Back to reality again

There is no earthly way I'm going to make it back through two weeks' worth of Friends list. So if any of y'all posted anything I need to see, or which I might have found particularly cool, please drop a comment!

Being back at work today after two weeks' absence was a little weird, but mostly only because I was so sleepy the whole day. Weirder was going to Whole Foods for lunch and dealing with clerks at the registers who spoke English. And the money looked all weird and monochrome and stuff. ;)

Also, the one sad thing about our absence was that our Quaker parrot Zoe passed away while we were gone. Sniff. risu emailed us about it two or three days into the con, and basically, the poor thing just started abruptly gagging and fell off her perch. With kathrynt's help, the birdie was hauled off to a birdie emergency center, but alas, in vain. The house is too quiet without the Squawkmonster. We've already started thinking about getting another birdie, or perhaps a bigger cage for a whole flock of budgies. But we have to get another cat or kittens as well. It's just not been a good year for pets at the Murk.

I realized today that I am five days away from Faerie Blood being in the e-queue at Baen Books for an entire year. It was a relief to get home and not find a rejection letter waiting for me. I was kind of hoping I wouldn't get one during the con. ;) But since Baen's site does say 9-12 months' turnaround time on answers, I expect to see a rejection letter any time now. Something more positive than that would be awesome, but hey, this is me trying to be practical here. Hee.

Last but not least, it's been nice not having to worry about tracking weight or miles walked during the vacation--in fact, I made that part of the point of the vacation! Yet it was satisfying to see that I didn't actually gain any weight while I was gone, despite eating a lot of Japanese snacks as well as various funky flavors of Kit Kat. I attribute this to all the sightseeing and tour walking we did. But now that I'm home again I do need to get caught up on my numbers, so here's the latest report!

Miles since Aug. 13th: 55.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2326.2
Miles out of Isengard: 533.2
Miles to Minas Tirith: 252.8

ETA 9:47pm: I am informed that lyricae provided transport support and kathrynt moral support for dealing with Zoe. Many thanks to both of you ladies. We really appreciate that you guys pitched in and helped out with this during our absence.

Worldcon Dispatch #4

Originally written 9/3/07 9:34pm, transcribed 9/11/07 9:12pm

Fell behind on updating my journal for the trip, partly because we've been so busy--and partly because I've come down with a cold. :P Stupid cold. I've been drinking as much vitamin water as I could stand, and burning through multiple packets of Halls.

But in the meantime, we've gotten a lot of stuff done and a lot of things looked at. Here's a brief rundown:

Friday the 31st: I got Esther Friesner's autograph, which was quite cool. :) Told her I had several of her older novels, and she mentioned she has new stuff coming out, so yay! I haven't bought a new Friesner novel in a while; I'll look forward to finding these!

Went to a reading by naominovik, which turned out to be from her forthcoming fourth book of the Temeraire series--very cool. :) Some of it was from the preview I'd read before, but some was new to me, and it definitely spiked my interest in picking that book up.

Later I came in on the end of a Q&A panel Novik was doing, and the main highlight of that was her mentioning that she'll be rearranging the publication schedule for the Temeraire novels so she can play with other books in between the Temeraire books. She said she has the Temeraire novels planned out through Book 7, and that she'll end the series when the Napoleonic Wars end--though she doesn't know when that'll be yet.

I got a chance to get her autograph, too. ^_^ And I thanked her for her wonderful books and journal posts; she asked if I was on LJ, and I told her yeah, I'm annathepiper. She recognized my ID. Woot!

The big con highlight of the evening was a showing of "World Enough and Time"--the latest episode of Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan-produced series that continues the Enterprise adventures from the original series. This little effort has distinguished itself by getting Walter Koenig on to play Chekov--and now they've gotten George Takei to play Sulu! Takei and the dude in charge of the overall series ETA 9/17/07 7:11pm writer/director Marc Zicree were on hand to present the episode, which was pretty solid overall. They came up with a good time travel plot to explain Sulu being 30 years older, and even wrote in a daughter for him. She was well played, even if she was a bit Mary-Sueish (all the main cast loved her, she was smart and insightful, yadda yadda). And it was just weird to see the dude playing Kirk hitting on Sulu's daughter. Hee.

More tomorrow!