The Great Ketchup Wars

Well, things have been hopping around the ol' Confusion Factory these last couple days.

Yesterday, I had nice chat with the second of the four brave and fortunate people who will be committing the Liaden Universe® to audiofile.  I did laundry, and glared menacingly at the proposal file while I put words in and took words out.  As one does.  I did do-it-yourself deep muscle massage on my frozen shoulder with the TheraCane, which, just by the way, hurts like a sonofagun.

This morning, I started in signing sheets of paper.  When Steve and I have both signed all 1200 pieces of paper, they'll go back to the printer and be bound into the appropriate number of Dragon Ships.  I would just like to say?  That 1200 sheets of paper is a non-trivial number of sheets of paper, and that I am entirely at peace with my decision to write under my own, and relatively short, name.

Also this morning, the proposals went to Madame the Agent, who will look them over and in the fullness of time either send them on to Madame the Editor for discussion, or to us, for improvements.

Fans of Socks will wish to know that he went back for a checkup today.  He was not (that's NOT) happy about this at all, and when I let him out of his traveling box in the examining room, he jumped down to the floor and stamped around it, tail snapping.  And when I say stamped, I mean stamped; it sounded like he had flamenco boots on.

Aside a fit of temper, he's in good health, and we're to continue doing whatever it is that we're doing, and cross fingers he'll continue to gain weight and otherwise improve.

Socks and I returned home in time to help Steve and Mozart (Scrabble having gone to the basement to, I assume, inspect the tornado room ) batten down the hatches, turn off the computers and marvel at a really splendid, and for several minutes there, quite scary, thunderstorm.  I speak as one who tends more to the "thunderstorms make me ecstatic" side of the scale than the "thunderstorms scare the hotel outta me" side.  The net effect of the storm?  The temps fell from 93F34C, pre-storm, to 72F/22C, post-storm.

After the storm, I did a deep-massage session with the dern cane, then signed some more pages.  Honestly, I think they're breeding down there in that box.  I'm sure there are more empty pages now than there were this morning.

For those who follow the Free Culture debate, there's an interesting exchange that you may not have seen.

First, there's this blog post by Emily White, an intern at NPR, who confesses that, as someone with a music library in excess of 11,000 songs, she's only in her life purchased 15 music CDs.

Then, there's this (warning: long) and informative response from The Trichordist.  If you have time to read only one of these posts, I would recommend this one.

And now?

I'm going to wash dishes.

And sign some more pages.