Days, weeks, what's the difference?

"Let's pretend it's easy this time and see how it goes." -- fredcritter

I just looked at my list. My incomplete list. All I need is about week for each and every one of the next seven days. And I need those seven days/weeks to then squeeze down into the space allocated to Monday through Friday. This Monday through Friday.

Eep.

It's likely to be like this for awhile. From until after Chicon most likely. Reminder: the Hugo voting deadline is Tuesday, July 31st. There's a spiff countdown clock on the Chicon web page with the online Hugo ballot and also on the home page. It's telling me that I currently have 1 day, 19 hours, 8 minutes, and an ever-diminishing number of seconds to get my vote in. Why, yes, that's on my list, and the hypothetical seven days for every one don't include any further reading time of that spiff Hugo voter's packet. It also disappears from the Chicon website when voting is closed, so if you've been meaning to buy a supporting or attending membership, get the packet, and vote in the Hugo's, now's the time.

I'm celebrating my 30th Fanniversary at Chicon, co-hosting with Matt & Kelly Strait in the Minnesota Magpies suite late Thursday night. More details on that to come. But probably not this week….

Speaking of Matt & Kelly Strait, they're reviving Rune! Huzzah, huzzah, calloo callay! Write early, write often. Ditto that for fanart.

Other quick headlines of note: I haven't seen the moose, but it's certain we have a bear. The next door neighbor shot nearly 5 minutes of video as a gorgeous, healthy-looking black bear stood a good 5-feet tall while chowing down on the food in one of their bird feeders a recent early morn.

There's no sign that the bear has come up on my deck to help harvest the black raspberries ripening there. Yet. I haven't looked closely enough at the blackberries toward the back edge of mowed lawn, or other black raspberries on the property to see if the same holds true there.

And so life goes. With gusto!

Hope to see you on the Funway....

The oldest piece of email I keep in my in-box...

...includes the following, which I quote:

"There are no rules for communication that can't be rules-lawyered.

"Sometimes it just feels to me like some people are awake and others aren't. The ones who are awake know that communication is difficult, interpretations vary, and feedback is useful. The ones who're still asleep think that the meaning of their writing is the feeling they had while writing it, or that a description that seemed perfectly satisfactory to them must be universally adequate, or that the validity of a point is in direct proportion to how strongly they feel about it, or that the purpose of the exercise is for other people to understand them. Or some other error entirely; they're very good at generating them."

-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden, August 4, 1998

The second oldest piece of email in my in-box...

In February, 1999, a discussion on rec.arts.sf.fandom led to my asking how do we clearly explain to people new to sf fandom what draws us together. How do we talk about the common thread, the "it" at the core of our community? Graydon Saunders responded:

"It is the belief that anyone, wheresoever they have come from and whatsoever they have seen or done on the way, may love words and the uses of words and the enactment of words -- their own words and the words of others -- in the service of an ideal that the world may be imagined again, grown larger and stranger and more beautiful, grown fuller and more home-like and more wise, and that this imagining, of its own shape and nature, may be a joy and a pleasure and an exaltation to perform."