Every day's a holiday when you're unemployed

I went last night to Jenny's house, not for a holiday party but for a birthday party. Jenny is someone I've known for ten years, since meeting her at Sybase, so she's a friend, but she's also a former co-worker and minion; I hired her at BEA and assigned her to a difficult, laborious, technically challenging but rewarding project. When I got laid off in October, she stayed, of course. I overheard her last night complaining that she would have to work over the holidays -- BEA forces people to use up their vacation at the end of the year, an increasingly widespread corporate practice -- to finish her project. I wanted to make a joke about having assigned her the project so she had to do a lot of work, whereas now I don't have to do beans, since I don't even have a job. But I couldn't think of a funny way to say it. And actually there's no joke there. It's just extremely thin irony, I think.

Anyway. I got an early Xmas present yesterday by getting two, count 'em, two pieces of fan mail in one day. Both had just read my book How I Adore You. An advertisement for the book, citing this review, just came out in Skin Two; I wonder if the ad had anything to do with the sudden fan mail. I hope so; I paid for the ad.