incorrectly set environment variable. Bleh. Said shell script still refuses to invoke said program, but said program can be invoked command-line because the shell script only passes an argument to the java interpreter anyway, so what the fuck ever.

In my ultimately-futile-and-I'm-kinda-glad-about-that quest to find a workaround, I even considered writing a process in some other language that I could invoke from within PHP, to hop over to another server where the damn program works and do the work there. This started to lead into a quest for an ssh library for Python (since its telnetlib is so handy), which led me here, and wow, SSH is complex. In my copious free time I will have to learn more about it. Fortunately, I don't have to do that tonight.

As far as other stuff goes: it's life, and it goes on. We know now, forever and ever amen, that you cannot get into the US military if you have ever had any form of malignant cancer, so Colin's admirable (yet ultimately rather painful) goals now have to be reworked. It's not going to be easy. I know he wants a sense of fulfillment, and that for most of his life, he's expected to be able to get that from the military. All I can really do is be here, and be supportive, while he figures out where to go, if anywhere.

Honestly? He's more than welcome to be a stay-at-home husband if he wants. He's far better at taking care of a house than I am, and my earning potential is easily good enough to keep us in steaks and gasoline for the foreseeable future. But I want him to be happy on his own terms, as much as the rest of the world allows it. It's just that none of us know what those terms are any more.

Um, other stuff: not much progress on the writing front this month, but that's ok, as I was expecting to get a lot done during spring break, which is next week. Workshopped chapter 1 of Disintegration yesterday, and the reader-response was ... let's just say, exactly what I was hoping for. People asked the kinds of questions I anticipated they'd ask, one or two things flew under their radar (but that's okay, as I'm setting those things up still), reaction to the narrator's voice was very fun. Egad: am I actually ready to write this novel? Astounding.

Hee. Marc emails just now: "That's good news. Don't exhaust yourself and get a relapse!" But I had a long nap today. Life is all right.