Posted on August 16, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 52 Comments
Having a great time in Austin, wish you were here. Unless you are here, in which case: uh, hi.
I’ve got three panels and a Q&A today. What are you planning to do with your Saturday. Share! Share your plans!
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, editor – AMS
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Wellll…I spent my Saturday dodging raindrops, test-driving new cars, and eating artisanal bread.
I’ve had worse Saturdays…
Oh, oh! And I figured out how to get Crimson Fields to work on my PDA, and I finished reading some SF novel by some hack in Iowa or Idaho or something. Some guy named Scalvi, I think.
Recover from being hit by a car, myself.
I’m taking my son to see Walking with the Dinosaurs today. Should be fun, and maybe a little scary. For him of course, not me. No…
Apparently I’m going to take this lovely Saturday afternoon to fight with my girlfriend. Now, if you’ll excuse, I have a scuffle to get back to.
Sigh.
go shopping for a dishwasher and then get back in time to enjoy the fireworks for our Fall Festival (actually the Grand Valley Festival, but it was originally called the Fall Festival when it was held in October, and you know that the old names for things die hard in small towns).
I have two book covers to design. Yay, income!
Going to see Tropic Thunder.
Drop my 16 year old son off at his first (part-time) job, bus-boy at a restaurant, then pick up my daughter from the railway station, then take my wife for out for a meal to a local gastro-pud.
Life is good.
pub, not pud – doh!
I plan an exciting day of going to the farmer’s market, mowing the lawn and playing “Burnout:Paradise” with my son as back-seat driver.
Given that I live in the SF Bay Area, the mowing will take about ten minutes.
Then I have to finish this damn Power Point for a presentation on Monday.
South Central Ohio weather being lovely today, I mowed the lawn this morning (trust me, it’s not a big lawn). I then rewarded myself by finishing ‘The Last Colony’. I am late-come (this spring) to the Scalzi family of books, and not finding it in hardback, had to wait for the paperback version. I loved it, and it makes the short wait for Zoe’s Tale that much sweeter.
This afternoon will be spent doing housework and finishing the laundry from my vacation. I belong to the SCA and returned from our annual Pennsic War *last* Saturday mentally refreshed, but physically exhausted. (pennsicwar.org) The laundry mountains are being defeated today!
Working in the Local History Room. Meeting with a guy about a program we’re giving called something along the lines of the Machiavellian Batman. Indexing files. Librarianating all over the place.
Read the paper, do laundry, park myself by the pool.
Finish Little Brother for the second time.
Finish Zoe’s Tale for the first time.
Review some stuff I’ve read/re-read this week.
… make some more nice P. G. Wodehouse Mobipockets for the Kindle. (The stuff I can legally do in the U.S.)
Do laundry. Clean the house. Avoid trying to cross town as today is move in day and there are insane parents freaking out about their innocent offspring starting college.
I need to do laundry. I need to go buy some curtains for 4 windows. I need to go shop for a couch.
I’ll probably read, watch some TV, organize my mp3’s and make lunch.
It’s my first saturday off in 3 weeks so I feel like being lazy.
Got up at 9, put on scrubbies and bug spray, and then weeded the back yard–and filled TWO giant trash bags with said weeds. It’s not hot out, but I still turned a nice shade of purple. Damn that Scots/Irish/English/Welsh blood!
Showered, fed my face, and am now taking care of all the crap that I ignored the rest of the week: dishes, laundry, clutter, blahblahblah. Maybe I’ll get some work done. Maybe not.
Tonight? BBQ chicken and the Olympics. Par-tay!
I finally got around to sending prizes to the folks who won my contest…over a month ago.
D’oh!
Design three logos for various clients, finish a story I’m working on, work on my website, wash my RV … sigh.
Hell with it, think I’ll just play WOW.
Today I dealt with 2-1/2 years worth of filing. Not entirely 2-1/2 years, but pretty much anything from late 2005-sometime 2007 (somewhere in 2007 I learned that if I filed or shredded as soon as I’d taken care of it, life was much much easier!).
I’m also going to a party for this thing called the Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit, Michigan.
After that it’s a nap for me. Guess what I’m looking forward to the most?
Going to the zoo (actually, not so much a plan as a record of what I did…)
There were giant fruit bats.
Hmmm, lesse. Painting a bookshelf, putting things back in my room (my sis painted it while I was in Denver), and trying to get a Worldcon trip report wrote. Oh, and I need to go to the library to switch off books and CDs.
All in all, it’s a relatively boring Saturday, but given that last week was full of excitement and spin, I can take that.
-kat
I’m doing nothing much and am enjoying it. Except for a short trip to shop a bit of food, I’ve been reading The Castle and playing WoW. Nothing else.
As long as I’m taking medicine for acid reflux, I can’t have any coffee, black tea or colas, so all sources of caffeine are denied me ATM. Okay, so I also sometimes do nothing when I *can* have coffee, but now I have a legitimate excuse, besides it being Saturday.
I slept for 3 hours this afternoon and I don’t normally take naps, so I must’ve needed it.
I can’t wait to be able to drink coffee again!
Right now: wondering where the ibuprofen is because I can’t find it and my head is killing me. The only thing I can find is Advil PM, which one doesn’t want to take at one in the afternoon, especially since I have to go to work later
So yeah.. this, and maybe some reading, and then work, and maybe some TV.
Woo, my life is (not) exciting.
Get my car out of the impound lot, then look up “where to park in Uptown Minneapolis” on Google.
Then, some video games, because my motivation to ride the bike today is completely shot.
Trying to do as much housework as possible even though today is the first day after my first chemo and I’m pretty tired. The housecleaner comes this week and my house shows the results of two weeks of deep fatigue.
So far, I’ve washed the dishes, finished all but one load of laundry, picked up all the stray bottles of water around the house and cleaned old food out of the refrigerator. But now I’m feeling pretty whooped on.
Reporting back in:
-2 hour nap has been had.
-homemade coffee flavored milk shakes are now being consumed.
-Resuming reading of latest Stardoc novel in …3….2…1.
wife’s b-day so that means drinky sexy time old hat
Go to a club meeting tonight of San Diego Vintage SF and introduce them to, ‘Island Of terror’
#26: Oh no–are you cleaning *before* the housecleaner comes over?? And you just had chemo? Sounds like the best excuse *ever* to do jack.
bob evans — geez can’t even type my own name
Seeing Dar Williams & Shawn Mullins at the Bluebird. Life is folky.
Mow the lawn and put up shelves. Sweet!
(sigh)
Going through the grab bag from Subterranean, trying to figure out what to read first. I have to choose from:
The Jack Vance Reader
The God of the Razor, by Joe R. Lansdale
Subterranean Tales of Dark Fantasy
a small softcover Joe Hill chapbook
The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury
Antediluvian Tales, by Poppy Z. Brite
Rude Mechanicals, by Kage Baker
A Soul in a Bottle, by Tim Powers
Pilot Light, by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock
The last is a little hardback chapbook.
And the signed stuff was:
Plots and Misadventures, by Stephen Gallagher (numbered)
The Other Teddy Roosevelts, by Mike Resnick
After the War, by Tim Lebben
Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, by Kage Baker
It runs the gamut from stuff I read before, years ago (the Bradbury), to a bunch of stuff I haven’t read from authors I’m familiar with, and then a couple of things from authors I’m not familiar with (the Gallagher and Lebben books).
All in all, I’d say it was worth the $124.
I just spent my Saturday flying from Portland, OR to Denver. And having Frontier lose my suitcase. I scheduled to fly from DEN to Indy tomorrow at an ungodly early hour, so I don’t know how this is going to work. Arrgh!
Oh well, at least it didn’t have anything too valuable in it, mainly clothes. I carried on all the important stuff — my laptop, my Canon 30d bag, and most important of all — my copy of Zoe’s Tale that I bought at the Borders in Gresham, OR yesterday. No way I would let that out of my sight. :)
Visited a heron.
Was visited by a black squirrel.
Posted their pictures online.
Plugged the shots in a comment (assuming one clicks on the link above).
I’m doing last minute things before I hop in a plane tomorrow and go to Tucson for the week. It’s for a week of training on some spanky new Lab equipment for the hospital. Charlie Stross and William Gibson are going with in paperback.
Usually I wouldn’t be that excited about a trip to Tucson in August, 95 to 115 in the shade this time of year, but Tucson is where I’ll be on the 19th on which I can buy
Zoe’s Tale.
I’m in Tucson and …. I CAN HAZ A NEW SCALZI BOOK!!!!
yah me! 8 )
We now return you to your regularly scheduled, non-fanboy gushing comment thread.
wait a minute
rereading some of the thread some people are talking about reading Zoe’s tale already.
I thought it’s not coming out till the 19th.
am I missing the boat? Could I already have picked it it up and be in reading bliss in the OMW universe. I mean no offense to Charlie and Willie but WT heck.
Help me out here folks. If I have to run back out today I will but I feel like I’m going to hyperventilate.
Putting together a bookshelf
Picking up my bright pink bridesmaid’s dress.
Deworming my dog.
Laundry! Sheets shredded themselves in the wash, so sheet shopping! Then, laundry of the new sheets! My single life is sooo exciting, let me tell you…..
Verified the US Women’s Foil Team took silver. I attended 2.5 panels and a Q&A session. Came home, had dinner and walked the dog. Maybe I’ll bump into you at a room party.
It was the receiving-Stuff phase of my family’s Moving Adventure. I got to sit and watch five sweaty laborers haul boxes into the house and got a sunburn in the process, and then spent the afternoon unpacking the living hell out of the kitchen.
We’re still in Cardboard Paradise, natch. I’m thinking a ‘brown’ theme for our decor this year.
I spent my Saturday with my kids, my youngest son’s best friend, my eldest son’s girlfriend, and her family at the Michigan Renaissance Fair, where I competed with my classmates in the Traditional Middle Eastern Dance Competition.
We won the Group division!
GenCon FTW. That is all.
Hmm, what DID I do today…
breakfast, morning paper, watched Olympics, listened to “Wait, Wait, don’t tell me”, more Olympics, PBS shows, laundry, dinner, more Olympics (including the womens marathon with commentary by Craig Masback, who I went to high school with many moons ago), repeatedly checking email for messages from my brother, finally finding the message I wanted on his blog…
Congratulations to Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon, or as he is better known in this realm, Dr-Phil-Physics.
Seems he won a little award in LA last night, as a result his story “A Man in the Moon” will appear as the first story in the just released 2008 L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Anthology!! Not sure if he’s been to bed yet…
Way to go little brother!!
Jeff S. @38: ZT is not supposed to be out until the 19th. Usually, bookstores receive them up to a week ahead of time. They’re not supposed to put them out on the shelves until Tuesday, but some stores either don’t notice the release date or they ignore it and put them out on the shelves whenever they get them in.
You can try your local Borders or B&N tomorrow, but it’s a crapshoot whether they’ll have them out on the shelves.
Skip @34:
Whoa, heavy déjà vu. You and I appear to have received identical grab bags … or should one say “grab boxes”? Whatever.
I just finished a couple of the chaps (A Soul in a Bottle, Thumbprint) and will be making inroads on the Tales of Dark Fantasy anthology before bed. Not my usual cup of tea, not at all … but by damn, these are some excellent writers.
(Which is what Scalzi has been telling us all along.)
weed-wack in the morning and then reward self by mixing reading (L.E.Modesitt, Jr. and Eric Flint) and watching the Olympics (while helping my wife bitch about the downer, lying McCain adds).
Can’t you just roll a few dice on which one to pick, Skip?
Mowed the lawn. Got some leftover contract work out of the way. Played poker. Read some Flashman in lieu of grooving Patrick O’Brian deeper into my memory.
The Austin paper has a write-up on Armadillocon, but it says you’re from California…
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/08/17/0817armadillocon.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=52
@51: Which he is, originally, at least.