On The Funway

During the Boskone Dead Dog party, sfrose updated the NESFA Press e-commerce site and asked papersky to post an announcement on her LiveJournal. A few minutes later, the orders started arriving. Actually, the first one showed up just before Jo posted -- someone was watching very closely, or was just plain lucky.

Monday afternoon, I went to the NESFA Clubhouse to help unload the truck as much as I could. That turned out not to be very much -- my left knee is pretty much fully recovered, but four consecutive days of 15,000+ steps following the previous week of taking it really easy left both of my knees tender and not working all that well today. The right knee in particular is really unhappy, probably because it's been doing the heavy lifting while I compensated for the bum left knee.

Okay, enough of that. I cleaned coolers, pulled heavy road cases, pushed flatbed carts, and did whatever else didn't require me to climb stairs while carrying things. And because I was curious, sfrose let me help by sorting the e-commerce orders that came in since Saturday afternoon while she worked on the Wednesday night-Friday batch and the Friday-Saturday batch.

My batch contained a satisfying stack of orders for Sibyls & Spaceships and Lifelode. My favorite part was seeing where they came from. In the first 18 hours of online sales, NESFA Press received orders for the Walton GoH publications from 14 states and 2 foreign countries: CA, MO, CO, NJ, VA, MA, TX, NM, DC, WA, NY, ID, NC, and IL, plus Australia and the United Kingdom. Please note, I jotted the location info on a piece of scrap paper and didn't double-check it -- I could well have missed a state or country (or two) in there.

Not bad considering that it was nighttime in most US time zones for at least half of those 18 hours. Not bad at all.

...the rest of the week doesn't get any worse.

While running an afternoon's worth of errands, I slipped on ice in the Rite-Aid parking lot in Palmer. Actually, I wasn't running, I was shuffling along really quite slowly and carefully, 'cause, y'know, it's icy out there.

Bam. Point of impact: my left knee, which seems to be my default point of impact whenever I fall. In recent years, that's been once or twice a winter, though I may have gone through one of them without falling at all. Five years ago, I spent the whole winter falling, something like five or six times, and once with the sort of pain that today's fall seems to have brought on. Needing to use an ice pack when it's cold out is cruel and unusual punishment.

One of these days, the knee is going to say "enough!" I hope it's not this time. So far, it doesn't seem to be, but it's still Not Fun.

More Not Fun awaited me at home. All that ice we've been having? It appears to have torn the gutter off the side of the garage. Or, more precisely, half-torn. Which means there's an unsightly mess, with half of the gutter still attached, a twist in the middle, and the rest of it dangling down to the ground. I've been putting off the call to s Mr. Gutter to replace the one in back that I lost a few years ago. A quick look at his website this afternoon confirmed my impression that the repairs will probably cost a little less than the amount of the deductible on my homeowner's insurance, so I'm not inclined to file a claim.

I wish the damage weren't visible to anyone coming down the driveway. I'm not inclined to try removing it myself or even to have Mr. Gutter remove it until there's something less than a foot of snow and ice on the ground underneath. Leaving it hanging there does not appear to put the garage itself at any further risk; the shabby appearance is just an embarrassment. It's affront to my sense of pride, which tends to be distinctly shaky on the home upkeep and improvement front as it is.

The day wasn't all bad, far from it.

One of the stops on my errands run was at Turley Publications to proof Sybils & Spaceships, the chapbook of Jo Walton's poetry that I edited for NESFA Press in time for her GoH appearance at Boskone 46 next week. The proof looked good; the finished chapbook should look even better. I'll post a link to ordering information as soon as the chapbook is available. Folks coming to Boskone will be able to pick it up it in person. $12 (and discounted at the convention, IIUC). 44 pages plus cover. Tasty, tasty. It's an honor to work with such good material, and a delight thanks to its creator, who is an utter pleasure to work with. Thanks, papersky! I look forward to handing you your author's copies next week!

Onward, with something of a limp.