Three random things make a post

I got a letter from FedEx yesterday saying that they couldn't honor my claim because I had shipped through one of their authorized shipping stores, and would have to get said store to make the claim. After a phone call to FedEx this morning, I emailed Send It Now with the details of the problem (sometime in the last fortnight they have added a contact email address to their website). I got a reply a couple of hours later, apologizing and promising to file the claim immediately. Obviously, time will tell, but it didn't read like a form letter. (In the course of digging out URLs for the prices of the books, as suggested in the letter, I saw that I had overestimated one, because I had a paperback of the Okorafor, not the hardcover, which doesn't seem to actually be available new anyhow.)

Random cool fact: the stars on the Brazilian flag aren't just pretty. That's a representation of the sky over Rio de Janeiro the morning the Brazilian republic was declared. Brighter stars are shown larger than dim ones; the most recently added, for the federal district around Brasilia, is the dim star above the South Pole.

Someone suggested that I keep copies of my timesheets, given the switchover to a new, online tracking system for time off/days worked. This is an excellent idea. If they ever hand out timesheets for the first half of June, I will act on it. (Normally we'd have had them by the afternoon of the 15th, since it's a 15th-and-last-of-month pay cycle, and there would have been at least one email reminding us to hand them in by now.)