kate_nepveu | No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

1) We are renovating our house. We had no spare bedroom and our kitchen was falling to pieces, so we are a) gut-renovating the kitchen, b) expanding the mudroom off of the kitchen to include a bathroom with a shower and enough space between the sink and toilet that people over the age of five can comfortably sit on it, and c) expanding the little room above the mudroom into an actual bedroom, rather than a small low-ceilinged room good for nothing but random storage. The new bedroom will become SteelyKid's room (she and the Pip will have closets that back on to each other now; regretfully, I declined her request for a secret door between the closets), and SteelyKid's old room will become a guest room. (For instance, Chad's parents live two hours away, regularly come up for the day to visit . . . and then go back home again the same day.)

The end result will be great. The process has been . . . interesting. Getting the loan, for instance, involved regular and literal rage headaches on my part as speaker-to-the-mortgage-people. And while our contractors are awesome, the ridiculously wet weather we've been having delayed the start of construction until mid-May (they'd hoped to start in April), and then more rain while we were on vacation led them to advance some indoor work, so we came home to find our kitchen half-gutted and couldn't figure out where anything was. (It wasn't that much stuff, because we had been moving things out in preparation, but still. I wanted to cry.)

2) Oh yeah, vacation. We went to Mexico for a week with Chad's grandmother, who took her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids (except one grandkid + family, who couldn't make it) on a collective trip to a fancy all-inclusive resort. The kids had a great time with their Midwest cousins, who they'd never met, and spent a good 50% of their waking hours in a pool of some kind, and we enjoyed catching up with everyone. Check out the sillyheads with dolphins!

3) But also while I was out an excursion, I was having lunch on the deck of a restaurant, and—I am told—bent down and scooted my chair back slightly to reapply bug spray under the table, and my chair went right off the edge of the deck, under the rather-high rope that was strung across at the edge, and I fell backwards onto the beach below.

Bright sides: I landed on sand, not anything harder. The kids were not there. Nothing was fractured, bleeding, broken.

But I definitely had a concussion. For a few hours, I forgot the whole day—I kept asking Chad if the kids saw and were scared, which meant that I didn't remember that they'd stayed at the resort—and I had literally no moment-to-moment memory, as in, I kept asking Chad if the kids etc. (among other things). (And, I'm told, cussing him out when he tried to vary things up or deflect the repetition. "No, it wasn't your fault, and by now you've asked me that so often that I would actually tell you if it was." "Fuck you." Yes, I have apologized.)

Everyone at the hospital was very nice, and, luckily, spoke excellent English (my sister-in-law's partner came to translate on the follow-up visit, but it wasn't necessary). I went back to the resort that night after the CT scan was clear and I started getting back short-term memory. The next day, x-rays showed that my neck vertebrae were straight in profile, not curved the way they should be, so I got a soft cervical collar and instructions to see an orthopedist at home. In a feat of scheduling, I have an appointment for this coming Monday. (This happened on two Sundays ago, on June 25.) I imagine I have a bunch of PT in my future, which is fine—my overall pain is almost back to baseline levels (I say baseline, rather than zero, because I grind my teeth in my sleep, so my head and neck muscles are perpetually needing attention for that), and while I do not enjoy the paranoia that comes with every typo and detail that slips out of memory, it could have been SO much worse. So all will be well!

Edit: Chad has more detail about vacation in all its aspects.

4) Readercon! I will be there seven days from now. I have a schedule:

Saturday, 10:00 a.m. (BH), We Have Always Lived with the Magic
Phenderson Clark, Greer Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kate Nepveu, Naomi Novik.
Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's Temeraire books take a slow and clever approach to a common issue with alt-historical fantasy: if magic has always existed, why have historical events gone essentially the same way that they did in our magicless world? Her focus on the familiar territory of Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars gradually broadens to include other regions that look very different. This panel will examine this and other techniques for integrating magic into history, including using the appearance or reappearance of magic as a timeline divergence point, limiting magic or paranormal entities to a particular region of the world, portraying paranormal communities or magic-users as hidden and secretive, and entirely reinventing history from the Neanderthals on up.

Saturday, 12 noon (5), Life, Love, and Robots
Jeffrey A. Carver (leader), Glenn Grant, Kate Nepveu, Sonya Taaffe, Sheila Williams.
Robots, golems, and other living machines appear human but can never become human, which makes them perfect vehicles for exploring concepts of sentience, emotion, and human nature. Many robots long to be human; it's much more rare to see one that loves being what it is. Far more fictional robots have gender identities than national or ethnic identities. They are often programmed to feel sexual desire but rarely designed to eat a meal or sniff a flower. How do our depictions of robots reflect our changing understandings of what it means to be alive?

Saturday, 5:00 p.m. (5), Naomi Novik Interviewed by Kate Nepveu
(OMG OMG OMG! So excited. So many notes. Though, brain, I did not enjoy the dream where I got the time of the interview wrong and then got lost in an Escher-like maze that involved water slides. Subtle.)

Sunday, 10:00 a.m. (BH), The Works of Naomi Novik
Kate Nepveu (leader), Sarah Smith, Emily Wagner.
Naomi Novik has published ten novels in her Temeraire series about dragons and war in the Napoleonic era, and has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. The fourth volume of the Temeraire series, Empire of Ivory (2007), was a New York Times bestseller, as were the sixth and seventh volumes, Victory of Eagles and Tongues of Serpents. Her graphic novel, Will Supervillains Be on the Final? (2011), was praised by Publishers Weekly, and her fairy tale novel, Uprooted, won the Nebula Award and was a finalist for the Hugo Award. She worked on the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide and was one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, but she is best known as a novelist and short story writer. Join us as we welcome her to Readercon and celebrate her work.

I will also be taking Safety Committee shifts--this will be my last con on the committee, I've handed in my resignation solely on the ground that I've been doing it for a long time now and it's time for me to move on.

So, given the panel times above, and the possibility that I may have to bolt off if the phone rings, a poll:

Poll #18559

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 8

Are you going to be at Readercon?

Yes I am. . .
6 (75.0%)

. . . and we should try to get together!
4 (50.0%)

I might be, touch base with me later!
2 (25.0%)

(If you don't tick the second box, I will assume that you are entirely swamped and it would not be plausible, and I will hope to see you in passing.)

5) What with vacation, and the concussion, and making the non-demolished parts of the house fit for human habitation, and work, and Readercon prep, and staring balefully at my notes for the Books of the Raksura post I promised Tor.com pre-concussion . . . I have not read Twitter or DW in more than two weeks. I am sorry! I miss you all! It is just . . . a lot.

And now, we are taking the kids to an amusement park tomorrow, so I really need to go to bed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

yhlee

So sorry to hear about the hecticness and the concussion, but glad you weren't worse hurt.

From:

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

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