quislibet | Happy birthday to lepidosiren, and unrelated text

Last night, good news and bad news by phone:

Bad news first: a great uncle I have neither seen nor heard from during my adult life has died. I have fond memories of him from when I was a child and we were closer to members of my father's family, but that started to end when my paternal grandmother died in 1986.

Anyway, it's sad, and yet I feel that guilty sense of relief you get when a family member begins a phone call "I have bad news" and then it turns out not to be the really more personally terrible things you imagined first.

The good news: J.'s mom called soon after to tell her they'd received royalty checks from the publisher of their recent book. This is not only pleasant in of itself, but is particularly cool because the publisher figures its royalties only twice a year. One of the dates is Sept. 30, at which point the book had only been out a month. That's what these checks are from, and they'd already had a reasonably good advance on royalties. So one month's sales -- probably largely preorders -- made enough to surpass the advance and put them a little over.

We're not talking wealth beyond the dreams of avarice here, but it served as a new dose of enthusiasm just as she was rather despondently trying to sort through her overwhelming information on California agriculture for next week's trip, there to research a second and similar book. (As she was also despondent about affording said trip, the news helped in more than one way.)