Meh. I’m never going to be an average blogger; I just can’t get hyped up about everyday mundanity on a regular basis. It’s much more interesting to wait and see how things relate over a longer period, in general.

That said, it’s been a somewhat eventful month or so.

I was planning to go to Persacon at the end of June, because wearing my T-shirts to DragonCon has been such a success. My sales have been impressive since then; the Think design is still the favorite Still not enough to live on yet, but if it continues to grow, I could very much enjoy making my living that way.

Unfortunately for my plans, I had an accident at work the very day that Persacon was to start. I was cutting banner vinyl, which is rather fussy stuff, and the T-square slipped a bit. It’s always doing that, and I had tried a different hand position to try to keep it from doing so this time. It didn’t work.

It’s funny, sometimes, the things that all come together in your head at once. I was fully aware that I was cutting with a very sharp knife; I’d flipped the blade when I started so I could make sure of it. I was fully aware that I was pulling the blade smoothly along the edge of the T-square. When I felt pressure in my finger, all these facts came together at once, registering as “That’s the knife in my finger, and this is bad.”

Kinda funny, really - it didn’t hurt. Didn’t hurt at all until I started putting pressure on it, and it stayed that way all while healing. Only hurt if pressed. Bled like crazy, though instinct had it in my mouth before it could drip on the vinyl. My co-workers ask me if I’m okay almost any time I make a sound, but this time their tone was different; apparently they could tell from my body language that it was a bit more than the usual papercut. Manager called the safety personnel, and I had to put my head down on my desk, which freaked him out, but I’ve explained before - I’m a squeamish person. I can handle emergencies (as I had just done, wrapping my finger in a paper towel until they could come show me where medical was - though if I’d been thinking of it, there are signs in the other building that I probably could have followed) but once the urgency is gone, I’ll faint if I focus too much on the blood.

That’s part of why I didn’t post about it until now. I kept getting queasy trying to describe it. Heh. Anyway, I decided to stay home for the weekend and take lots of zinc and vitamin C so it would heal faster. It’s mostly healed up now, though it’s still a little pink, and the reconnecting nerves are a little sensitive. I made the mistake of letting my teeth scrape the area yesterday when I was getting the maple syrup off my finger, and yeah, that was a little uncomfortable. It’ll probably stay scarred, though at least it’s a fairly thin line. Oh, and they ordered a safety ruler so fast, it got there the next business day, and get this - it’s purple.

Around that same time, Huntsville had a series of power outages two weekends in a row. Unfortunately, I no longer have a UPS battery backup for the VAIO, and the secondary hard drive fried. It took about 30 reboots to get Windows to run a surface scan and reassign the bad sectors, and then it took me a few days to get the important data offloaded to the external drive. There have been more power outages since then, and the monster is still unreliable. I had to resort to transferring everything to my new(ish) laptop. Newish, because it was new when I bought it, but it’s been a few months…

When it became clear that they were going to start forcing everyone to get Vista, I decided I had better get in before all the XP models were gone. It’s a fairly nice machine, though I’ll still want a desktop machine for the 3D stuff, and since I’ve been unable to get the VAIO to stay on for more that 3 minutes before it locks up (yes, even in safe mode) I’ve started installing the important software on it. Office, email, stuff like that. Just finally set up Miranda IM today. I’m casually looking at hardware for a new desktop machine, but I don’t have to rush. I bought a standalone copy of XP a while back, expecting something like this to come up, so when I can afford all the nice stuff, I can build my ultimate media machine

Anyway, I’d just managed to get all the data transfer and email stuff straightened out (though Incredimail is still glitchy on here - I suspect it’s not happy about Spybot) when I lost all contact with the web. Microsoft issued an update to XP that violently clashed with ZoneAlarm, and when I finally figured out what was going on (since I was the only one in the house who couldn’t get to the internet) I shut off ZA. We have a hardware firewall, too, and I like using PeerGuardian (yeah, okay, maybe I sound paranoid, but hey - I’ve already been hit by spyware once!). Fortunately ZA has issued a fix now, but the timing of the blockage was awful. Got SBK out late because of it, so I’ve already started assembling August, because I want it to be on time this month, for cryin’ out loud!

In other news, I’m staffing SFLit at DragonCon again this year; no idea what my schedule will be yet, but I won’t be able to get there until late Friday night, so I won’t be findable there until Saturday. Also, I suffered a bout of temporary insanity, and volunteered to be a panelist on the self-publishing/small press panel, so I’ll be busy compiling my data on that for a bit. Obviously I won’t be online much that weekend.

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to encourage people to wear my designs at conventions (advertising, don’t you know) and I just don’t know how to find the right balance. I don’t want to spend too much, because that defeats the whole purpose, but I’m not a big enough name that shoutouts would be much of an incentive. I don’t know. Maybe next year.

Oh, and I’ve also finally come back to SGA. After Joe Mallozzi (or however he spells his name) ticked me off with his fanbaiting, I walked away from SGA - for about two years. I didn’t post screaming rages on his blog, I didn’t announce my departure; I just left. Missed about half of season three and all of season four, and probably would have skipped season five as well, but I re-encountered Crysothemis at DeviantArt (had friended her on LJ ages ago, and didn’t realize she was on dA). She draws the most awesome SGA portraits, and it sparked a little. Additionally, I was reading on FFN (in another fandom) and came across a few fanauthors who wrote for SGA as well as the other fandoms, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to give a few of them a read. Then I got drawn in, and started re-reading some of my favorite authors, only to realize that I needed to catch up on the series in order to know what was going on. So I did, and about the time I finished catching up, my manager forwarded a link to the current “Watch it live” promo, and I started watching season five as it comes.

Anyway, I came up with a design (using calculus, of all things) that expressed my opinion of Mallozzi, and only now, two years later, have I uploaded it. (I still have to edit and adjust a lot of the items in that category…be patient - I’ll work on that this week.) Maybe it’ll catch on. I haven’t decided whether or not to send him one - he’s still at it, professional troll that he is, and my SGA list (which I never actually left, I just stopped reading messages until now) is again frothing about his “hints” and misinformation. I flatly refuse to visit his blog anymore. If I leave SGA again, I doubt anyone would be able to bring me back, and I know that if I let myself read his garbage, I will just get angry and leave again. Newsflash, Joe: there really IS such a thing as bad publicity.