Monday, August 16, 2010

The Other Half

I posted about Penny's birthday party (with pictures) yesterday, just in case the IS dragons were still up to their tricks today (and it looks like they are, so yay for planning ahead).

The rest of the weekend was pretty awesome, too. My book was released sometime Saturday while I was at Penny's party. (If you read via RSS you may have missed seeing the new link on the sidebar, in which case here, have a link!) I posted it to my writing blog and to Facebook as well, and I've received several very nice comments. The publisher doesn't provide any sort of sales numbers, so I won't know how many I've sold until they pay me, but apparently it's at least three! A co-worker is taking me out to lunch today to celebrate.

Both tomorrow and Wednesday, I'm doing publicity stunts -- Tuesday I'll be in the Q&A hotseat on the publisher's mailing list, and Wednesday I'm "hosting" their livejournal community. That one will probably have a contest to win a free copy of the book and possibly my writing some flash fiction based on participant-provided keywords, so feel free to drop by and heckle!

Sunday, Vicki came over and we drove up to Richmond (actually, just past Richmond) to the Apple Store so I could buy my iPad. It was nice to have someone along for the drive (which had insane/stupid traffic yet again -- WTF, people? Is it really necessary for both lanes to slow down to 30 every time there's an exit ramp?) and to share in my geeky joy.

Apparently, I screwed up, though, because she was about five minutes from buying herself an iPad as well when I interrupted her mesmerized play to tell her I was going to go look at accessories. (She's going to New York in a few weeks, though, and told me she's made a point of planning to go to the Apple Stores there, as well, so I decided that she was saving that big/fun purchase for her trip to the mothership store.)

After I'd bought that (and a new Mac Mini for our kids'/guest computer) we made our way to the food court to have some lunch. I did really well with lunch, too -- fruit and soup! -- and then we had to pass the Godiva store on our way out of the mall. Oh no!

Then for dinner, we had taco salad and homemade guacamole -- we'd gotten about a pound of tomatillos with our CSA box last week, so I was looking for ways to use them up. (I still am, really, as the guac only used up about a quarter of them. Suggestions/recipes welcome!) The guacamole turned out really good, though -- I was basically using this recipe, only without the hot stuff, and I finally figured out my idea ratio of mashed avocado to diced to get just the right texture. Even Penny went back for seconds! It made a lot, though. I need to pick up some chips or something to eat with the leftovers!

Back to work today, though it looks like it's going to be a slow week. Brace yourselves to hear lots of bouncing about the iPad, I guess! (So far: two big thumbs up, though I'm still trying to find a good document editor that isn't too expensive. It doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles, but I do want to be able to do some basic formatting, like italics and centering, and I need to be able to edit multiple files, and I need to be able to transfer the files back to my hard drive somehow -- email would be acceptable. I tried a couple of free apps that promised to link to Google Documents, but both of them horked on me when I actually tried to download and access files. I'm now pondering Apple's own Pages app, which is $10. It doesn't connect to Google Documents, but I'm fairly certain I can trust it not to hork on me.)

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