The tile is embedded in the middle of a busy street. I saw a few similar ones, but they were more fragmentary. Turns out it’s one of these.

Perhaps an honest self-assessment?

Never know who you’ll run into.

Did the paint just happen to peel in the shape of a heart?

AND LEAVE THE BINDER ON YOUR DESK WHEN YOU WALK OUT OF THE OFFICE.

Man.

You go away from easy Internet access for a week and somebody hacks your dang MySpace. For any of y’all who got bulletins from “me” alerting you to the latest horizontal hijinks of a young lady who I will not name, who is famous for being famous, please accept my sincere apologies. I’ve totally changed my password and reestablished ownership. I think.

It was a very bookish ambiguous winter holiday. I have just added to my obsessive LibraryThing catalog the following:

• The Points of my Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South, by E.B. White
• The Sound I Saw, by Roy Decarava
• Moomin: the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip
• Strange Landscape: A Journey Through the Middle Ages, by Christopher Frayling
• The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier
• The Edwardians, by Vita Sackville-West
• Washed Up: the curious journeys of flotsam and jetsam, by Skye Moody

Some of them came from the several good used bookstores along US 101 between Lincoln City and Newport, one of which has this excellent poster:

Two of them came from the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, which I highly recommend. We also purchased a fine rubber octopus, learned a bit about Antarctic whale research, and I took a few pictures. Here’s one:

Some fish you don’t need to work at all to anthropomorphize.

Last but not least! The other thing I did while away from the ever-enticing Internet was to finish writing my story for the Comic Book Tattoo anthology, which a few of you may have heard about already — it’s coming out this summer from Image Comics, and all the stories are inspired by Tori Amos songs. I don’t think I’m allowed to say yet which song is mine, but I’m extremely psyched about the story and the project as a whole.

Happy end of 2007 and beginning of 2008!

You probably can’t read that, but it says “Check Left Front Tire Pressure.”

We did. At which point we noted the furious, tea-kettle-esque hissing sound of air rapidly escaping.

Note that this was an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT RENTAL CAR than the one we had last weekend.

86.

A month of that is parental visiting (split into two two-week chunks, once in spring, once in fall, as longtime readers will perhaps recall). Then there are the library conventions, the comics conventions, the writing retreats, the author appearances, and oh, yeah, the part where you just go someplace because you want to hang out there, you know, with friends, and maybe experience culture or something.

All told, a little under 25 percent of 2007.

It feels like more.

How much of this year have y’all traveled? Moving counts as travel; it’s like traveling cubed, because you don’t go home, or rather you do, but it isn’t home yet, you have to make it home.

2. Speaking of elevators: there weren’t enough of them. After waiting for one for twenty minutes, at which point we took the stairs up to our room. On the seventeenth floor.

3. Man taking a doggie sticker: “That’s my lucky dog!”

I informed him that he was correct.

4. Woman taking a gun sticker: “That’s what my heart looks like.”

5. Best outfit on anyone during the whole show: the three-year-old girl in a Spiderman muscle costume. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo.

6. Sean’s latest genius object: Smokin’ Zombies!

7. Useful Tip: When there is a bottle of fancy water on the table at the hotel restaurant, do not assume that it is on the table because that is the only kind of water they serve. Assume that if you open it, it will cost you more than eight dollars.

7.5. Conversely, do not assume that just because a restaurant has a dumb name, that it will not be a good restaurant.

8. Admonition from a gentleman passing by the table: “Don’t let the loonies get you!” He paused. “Unless…they already have!”

9. Ninety five percent of the announcements made over the PA system, I completely could not understand, what with the noise in the room, the distortion, et cetera. Fortunately, the one that I did was about a gentleman who had lost a fanny pack containing pain medications. I’d been wondering whose fanny pack was underneath our table.

10. When you come to the end of an intense convention weekend, it’s great to have a task to accomplish.

It was a good thing we decided to check the tires while we were still in the parking lot.

It measures how much one’s holiday experiences diverge from the media ideal.

I haven’t quite figured out the actual numerical part, but it might be like when you’re using a level and you assess how many bubbles off plumb something (or someone) is. So your holidays could be, say, four Rockwells off.

Like mine.

In other news: Steve and I are now in Columbus for the Mid-Ohio-Con, and we’ve already met some lovely people who totally know some of my friends at the Ann Arbor District Library, because as Steve says, all towns are small when you deal only with the literate.

The theme of the workshop was about finding a sense of self and place in young adult literature. Our panel was about place in different genres within YA, and I’m still thinking about it. We each had about five minutes, and I’ll give you a tiny snippet of  what we said. Cecil Castellucci talked about how a scene (punk, movie monster-making, etc.) can be a place, how a city can be a character, how art itself is a safe place for a lot of us. Holly Black talked about how description in fantasy needs to suggest, even before any fantastic elements come into the story, that the reader is someplace unexpected, where anything might happen. Garret Freymann-Weyr discussed how inextricable place is from memory. I talked about how in Rules, Battle adjusts very quickly to Portland, and the very ease of that adjustment to a new place underscores how hard it is for her to connect with and understand her brother. (I also told everyone about the anxiety dream I had the night before, appropriate for a conference full of English teachers: that all of us had to relate our own work to the Great Gatsby.) Jo Knowles talked about how an abuser can make every place feel unsafe, but also how places can, eventually, be reclaimed. And Ann Angel did a search for all the places mentioned in the anthology she edited, Such A Pretty Face, and saw that the places mentioned most often — bathrooms, locker rooms, bedrooms — were all locuses of anxiety about where the characters fit in the world.

I was so glad to have the chance to be part of the conference.

More soon, but right now, it’s sunny and I’m going for a walk.

I thought I was going to take public transportation from the Newark airport.

I waited for the bus to Penn Station.

For a while.

Some other busses came.

Finally the bus to Penn Station arrived and I was climbing the steps to get on it and I must have looked more than usually bewildered/worried, because the driver asked, “Do you want Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station?” “New York Penn Station,” I said. “Oh,” he said, “you need to go over there and wait for the [indecipherable].”

So I did that.

It didn’t work.

Long story short: I got one of those shuttles that goes to multiple destinations within a certain (extensive) geographic area. The driver had been working since 5 am (it was about 5:30 pm when I got on), had a cold and was sneezing and coughing, and kept getting texted by his girlfriend. Finally he called her back and said, “Baby, now is not a good time, I got a bus full of people here, I’ll get with you later.” He also kept getting harrassed by one of the other people in the shuttle who’d waited a long time for a pickup and who got progressively angrier as other people’s stops came up before his. And did I mention the traffic?

Meanwhile, I am calling my delightful hosts ellen_kushner and deliasherman at intervals to update them upon my whereabouts as I am now two hours later than I thought I would be and we are allegedly going to a play at 8 pm.

Fortunately, at 7:35 when I relayed my 20, it was conveniently close to Lincoln Center!

So I got out of the shuttle and gave the driver a big tip, because he was having a way worse day than I was. “I hope your night gets better,” I said. “Oh, it will, it will.”

I started laughing when I was halfway across the street, contemplating the spectacle of myself and my luggage going — more or less — straight from the airport to a show. We all got there just in time.

It was a good show, too.

Next post: will be actually about the conference!

I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either.

So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, in part to see how someone who’s incredibly vicious to his characters does it. I’m really glad I’m enjoying it, because it means that I’ll have listening material for months to come.

Now I have three suitcases of differing sizes laid out on the bed, and I am torn between the desire to be fancy and the desire not to take so damn much luggage for once.

Also I am seized with the irrational fear that if I pack my favorite fancy clothes in the giant suitcase,  it will get lost and I will never see said clothes again. Maybe I’ll just take a few fancy items and stuff them into the little carryon.

In sum, Internet, I am very excited about going to NCTE/ALAN (it will be my first time!) but also, I am preoccupied with the trivial.