We had a book signing at the Carnegie Library last night; it was fantastic! The Arts Council brought together eight local authors-- both self-published and traditionally published-- to talk with people about the process of writing and publishing and to sell their works. It was so much fun. Also, the Council gave each of the authors $100 just for participating, so that was beyond great. :-)

I brought a few copies of each of the trilogy novels, and five copies of In the Darkness Find Me. At the end of the night, I'd made $116 from book sales. Wheeeee

I also talked up Mandy Roberts, EMG Portrait Adoptions, and lulu.com as much as I possibly could.

And today, since I got an unexpected windfall, I bought Devin a mini-fridge to keep in his room since he's been wanting one for a while. :-) All in all, great weekend.

Now this is a news source I'll allow in the house. ;-)

-- Swept and mopped the kitchen floor
-- Vacuumed
-- Folded laundry
-- Cleaned the cat box
-- Put up frost-stuff on a couple of windows
-- Tore out the linoleum from under the sink and put down contact paper
-- Cleaned out the fridge
-- Started to paint the upstairs closet

Am sick. Caught it from Chris, who caught it at the 4th of July party from one of his nephews. Fortunately it seems to be one of those 24-hour things, but still. *debates spritzing Kaylee with Lysol*

Which means I've spent a lot of time over at mom and dad's watching TV; namely, the TV Guide channel as we tried to figure out if there was anything good on (answer was no) and of course they were in the middle of their nonstop Michael Jackson coverage, including something about a helicopter of press people assigned to try and get footage of his kids on their way to his funeral. I wish to thank them for making my oft-used vultures metaphor even more apt. Now, where are clouds of radioactive wasps when you need them??

I should do something useful today. And I will if I can figure out something that involves little to no movement.

Guess who gets to see the show on the 25th?!?! *eeeee*

Also, there are four tickets available ($56 each) through our college-- the show's at the Tulsa, OK Performing Arts Center. If anyone's interested, email michiellec@labette.edu.

Just busy categorizing recipes, going through my books, organizing story notes, getting ready to paint the upstairs office, and trying to keep an eye on Kaylee, who is now tall enough to reach the top of my desk. Eeek.

And because I really did intend to start answering these but instead keep forgetting because my brain won't keep information around for longer than 3.8 seconds:



Basically, my Yahoo sidebar in my mailbox alerts me to anything really huge going on, and reading my LJ friendslist also keeps me in the know. Slacktivist and Leonard Pitts Jr. articles are my newspaper-type sources, though I read them both online, too. ;-) TV news is not allowed in our house.

Available here! Cover art by the fantastic Mandy Roberts. You can see more of the art she did for this novel here.

*skips off*

So Alexa Davalos has been cast as Andromeda-- which is great to me; I loved her in Defiance.

My lazy-Saturday question to you guys is, who would you add to the cast if you could? Who's your Aphrodite or Hera or Ares? :-)

And Cereta hits the nail on the head

I haven't been able to read all the comments yet, but the essay is a good one.

Why is it when I go to Yahoo.com, their Main Feature Headline News box is on President Obama swatting at a fly?

I hereby declare the mainstream news media officially dead.

Went across the Royal Gorge bridge. Beautiful view, even though I was hyperventilating half the time (dumb fear of heights).

Got to talk with my cousin Jenny again! She is awesome, and I got her hooked on the Dresden Files. Yays.

Kaylee got to play with her cousin Brandon, who is so completely adorable I wanted to take him home.

Went up the cog railway to the top of Pike's Peak.

One of the favorite parts of the trip: going to the Aquarium.

One of the least favorite parts: having our car motor decide it hated us and was going to die. On the Interstate. We had to rent a U-Haul truck and car dolly to get the dumb thing home. There was $500 I wasn't expecting to spend. . .

Got home and found out the cats had acquired fleas in our absence. Cue me washing everything in the house.

Saw the Friday the 13th remake last night. Wasn't half bad. (of course, my love for Jared Padalecki could be influencing my opinion)

Off to write some story notes.

Back from Denver! Bigger update later, when I'm not ready to fall asleep at my desk.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered going into church this morning. Not linking to the news article, because of course they can't tell a story without an image of his body being wheeled away.

For those of you who don't know, Tiller was a doctor in Wichita, KS who provided late-term abortions. He was one of the few doctors in the country who would actually do that. For his dedication to his patients, for daring to help women who were in a heartbreaking situation, Tiller was threatened, sued, and usually wore a bulletproof vest after a previous attempt on his life. Now he's gone.

I live a few hours away from Wichita, and I just know there are people around here who are going to be glad this happened. They will call themselves pro-life as they cheer on the death of a man.

We went out to the water plant to talk to Chris for a few and see if we could get some pictures of the geese that live out there-- and we ended up getting pics of something else:



She's pretty young, and absolutely not afraid of people at all-- she just wandered across the parking lot and came within ten feet of where Chris and I were crouched at the corner of the building. Chris thinks she's made a home in one of the spare pipes lying around in the nearby field. She stalked across the field for several minutes, springing up into the air to pounce at things, and we followed at a distance. :-)

After watching the Scrubs musical episode yet again, and remembering how popular the Buffy musical episode is (for people who have seen the series-- if I look this episode up, will I have any idea what's going on?) it occurred to me that what the world really needs is a Supernatural musical episode.

C'mon, Kripke, the track list for that would be phenomenal. ;-)

No sooner did I get up from typing that last entry than I go into the kitchen to start a load of laundry. I tossed our comforter onto the floor in there late last night, since one of our cats decided to show their affection for us by puking on it. I reach down to pick it up--

Monster. Brown. Spider.

When the camera is hooked up again, I will post pictures. Unfortunately, taking pictures was the third thing I did. First was to scream, which of course scared Kaylee, and second was to calm her down.

I trapped the thing in a plastic container, and once the lid was on tight I showed it to Kaylee so she could see it's nothing to be scared of. She was fascinated and tried to take the container from me, but I wasn't willing to go that far. I let the thing go a very good distance away from the house.

I'm going to have that 'something's crawling on me' feeling for the rest of the day; I just know it.

So Kaylee needed to be changed, and I told her to go get me a diaper. She picks one up from where she scattered them all last night, holds it out to me--

And I see, about three inches away from her hand, a good-sized brown spider crouching inside the fold of the diaper.

I snatched it away from her and headed for the front door, which the spider apparently took as a threat. It scurried out to the top of the diaper and reared up. I unlocked the front door in one hell of a hurry before it could decide to try a Flying Squirrel Tackle and shook it out into the grass.

Not even noon, and I've already had one heart attack. Yay.