Follow this link. Do it - even if you’ve never followed another link ever. It’s the web site of my friends Andrew and Jill, who went to Thailand with a relief team soon after the tsunami; about their experiences there and about the Thai kid they met in one of the refugee camps.

So much happened and each thing could fill an entire posting.

Eastercon, of course. Paragon 2 in Hinckley; a little thinner in the programme department than usual, but that didn’t bother me overly. Our finances being better than they have been since I started the PhD, we allowed ourselves a larger budget for books: here is the result. (Several of the book dealers offered to buy us drinks. Fancy that.)

Teddy was at the convention, which was fun - the last Eastercon we both went to was in 2000. The hotel was good, high standard, very friendly staff, plentiful meals. And a leisure centre where we went to swim on most days.

However, as it is now bedtime, the rest will have to wait. Then you might find out why they now call me Der Flabberghast.

OK, let’s see if you all are smarter than I am: If you got this txt message from a uknian friend:
Dunker! Ivar! Pjatteryd! Rigga! Ludde! Poäng!!!

What would you think it meant?

Tomorrow, I’ll go down to Stockholm to have dinner with a bunch of people, including one person I’ve known for years - six or seven at least - but never yet met. She’s part of the first online community I encountered, back in 1993. Come to think of it, she was there before me, so make that 11 years! Am looking forward to that. Other than that, I should be tidying the house right now, rather than leave it all to poor Johan. (He has to do the hoovering since it’s a back-killer, but that doesn’t mean he should have to do all the rest of it as well. Or does it?)

My string of colds seems to be over, or at least -ish. Am still all phlegmy and have slightly congested sinuses, but don’t feel ill which is a blessing. Instead I feel run-around-in-circles-and-scream panicked. Whee.

Two images from this last week. . .

On Wednesday afternoon, I got an email from Johan saying he bought a book. For people who don’t know us, I should perhaps say that this isn’t exactly an odd thing for either of us to do; hence I thought it must have been a pretty special book, for him to write and tell me. So I replied and asked him what book it was. “Well, maybe it was actually two books”, he answered. “Three?” said I. “More like four”. “Five?” “Well, roughly, but actually about six.”

It turned out to be thirty-one.

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On Thursday morning, I sent a goodmorning txt message from the bus to Watty, who replied that yes, possibly a good morning except he was stuck in traffic. I also txted nat, who’d sent me a message the previous evening complaining about the heat, and told her there was frost on the ground up here. She txted me back with some dried apricots, which were quite lovely, so I told her to send a few to Watty on account on him being stuck in traffic and probably in need of apricots. So from the 60th latitude, I asked for dried fruit from Turkey to be sent to England.

I like living in the information age!

Dunx is a blog writer, too!

The chat room at MCiOS was invaded by Slovenians yesterday; CdM wanted to demonstrate an Internet community during a lecture and so asked me to be there for a few minutes. It was fun, though I have no idea what kind of weird impression I made. . . still, they didn’t know me, and won’t be returning to the room so I guess it’s ok. As I say, it was great fun. Certainly not your ordinary chatroom experience.

Good Things have been happening: flerdle is going to Europe in June, and she’s coming to visit us — yay!! Am really looking forward to that, and planning things to do and see. Good Thing no 2 is that Dunx and Jen got engaged, which makes me very, very happy. Double yay (one for them each!)

And it’s only 2 weeks until Walpurgis!