I worked on that until around 3 yesterday, and then I headed out to Schaumburg. I was meeting Karen and Co. for dinner at IKEA (mmm...Swedish meatballs and lingonberries), and I figured I could go early and beat the traffic. I didn't miss all the traffic, astonishingly -- I should've left an hour earlier. But enough, and I made it to the Borders there -- promptly to be diverted by the Nordstrom Rack next door. Which had short black dress boots which fit me for under $25, which excited me muchly. I have big black army boots, but a) they're getting really raggedy, and b) my sister always mocks me when I try to wear them with nice pants. I still love them, but it'll be nice to have another option. After the boots, came the Borders cafe with the working -- I revised and then wrote another chunk of this collaboration I'm doing with Jed. We hit some potholes on Sunday -- differing understandings of backstory and such -- but I have some hope that we're muddling through it somehow. It felt good to write anyway. Hopefully we can finish it by Nalo's deadline. (Greg, you writing something for this?)
Met them at IKEA around 6:30, much playing with J while they looked at bookshelves, then a nice dinner with Karen and Par where we did a lot of talking about why people used to be skinny in Sweden and aren't anymore, and whether if restaurants in France started serving American-sized portions, the French would get fat. Our conclusions were inconclusive. Par took J off for a bit after eating to run around, and Karen and I ended up going over "how to throw a SH tea party" in detail -- I hope I remembered to tell her everything she'll need to know. She and Susan will be handling it at World Fantasy this weekend -- if any of y'all are going to be there, you go offer to help out, okay? It always takes longer to set up than you think it will -- something about opening all those little boxes of tea and setting out all those little cookies...
I was feeling pretty tired by the time I got back in the car at 10 (having incidentally returned some shelves to IKEA earlier and gotten store credit, with which I got two cookie sheets (ours disappeared mysteriously recently) and a basket to hold all my fabric supplies). The roads were fairly empty going back to Chicago most of the way, so I got to (had to) go pretty fast. I'm still very aware, when I'm driving fast, of the fact the a second's inattention could have me hurtling into a curving divider or another car -- its a rather intoxicating sense of leashed power combined with astonishment that people do this every day, all the time -- lots of careless, lazy, tired, maybe even sick people are driving these death-machines with no supervision at all. I've been driving for two years now and I still can't seem to take this for granted. Maybe I should've been born in the horse-and-buggy days -- that might have been more my speed.
But oh, sometimes I do like the speed.
Hey, is Nalo’s anthology open, or is invite only? This is the second time I’ve seen someone mention it in their journals, so I’m curious . . .
It’s invite-only, and it’s only open to people of post-colonial descent.