Okay, so I’m declaring…

Okay, so I'm declaring pre-registration officially open for Kriti. Woohoo! It's exciting, throwing a convention. Terrifying too, even though this is going to have like half as much stuff going on as a regular sf convention would -- no Masquerade, for example, and no Art Show. But still, lots and lots of stuff -- a lot more than the academic conference I helped run in Utah. Please please please -- if you're going to register, pre-register? You save $10, but more importantly, the more pre-registrations we get, the more authors we can justify inviting now! Ideally, we'd like to have 30 invited authors at this thing -- which means we need about $10,000 minimum, given honorariums and the like. That'd be 500 pre-registered. We're getting small amounts from students groups and individual sponsorships too, of course (and big thanks to my sweetie Jed, the first individual to sponsor, even though he isn't even coming to the festival) but I'd be really happy if we had lots of early ticket sales. I'd be thrilled, actually. So hey, please, pre-register. There'll never be a better time, as the used car salesman say on tv...

I went to a bhangra dance class last night, taught by my friend Sadaf, who's a terrific dance teacher. Bhangra is an Indian dance style that as I understand it evolved out of Punjabi and Gujarati folk dance, but then got mixed in with hip hop and other contemporary music to create a really fun international fusion. It's a blast to dance, and highly aerobic. I was sweating like a pig, which was some comfort as otherwise, this has been a horrible week for the diet/exercise plan -- a cold which hit me a few days ago has made me disinclined to exercise, and we had two massive dinners out with math department people early in the week, which means that I think actually gained a pound this week, dammit. Argh. But oh well, the dancing was great fun, and even though I was the earliest to bow out of the actual club dancing (at 12:30), I can at least try to put that down to fighting my cold, rather than my just being an pathetic granny. I admit to having a moment of old lady shock when I saw what some of the kids at the club were wearing -- a couple scraps of fabric held together by string, it looked like. If their mothers could only see them...

Today, get some work done, possibly in a cafe. This has been a pretty bad week all around for productivity -- aside from the Kriti stuff, I haven't done much of anything. No writing. Sadness. This academic job stuff is super-distracting and somewhat depressing, just waiting to hear back. The wheels of academia grind exceeding slow. I'm going to call Monday and try to get some kind of update.

Tomorrow, we spend the afternoon looking at townhomes in Bucktown, I think. We're still not sure about this whole buying-house concept, but we figure it can't hurt to look and dream a little, right? Unless of course we end up deciding that we really can't afford it and then just come home far more dissatisfied with our current housing situation. Okay, so it could hurt. But hopefully it won't. The funny part was chatting with Alex yesterday, whose reaction was -- "But why would you buy a small house now, when in July, your book will come out and you will make millions? You'll just end up having to move again in three months." Ah, it's good to have friends with faith in you, even if their faith is insanely out of proportion. :-)