…since the days when we rocked and rolled so much, Fort Devens made us “off limits” to base personnel! (That is a true story.)<\/p>\n
Wow. My kitchen window thermometer hit 102\u00b0 today before it started slipping back down. I only saw it at 101\u00b0 yesterday–it probably went higher, because the Official High For Pepperell yesterday was 102\u00b0 and my house usually runs a degree or two higher. The dewpoint was a gasping 70\u00b0, and it’s still really high–71\u00b0 right now. That’s pretty much Aqua-lung territory. The poor animals are perfectly miserable; I don’t have pets, I have throw rugs. You’d think the cats would go down into the crawl space, where they regularly prowl around for critters, but I guess they’re not the brightest lights on the tree!<\/p>\n
Tomorrow Readercon<\/a> starts! I’m commuting to the con, which takes some of the pressure off. I can run home every night to do more reading prep, print out or retrieve things I need, bake brownies for the By Light Unseen Media Kaffeeklatsch (8:00 p.m. on Friday night!), take care of the animals and incidently, do a New Moon\/Solar Eclipse ritual on Saturday night. (I’m not going to try to squeeze in workouts, though: I’ll give my muscles a few days off and then shock them when I resume on Monday. That tends to give you great results, actually, as long as you don’t do it too often.)<\/p>\n I feel a little silly, actually. Readercon is the only con I’m definitely attending this year. A few months ago, I wasn’t going to do any<\/i> programming. I’d gotten discouraged by my convention experiences over the past two years and figured I’d just hang out and schmooze all weekend. Then the invitation for program signup went out, and I couldn’t resist…then I thought maybe I’d put in for a BLUM Kaffeeklatsch, and what the heck, couldn’t hurt to ask for a reading time, and hey, the Sturgeon read-a-thon sounded really fun, and so did the A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/i> read-through, and…now my name in the Program Book Index has this huge list of numbers after it! 8-( But not a lot of panels or things, it’s a lot of fun stuff–fun for everyone, I hope, not just the participants! My Sturgeon story, “Like Yesterday,” which was originally published in Rolling Stone<\/i>, is an absolute hoot. I’m reading it at 12:00 p.m. Saturday, come enjoy! Especially<\/i> if “you don’t remember the 60s because you were there,” ha! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Yesterday (having spent the holiday weekend working) I took a goof-off break and went up to the lake to hang out with Dad and my sister, niece and nephew. I feel kind of bad that I’ve seen so little of them, not to mention the cousins that were visiting over the holiday weekend–I only saw them on Friday evening! We had dinner and played games and went swimming…and went swimming…and went swimming…and paddled the paddle boat around, and it was quite a nice time. I baked a pie using black raspberries from my back yard and the foolproof, but rich,<\/i> butter pastry recipe that is now my standard pastry formula, and it came out delectably well. Everyone is visiting again in August and I should be able to enjoy more time with them then.<\/p>\n Before I went up to the lake, I went to Nashua with seven packages of book orders to drop off with UPS, and ran a couple of errands. I checked an iPad in the Apple store and The Longer the Fall<\/i><\/a> is live in the iBookstore! (Come to my reading at Readercon, Saturday at 11:00 a.m., and hear Chapter Four. \ud83d\ude42 ) I made some follow-up phone calls and took care of various business matters that were on hold over the holiday. And I won a contest! I won a drawing on Bitten By Books<\/a> for Holly Black’s new book and a pair of black leather gloves! That’s cool–I never win anything!<\/p>\n Anyway, back to work! My printer, or possibly it’s the wireless printer server, is being annoyingly uncooperative. I might just move the blasted thing in here and connect it directly because I’m printing cards and special forms and other things that I don’t want to mess up and waste ink and special papers. What a pain, grrf. On the other hand…I’ve gotten accustomed to all my sophisticated technology so fast–listen to me whine! I’m so spoiled! *wry smile*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …since the days when we rocked and rolled so much, Fort Devens made us “off limits” to base personnel! (That is a true story.) Wow. My kitchen window thermometer hit 102\u00b0 today before it started slipping back down. I only … Continue reading