August 2003

Captain’s log: Day 6,351,287. I have survived great olfactory evil. Why did it not occur to me that chemical solutions strong enough to denature wallpaper paste were strong enough to cause a queasy stomach - until after the fact? Why do I always manage to find the slowest cashier at a Wal-Mart on any given day? Why does Edmund persist in giving Tenzing unprovoked bites to his ass?

I don’t hate the bathroom yet. Pretty fishtank. Lovely fishtank. I also don’t hate wallpaper. I just hate the paste that holds it to the nearest wall.

A few of you know that I’m very deep into a dragon*con-related project right now. It’s not a bad thing - it should hopefully be a very good, very funny thing once it’s done - but it’s not something I can show on domesticat at the moment. I now comment fairly regularly on the dragoncon livejournal community, and I don’t want random people from that community to randomly come here and have one of the upcoming surprises for this year’s convention spoiled.

I have this half-finished entry sitting in another window of my text editor. I’d planned to tell you all about the lovely, yet still somewhat hush-hush, project I’m working on for dragon*con. It was pretty prose, prettily arranged. I might even use it, in another form, on another day.

However, I must interrupt this momentary rhapsodization to remind my five members of the listening public of this glaringly obvious fact: IM trollers, if I cared, would really, really annoy me.

1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I’ll ask you five questions.
3. You’ll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. You’ll include this explanation.
5. You’ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

My questions are from Heather of gravitylens.org. Her questions and her answers are archived on her site as well.

At this point, it’s just plain silliness: the cutting of a spare house key or the run to Kinko’s for sixteen color copies. Or, as said to Suzan the other night: “We do all this planning ahead of time so that when we finally get on-site, we can walk away from our lives for nearly a week.”

On the Saturday before dragon*con, I was sitting in the computer room, tending to minor items from my dragon*con checklist. Halfway down the list was the note "clean off camera." My camera's memory card had been slowly collecting photos from various places, none of which were ever quite enough to post at any one time.

I flicked through the photos and realized that, when added to the photos I'd been socking away on my desktop "for eventual use," that I had enough for a post. Therefore, I present for you a mishmash collection: The Shameless Feline.

Huntsville representatives

A photo that only touches the bizarreness of dragon*con: the cat sleeping on my desk while I work on a recreation of the Star Wars Imperial Emblem as part of the Super Secret Dragon*Con Graphic Design project. In other words, Tenzing was being good. For once.

I can finally give you the answer to the question which I’m sure was bothering none of you: “What was Amy’s super-secret dragon*con graphic design project that she worked on for all of August?” I held off making these photos available until after dragon*con was in full swing, hoping that no one who was meant to be surprised would be unduly surprised by visiting cat.net.