Well, actually, not so much in my house because it’s filled with boxes, but we did get to hang out a fair bit today before his reading. The reading was great fun; I’m pleased to say that Mr. Scalzi has a good sense of pacing and knows how to use a microphone to good affect.

I swung by Trader Joe’s on the way over to visit, because the man is clearly an amateur at touring and needed decent tour snack food. I also gave him a couple of packets of EmergenC to hopefully help him through the next week.

Afterward his reading a group of writers went to the Market St. McMenamins. I even enticed Rob down there and my neo-luddite husband got into a very interesting discussion about blogs with Scalzi, Jay Lake and David Goldman. David Levine and Kate ducked out early so they missed out on that fun. Rob doesn’t get the concept of blogging. He wanted to know what the difference between a blog and photocopying a page of his journal and sticking it to the wall of a bus terminal every day.

That might be an interesting experiment actually, an analog blog as it were. I said that in many ways blogs were like the op-ed columns in the newspaper, and Jay added that comments were sort of like letters to the editor. Scalzi pointed out that this sort of dialogue could really be seen all the way back to the pamphleteers running around in the 1700s century. Until he brought that up, I’d totally forgotten about what were essentially flame wars between authors who would trash each other’s work and then publish rebuttal after rebuttal. (I would give you sources, but I read it in paper and my books are in boxes.)

Oh, I am about to bite someone. I just got this from Carlile Transportation’s claim department.

I have researched our claims database, which goes back to 2003, and see no record of ever receiving notification this was missing or that a claim was submitted for this. Time limits for filing a claim for missing freight states that a claimant has 9 months and 1 day after a reasonable time to file a claim with a carrier in writing. Being this was coming from Kodiak and received in our Kodiak terminal on 03/13/06 I would think a reasonable time for delivery to the original consignee of Forward Air in Portland would be 14 days, putting that at 03/27/06. Nine months and 1 day would mean that a claim would have had to be filed by 03/28/07. As I do not have any record of any notification in the claims department for this shipment a claim would be denied if submitted.

If you need me for anything else, please let me know. Thank you.

I emailed back as follows:

Since Kim has been working on locating the crate, I have not placed a claim, trusting that it would be found. She informed me, verbally by phone, that she was giving up the search on 4-18-07 and that she would pass me to claims then. Had I known of the time limit on placing a claim, I would certainly have done so within the time limit required.

Now that this misunderstanding has been cleared up, please let me know how we can proceed with my claim.

I have been very patient, but my wrath has just been unleashed. If I don’t get a satisfactory response to that email, I’m going to make some people unhappy.