The other day rummaging around in a closet, I found the luggage tags they gave out at the opening of the new Charlotte, NC airport. I remember it well. Great food. Great fun. Of course that was so long ago that the new Charlotte airport has since been replaced by the new new Charlotte airport...

So it's time for a new opening day. Seattle Light Rail. I'm jazzed. It's Saturday. They doing free rides and all kinds of activities at the different stations this weekend. They have a twitter account and yesterday they twittered that they had 200 free inaugural ride tickets that they will be handing out starting at 10 am today at the Union Station.

I got mine!



You get on a bus at 6:45 on Saturday morning and they take you to one of the light rail stations where they will have a ribbon cutting and then you ride the whole route and end up back at that station. They open up the trains to the public at 10 so you can either wait for that or they will bus us back to Union Station after.

I'm looking forward to it!

---

I just got an invitation to do a user interface study for a new game at Iplay. I'm not clear how but I'm pretty sure that Iplay, Oberon, BigFish and maybe even Gamehouse and Popcaps are all interelated or at least sleeping together sometimes. I've never really understood the relationship. But, somehow I got on Iplay's list and now I'm going...

Their offices are an easy bus ride from here on the other side of the city center. I go on Friday at 11. They said it would take an hour and I get free games and a Starbucks gift card. I'm cool with that.

The big project of two weeks ago at work is a still moving target. Might as well entertain myself while I've got the time!

sent from phone
Susan Dennis

erica just emailed me telling me that the DOE has listed SIX spots available at ps124, WHICH WAS OUR FIRST CHOICE LISTED?!?!! i guess some of the other people who got in ended up pulling out and doing private school, or moved? i made a few phone calls and then put in the application for "round 2", on which i just put 124 as first choice and 38 as second (in a moment of panic that doing round 2 put us at risk of losing the 38 spot, which i hope is just my own insanity).... the application isn't due til 7/31 so there won't be any news til august. obviously i'm not going to discuss this with banjo unless/until he gets the spot.

in weaning news, banjo again asked to nurse this morning (i posted that he nursed for a minute yesterday, right?).... i said something like "really? i thought you didn't want it anymore." then two things happened, i'm not sure in which order. one is that i told him that we could just cuddle instead, and he cuddled up against me for a minute. the other is that he asked again and i gave him boo access and he just put his mouth up to it for a second, and didn't do anything, and i said something like "were you just tricking me?" and he smiled and laughed. also caleb woke up screaming and crying at 5:30am and i did offer him water but he wanted boo, which he had and then fell back asleep. (though i guess even though he fell back asleep this doesn't exactly count as middle of the night nursing anyway, since i wouldn't have even been there at 5:30 on a work day?)

a few quick blah blah blahs on the things i've been meaning to write long posts about but am too lazy:

-i've been feeling kind of emotional the last few weeks. not exactly emotional, not all the time, but just more likely to get all vehklempt over this or that. this preceded all the weaning stuff so i don't think it's about that, but who knows.

-i know have intermittent twitching of my right eyelid, which michael and the internet tell me are the result of fatigue, stress, and caffeine. it happens more at work, often when i'm in the middle of talking to someone. weird.

-i am feeling so so good about working. it feels so good to be DOING. i can't explain it.

-in other feels-good-to-be-doing news, when we went to see they might be giants at the park (i think i only posted about that on facebook, but they had a free family concert in the park, right near our house) i was volunteering for park slope parents the whole time, running a table where kids could make their own egg shakers. i think i had way more fun doing the table than i would have if i hadn't been. not that the egg shaker work itself was particularly fun, but it was just more fun to enjoy the music, weather, and the whole scene while also having a task to keep me busy besides wrangling my own kids (which i also participated in along w michael and rushie).

-i find all this very interesting since i generally consider myself to be very lazy. seriously, the normal things that people do? i just can't get motivated for them. ie cooking. ie taking my kids out to the playground rather than having them run crazy in the house and yard while i try to maximize the amount of sitting on my ass i can do. i think i just like having TASKS. i don't ever want to be a boss, or a leader, or an independent making-things-happen person. i just like having stuff that needs doing and doing it.

-yesterday was the first weekday of lele-less summer. it wasn't too bad because i had lots of other people on the scene. cleo was here in the morning, for cleaning not childcare but i went out to have my coffee and buy a new mop which i'd forgotten to do two weeks ago when she was last here and told me the mop broke. then i took the boys for some errands, then barbara and rushie took them all out to the playground and rushie stayed w caleb during speech while barbara took charlie and banjo out for treats.

-rushie was really impressed with debbie (speech therapist) and with caleb's progress. and barbara told me that he is talking to her a lot, which i'm really happy about because some of his progress only gets seen by me and i'm glad he's communicating well w other family members too.

-(i've made a deal w barbara that on the weeks when it's possible [which is most of the summer, minus a couple of weeks in august] she's going to babysit the boys for pay for a few hours on lele days. she was uncomfortable at the idea of taking my money but i see it as win-win because i can get way more help from her than i'd be able to if it were just a favor, she gets money for hanging with her nephews and can turn down babysitting gigs to be with them. and my mother doesn't get to harass and kill me for taking advantage of barbara.)

-i have the day off today (obviously) and tonight i am actually GOING TO THE MOVIES w my mom. very exciting.

-next week will be my first week working a full three day week. sunday, tues, thurs. i'll probably be exhausted the entire week since i'm always exhausted the day after i work. but then the following week we go on vacation. which means i have to pack. and quit smoking. calgon take me away.

30 minutes at 2.8 using the Rolling elevation. Tuesdays are the very best treadmill days. What feels like a major chore on Fridays is a nothingburger on Tuesdays. I guess it's because I don't go in at all on Mondays and this week, I blew off Sunday, too and I can't even remember Saturday.

But, today was good and nice. Very few people in there so not too much to watch but nice anyway. If I had gone in a little later, there would have been more action but I needed to get in and out and showered and up to the Union Station (just up the street). The light rail people tweeted that they are giving out inaugural ride tickets at 10. I'd like to score at least one.

So I'm off to the shower!

Another classic rock (and not the format) station goes away

A story from the Boston Phoenixhttp://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/dontquoteme/archive/2009/07/14/adios-wbcn.aspx

A sad day for radio - reminds me of WNEW's death in 1999

Questions for any one in the Boston area - is WZLX still on 100.7 as classic rock? And what does WAAF (107.3?) in Worceter play these days?

Some people are just so dang thoughtful and *interesting*. China Miéville is one of them.

Progress on both fronts... A new bunny and nearly half the back of the sweater...

The other new cat bed from Etsy arrived this afternoon. Some people use throw pillows for a splash of pattern, I use cat beds. My other two cat beds were fabulous colors but not fabulous for the rest of the room. One is now in a nook of the hallway where Betty likes to hang and the other is in storage.

I put the newest one on the ottoman and both cats came over to explore. Betty hesitated and Travis hopped in. Then they did a stare down.



After a while Betty just turned around and marched over to the old new one that I put by her scratcher thingie on the hearth and settled in.



All's well in Catastan.

It's always interesting buying from Etsy. I've had some excellent experiences and some iffy's. I bought a bag from a woman in North Carolina a few months ago. She had that thing wrapped and shipped practically before I hit Confirm Purchase! And she sent me tracking info. And a lovely thank you note for my purchase. She was so good and the bag was so nice, I bought another from her.

This time, neither seller bothered to contact me at all. One indicated she had shipped it on Etsy but the other didn't even both to do that so after a week I sent her an inquiry. She wrote back that she was very busy. (Well, why don't you just shut down your little Esty shop until you have some time???!!! She only had 3 other things in there anyway.) Both items were exactly as described and clearly the cats like them.

Windows Mobile is very forgiving about when and where you plug your device into a computer. It doesn't have to have one special computer and it even has a mini-SD that you can update from anything that has a USB connection (with a mini-SD card reader).

But, I rarely see any reason to plug it into any computer any time. If I want stuff that is on my computer loaded into my phone, I just send it over SMS.

I use this cleverly named (for those of us who can't remember shit), dirt simple site called Beam it up, Scotty!. You load up the file, zip it or not and plug in your phone number and Bob is just the easiest uncle on the planet.

It tickles me each time I use it.

Three details floated up to me from the soup in my head that really rock my view of tCiHS, that I kind of have to share so I can parse.

1) The prehistory of the Teakettle World is the history of another world entirely, possibly ours.  The people of the Teakettle came to this world through darkness in a long migration that forms the basis of the Koine religion, and informs the others.  The way they reckon it now is that the people walked through the dark for a long, long time, before coming up into this world, and many of them got lost along the way (a lot of those showed up later as monsters).  The world in which they live does not particularly like them there, and can be hostile.  So far, I am not exactly clear on what hostile means to them.

2) Christianity has its own language in the Teakettle world and the most of the Teakettle Christians have an ethnicity.  That language and ethnicity is Korean. 

3) It occurs to me that the Child Swords and the physical changes (increased physical capabilities, stunted emotional ranges, sterilization and semi-destruction of sexual response, altered metabolism) could easily be explained by a nanite infestation, or, as easily as it can be by magic.  Paris, and, indeed, no disbanded Sword-Mother or -Father knows exactly how the swords are passed on, only that banded cannot transmit it, disbanded feel a strong urge to transmit it, and that drawing blood is necessary.  Paris cuts the backs of his hands before he beats his pupils, spits in their mouths, and some other, fairly subtle things that suggest that the necessary component is blood-borne.

The long walk through the dark could have been an emigration in ships, though I'm not really able to suspend my disbelief for the sake of FTL or interstellar travel for people - not physically through space, anyway.  I can deal with it when other people do it, but I don't think I could without the specter of kadath or Rosi popping up and smacking me.  That said, moving through dimensions... I can buy that.  Don't ask me why I can buy that and not FTL, I have no particular way to qualify that, only that I know enough physics to know that interstellar human transport through interstellar space is not going to work without thousands of years advancement, and who knows about dimension hopping, right?

Granted, I do not have an appropriately SF explanation for the monsters, but fuck it, they are monsters, and none of this is ever going to surface in the text unless a publisher pays me a lot of money to make this a series.

Okay, enough to pay off my credit card would probably do it. 

The Personal - Again, I got to spend far too little time with far too many cool people.  This was not helped by the fact that exhaustion-collapse set in around Saturday evening.
Met: tithenai , mer_moon , readingthedark , asakiyume 's parents, shadesong , yendi , John Benson, Gene Wolfe, Claire ... (I forgot her last name :[ ); did not get to hang out with any of them near as much as I would have liked.

Saw again: asakiyume sovay , skogkatt , Moss, greygirlbeast , humglum , eredien , cristalia , ayeshabintjamil and the NH crew ... lots of people.  Failed to hang out with them as much as I would have liked.

Honestly, that is the story of the Con.  Did not hang out with people as much as I wanted.  I am still recovering.  Soon, there will be writing on content that I remember.  Promise.

These upstanding citizens (well, one upstanding and two downsitting) are ready to go but they will be forced to hang with the last class until the first of August. I hate to think what trouble they will get into.

I'm here, and I'm not ignoring your comments, but I'm having trouble posting today -- we're in the middle of a batch of thunderstorms.

I finished the pink bear last night and made some progress on the sweater. This is the back (bottom of...). It will be a cardigan - rather longish with a shawl collar.

So we were reading a book tonight that involved, among other things, the plot element of a police officer giving lectures with safety tips to a group of children.

I asked the Lad, "If you were a police officer doing that job, what safety tips would you give the children?"

He thought for a while, then replied, "Always ask for help when you are slipping off the mantelpiece!"

Me: "Oh yes? When did this happen?"

Lad [mischievously amused and slightly guilty look] "Ummm..... yesterday?"

The conversation went on, and I decided to offer a prompt or two. Asked "How about safety tips for around water?", his immediate response was, "Don't get in the water with the sharks."

This entry was originally posted at http://lauredhel.dreamwidth.org/382264.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Heading home today from Polaris. Had a good time. The TCON folk were very well organized, the con was welcoming and interesting, everyone was friendly, and A. and I had a really good time. We're staying with BIL in Scarborough, though, so we didn't do any nighttime activities, so we missed Klingon Karaoke, opening ceremonies and all. Instead we met up with orts again and ate Ethiopian, drank beer, and conversed, and had a pleasant time, if a little tired. A and orts had had long days of work, and I hadn't slept well, so we took it easy and did quiet things.

So we started on day two. For the most part, I was just there to see the Canadian authors. It's strange to find yourself actively doing something that, by implication, will mean that you will join a community you know nothing about, and have never really met anyone from. I'm largely ignorant of the SFF community as it is, and even members of the Canadian SFF community are largely ignorant of the Canadian SFF community ("What? He's Canadian? No way, eh"), as was evidenced on one panel, entertainingly titled "Canadian Writers Rock More than a Hockey Puck Smothered in Maple Syrup Being Eaten by the Queen" or something like that. But... Being a purely Canadian Gathering... Other than a brief review of some of the names of Canadian SFF, the discussion quickly turned into why the Canadian system allows so much creativity. Genre Fiction in particular: Universal Health Care and Government Funding for the Arts. Health care's probably the biggest thing to take away the risk of trying to take on what is probably the most financially unrewarding profession that one does not get into via slavery or caste-determination. Coming to think of it, the earlier panel on the business of writing and making writing pay focussed on exactly the same topics. "Way."

For the most part I did author-reading-hopping, often in the company of A. For a while there, we seemed to be stalking Julie Czerneda. We started out at a slideshow where she showed, via covers and supporting story, how her excellent relationship with her cover artist, Luis Royo developed through the years and how not only does her prose inform his illustration, but often the illustration is incorporated into the prose. Nice to see such a close creative relationship between two artists who have totally different backgrounds and do not speak each others' languages. Fascinating and encouraging.

But, yes, all through the day, we seemed to be following her around (I suspect a convergence of interests, A's biology and my writing) from panel to panel, at one of which A actually won (more by default than skill) the honor of having her name in one of Czerneda's upcoming books, if you can believe it or not. It was embarrassing enough that we had not read any of her newest novels so we, like everyone else there, couldn't answer any of her "quiz questions", but at least A. had read a handful of her earlier books!

I was a bit disappointed because I was trying to be business-serious and intended to get into a writers' workshop that was being held during the con, in particular because it was being given by one of the literary agents on my short list of who I was hoping to approach later this summer with Th'Book. The workshop had not been sold out at the time of pre-registration, so I rushed to the table just as it opened and heard that somewhere along the line, the last seat was vacated, but maybe if I check back every morning, someone will have dropped out, which of course was neither likely nor did it resolve to be. Ah well, ç'est la vie.

So it was double good luck to meet Violette Malan, who's brother runs The Novel Idea downtown in Kingston, which is one of those few stalwart independent book dealers who is holding out against the big box bookstores. I try to buy all new novels at his store, and when I can't, I go to Walter, who runs a stalwart used book store, holding out against the big box thrift stores. Walter is a great conversationalist, and in one of many discussions, it came up that I was writing a SFF novel. He suggested that I talk to Violette when I go to Polaris, so I went to her reading. She was reading from her latest, and I'm definitely going to start reading her stuff now. She has an excellent sense of the dramatic, and chose a passage that highlighted her characters, their role in their world, and their sense of honor in an economic use of words and images. Very nice. Midway through, her agent's junior partner showed up, and who could it be but the very guy I was hoping to sit in on. So it worked out that he could make some room, and I got in. I'm glad I was able to get in, since it was more or less a confirmation of much that I had learned about approaching agents, agents vs. publishers, and the way the business works.

Also talked a bit with Ursula Pflug at three or four panels, who I was glad to discover still writes SFF although she hates the terminology and the artificiality of the terms (something that privately gets right up my nose as well). It's strange how something as simple as shelving in a store directs an artform into an artificial separation. Personally, I think there's a lot of literature out there, particularly magical realism, that really is SFF dressed up in a tweed jacket, and I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU, TOO, MAGGIE ATWOOD (wherever you are). I enjoyed her reading of a short story she published back in 1981 that reminded me of my landlady's work back in DC. That and a sufficiently avant-guard poem that bordered psychological horror, but really did harken back to those merry days of the seventies where we felt the bomb above us like a damocletian inevitability.

Rested up and back to the real world, the first step of which is to drive back to Kingston on the dullest highway outside of Texas.

I may be a gym slacker but I am NOT a yarn slacker! The sweater is coming along nicely and so is this hot hot hot pink bear!

This past week I ordered a book from amazon.com, and I was careful to order a new copy of that book. I needed the full text of Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "Direction of the Road," in her book The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Amazon obliged as always; the book arrived with amazing speed, and it was the right book. I have no complaints about amazon.com. But I'm outraged by the condition of the book itself, which is one of the shoddiest printing jobs I've seen in a very long time. It's a Harper Perennial edition, and it says "Printed in the United States of America."

You would think, given the stature of the book and the stature of its author, that Harper would have taken at least minimum care with the production. They didn't. On the very first page that a reader sees, where Le Guin has used three verses of Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" as an epigraph, there are four words where the ink has dropped out. And all through the book, on page after page, it keeps happening.

There's no excuse for this. It's an insult to the reader -- who's asked to pay $13.99 for the resulting mess -- and it's an insult to Le Guin. Harper should be ashamed.

I could have gone to stretch class. I should have gone to stretch class. I had time. Turns out there were only about 4 or 5 in the class (ran into a neighbor who had just come from the gym). I didn't. And I feel guilty.

I could go to the gym and do the treadmill or the elliptical but I'm guessing I won't. And I feel future guilty about that.

I am a slacker today.

My excuse is Target. I bought some shorts at Target on Friday. I tried them on and they were fine so I grabbed a second pair. When I got home that 'second pair' turned out to be a very short skirt. (Nobody. Really, nobody who wears that size should be wearing that skirt, but I digress.) So since there is a nice Target over semi-near brunch, I decided to take advantage of their 8 am opening and go return it before brunch.

By the way, in my opinion, the only way Target's return process could get easier is if they sent someone over here to pick the returned goods.

Anyway, also, The Skylark has a new early bird special. Get there before 11 and you get 10% off. But, that's also a bogus excuse because I paid the same anyway. They had a new waitress and I wanted her to know I'm a very good tipper.

I'm just a slacker. No two ways about it.

I did see the cutest thing coming home. The sticker on the back window was for a scooter company.

.... took a hiatus - boo at 2am and 4:30. both times he asked for it - at 2 i asked if he wanted water instead and he said "no, boo."

i'm just really glad he fell back asleep the second time! i like having the consolation prize of getting to have alone time in the morning when i get up at 4:30 for work....