Sigh.
Oh well.
Let's try again...
I got a much-needed haircut today.
While I was sick I grew an accidental beard, and once she'd finished cutting my hair Wendy-from-Hair-Police decided to do things to the beard, on the basis that whatever she did, I'd still get rid of it in a couple of days. She wound up turning it into an extremely sinister Van Dyck, which has the effect of making me look, well, extremely sinister. I now look like the sort of person who, when the hero says "but -- but you promised that if we did what you asked, you'd spare the Earth, and, and we brought you the girl. Dammit, you promised!" nods thoughtfully and says "I lied," as he reaches out to press the red button marked Press Here To Blow Up Planet.
I signed a LOT of books at DreamHaven, stuff people had ordered from the DreamHaven Neilgaiman.net website -- everything I'm going to sign from here to Xmas (well, they'll have lots of signed stuff, but that's it for personalising). The high point was Greg Ketter showing me the Michael Zulli art for the next, as yet untitled, Spoken Word CD. It's quite glorious -- some of the coolest imagery Michael's ever made. I hope it reproduces down at CD size. If it doesn't we may be forced to do a poster of it or something, if Mister Zed doesn't mind.
I dragged my friend John M. Ford and his sweetie Elise off with me to grab some lunch, and to accompany me to the local Apple shop to buy some accessories for the iPod. (I got the voice recorder and speaker unit from here). This made me very happy (particularly getting to chat with Mike Ford).
Then I got home and discovered something puzzling. Something -- I don't know what (possibly Moodlogic. Possibly iTunes. Most probably just evil computer-goblins) -- has, in the last week or so, screwed up the tags for hundreds of songs. I was alerted to this when I noticed that Dylan Thomas was now apparently reciting his poetry on Hamell On Trial's "CHOOCHTOWN" CD. Dozens of CDs are screwed up, and there's not enough time to delete them and reburn them.
I've decided to look on it as a good thing -- it will add a certain amount of surprise and chance to the world of listening to music...
Also discovered enormous piles of mail waiting for me, including the Thackery T Lambshead Book limited edition pages to be signed. I found myself wishing they'd arrived a week ago, when I was sick, and had some time on my hands. Now I've got a very limited number of hours before I fly to London, and I'd not budgeted any of them to sign a thousand sheets of paper. Well, I'll manage it somehow -- and it's a good thing it arrived today, and not, say, Friday...
...
I'm going to be a guest at Penguincon next year, mostly because it struck me as something fun I could drag my son Mike to that he'd enjoy as much as, or more than, I would, and because Terry Pratchett had a great time last year. It won't be a usual SF convention, and the guests include lots of people I'm looking forward to meeting in the flesh, like the Slashdot people, and Wil Wheaton, who long before he was an uberblogger I knew of as The Guy Who Started the Sandman Discussion On Genie...
There's a bunch of CBLDF news I posted last time, but I can't be bothered to retype it. Luckily Dirk Deppey has done my work for me: http://www.tcj.com/journalista/zarch200311A.html#cbldf
...
And Fred the cat talks.
I've never had a talking cat before.
He wanders round the attic saying things like "Hullo..." and "Mimi". Well, the "hullo" is more like "hurro", but it's still quite off-putting if you aren't used to it.
His leg is healing fast. I'm really going to miss Fred when I go to the UK.