This quilt has a secret. I'd intended to make a game of it, but someone spilled the beans on Flickr.

['I might actually be ready to do some circles now.']

This quilt is 'White Librarian.' It's based off of a redpepperquilts design (Bricks and Stones) I purchased a while back. The original was only a lap-sized quilt, and I wanted something bigger. Bolder. I decided I wanted to make a new bedspread out of it, so I took the general idea of the design and scaled it up. I had to add an extra row, and I scaled up the size in a few places, but it's very obviously based on her design.

The smallest squares in this quilt are 2.5" unfinished, or 2" finished. Take those out of the equation.

Almost.

I am in placeholder time, the time between fully here and fully there in which one's thoughts are distractedly trying to root in both places at once and -- usually -- failing miserably.

The twitter repost script is turned on, so you'll see my increasingly nervous natterings as the trip inches ever closer. it feels real now, real like the fine layer of cat fur Tenzing deigned to place on my bags tonight.

Jeff is gone to Seattle already; words sneak back east of his doings and his travels. The stories await my arrival for the telling; all I have right now are Adam's snapshots of Jeff, so familiar and yet so far away.

Consider this portion of yesterday's twitter traffic:

My actions were characteristic of me, this post less so.

We neither of us are really sure of how, exactly, the friendship got started, but it did center around music and graduated to code and phone calls. That was years ago, and my clearest memory of them was walking outside on a lazy summer night, sitting outside in the driveway, bare feet on concrete, eyes to sky, and watching the stars circle as we talked.

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

Newsletter just came out - Steely Dan will be touring the States this summer. It has been approximately four minutes since I last breathed. I will resume breathing shortly.

Currently, the closest dates to AL are in Chicago and Washington DC, but the DC dates conflict with this year's dragon*con. More dates are supposed to be booked later, and I would think that an Atlanta, Nashville, or New Orleans date would be amongst them.

As my friends can attest, I just went all zappy and silly about The Two Towers after reading James Berardinelli's review (in which he gave it four stars out of a possible four). Like last year, I waited impatiently to get my hands on Berardinelli's review, knowing that his taste in movies so closely mirrors mine as to be eerie.

The words that I'm hearing most about the first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy indicate that we may be in the privileged position of watching one of the great events of cinema history as it happens.
But, no matter how good The Two Towers is (and I have not seen it yet, so I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge), I don't believe Peter Jackson will come home from this year's Oscars with anything more than token awards for technical achievement.