Journal

Tuesday, July 16, 2002
So, today I renewed my Green Card, which involved lots of Kafkaesque standing in corridors in order to get a number to allow me to enter a hall and wait some more. Eventually, after lots of waiting, they fingerprinted me, made me sign a bit of paper, took the form and the (terrible) photos of me, scribbled in my passport, and sent me on my way with a cheery "So, when are you applying for citizenship?"

(And the fact I had to renew my green card means I've been here ten years, which is, now I come to think of it, ten years, but I really still have no desire to be a US citizen. I think of myself as English, even if my accent's a bit dodgy these days. Giving that up would be giving up something that makes me who I am.)

Then I went in to DreamHaven Books, where I sat in a back room and signed many piles of books -- some of it stuff people had pre-ordered from DreamHaven, and some of it the "signed edition" Diamond copies of the Coraline special edition, which had finally been sent out. Seeing no-one had actually done anything special for the signed ones (apart from making stores and customers jump through some very peculiar hoops to get them) I decided to number them, which I did. Five of them were badly damaged or misprinted, and Elizabeth from DreamHaven very kindly gave us five of DreamHaven's copies of the Special Edition, to make sure that everyone who ordered the signed one gets one. (There were a total of 177, if anyone's interested.)

Bought the latest BUST for my assistant Lorraine, (because I always read her copy, and I think her subscription sort of vanished in their recent publishing troubles, or possibly just expired, or it's in the post and just hasn't turned up yet) along with a Mervyn Peake biography.

Still reading ARCHER'S GOON to Maddy. Tonight was the chapter where they go through the tunnels to meet Erskine, and when I got to the last sentence, she bounced up and down round-eyed and round-mouthed. I wished Diana could have seen it.