we didn't fall through the ice

Post-cottage

Good cottage visit. The ice was perfect, smooth and with only minimal snow cover. We walked across in about 25 minutes. I did a LOT of napping during the weekend, so cannot accurately report on the activities of Jeff and his parents. :-) I did stay conscious long enough to go for a walk around the lake with them, however, and have a picnic lunch of sandwiches, ravioli soup, grape juice, and (of course) chocolate bars. The marten showed up again, but didn't seem to like my mom-in-law's dog, Jamie. Jamie (named after the hero in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series) is a Scottish terrier type of dog, with a coat of fur so thick you can barely distinguish his features. He's a yappy dog, unfortunately, but is pretty affectionate (he tends to fall asleep quickly in people's laps).

I have to wonder what goes through yappy dogs' heads while they're yapping. When Jamie yaps, his message seems to be, "HEY YOU! I SEE YOU THERE! I'M PRETTY FIERCE, SO YOU'D BETTER WATCH OUT! SIZE ISN'T EVERYTHING, YOU KNOW! WAITASEC, UH OH, YOU'RE NOT ACTUALLY COMING OVER HERE TO CONFRONT ME, ARE YOU? OH GOOD! WELL, IN THAT CASE I'M GOING TO KEEP PROTECTING MY OWNER WITH THIS INTIMIDATING RACKET!! UNLESS YOU DECIDE TO RUB MY TUMMY, IN WHICH CASE I'LL ROLL OVER AND DROOL HAPPILY ON YOUR ANKLE UNTIL I FALL ASLEEP!!"

Jamie rode in the front seat with my mom-in-law (the four of us decided to just take one vehicle up north), but I could smell his doggy breath all the way from the back seat. Ick.

Convention reports

Allison's finished up an Ad Astra report as well as one for Consonance. I've links to these as well as other Consonance reports temporarily in the left navigation bar. Do check out reports by Seanan, Carla, Dave W., and Merav! If any of you have other Consonance reports online, please let me know.

By the way, I'm updating the OVFF Web site, finally. Just waiting for approval from the OVFF concom before linking up the Pegasus Award nomination ballots. If you're anxious to nominate sooner, however, Dave Weingart has kindly made a DOC format nomination ballot available online.

Also working on The Dandelion Report (www.filking.net). Coming soon: interviews with Jeff Bonhoff and Carla Ulbrich. I hope to officially launch this in the summer, but will be linking to individual articles and interviews from my Blatherings for now. My goal is to keep this a low-maintenance and fun project on my end, so I'm not committing to any update schedule yet, sorry.


Miscellaneous

The Reuters story on Inkspot came out yesterday, for those interested. Wired covered the same story, but I have to wonder if there's a typo in the headline.

Mini Annie story

Apparently Annie woke up crying in the middle of the night last week. When her dad went to see what was wrong, it turned out she was worried that Sara wouldn't be her older sister anymore when they grew up.

FilKONtario

Only a few more weeks to go! Katy and Ju are going to be crashing at my place after the convention. I must brush up on my extensive knowledge of German! ;-) I'm not sure if I'll be staying at the hotel on the Thursday night before FKO (it's my birthday and Jeff & I might be going out; I have to talk to him). I just found out that it's Katy's birthday on March 29th, too (and she -will- be at the hotel). It sounds like FilKONtario is going to be quite the party...I can't wait! :-)


Today's Blatherpic:

My dad-in-law.

Jamie, my mom-in-law's cute but yappy dog.

The cool beaded badge holder that Kathleen Sloan made for the Interfilk auction.