Gillian Polack's Blog, page 296

gillpolack @ 2010-09-11T10:19:00

I don't know if I ought to admit this, or whether I'm safer if I keep it to myself. I wondered what would happen if I referred to Heidegger's cat* throughout AussieCon. Anyhow, I did and either no-one noticed or they thought I made a mistake. Not a single person corrected me or even queried me. I shall now keep referring to Heidegger's cat until someone does...



* Heidegger's cat has entirely different uncertainties to Schrodinger's.

gillpolack @ 2010-09-10T22:17:00

I had a day off! Mum and I pottered, basically. This ought to mean nothing to report, but actually, in reality, it means that sixteen of my friends have just fallen off their chairs from laughing too much and need assistance. I do take time off. Much time off. Consecutive minutes, sometimes. If anyone's still sniggering, I might have to do something very drastic. The trouble is, I'm so relaxed from my day off that I can't think of anything.

Tomorrow I'm catching up with a friend I haven...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-09T19:31:00

The flavour of the New Year was honey. It always is. This year, though, it was honey in the form of NZ mead. I thought of everyone affected by the earthquake as I enjoyed my glass and mentally wished them well and through this time. I toasted littenz too, because he provided the mead. We opened it at our family lunch (which replaced the family dinner because the family is getting older) and it went quite beautifully with honeydew melon. So instead of apple dipped in honey (which we had ...

Happy New Year

It's that time of year and that time of day. May I wish you all Happy New Year and wish you all a good and a sweet year. Well over the Fast,too, for anyone who observes the Fast.

My particular Rosh Hashanah celebration is to max out my mother's library card with my own reading for the holiday, while giving her handy recommendations for her own reading.

I decided it was time to base my recommendations on a whole new principle. Mum refused every single book I pulled off the shelves. She expl...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-07T16:37:00

You know, it's very satisfying to tell people that Australia is rabbit-proofed...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-07T15:16:00

This is where I admit that my reports on AussieCon were scanty because the head-above-water thing was only just happening. As I explained to several friends yesterday, the heart and etc were coping, but only just.

I've spent the morning in bed and am going back there in a few minutes.

The wonderful thing is that I was mostly OK until the last hour (although I wasn't really thinking straight after about 6 pm - which a couple of friends spotted). Alan and Talie got me safely onto a tram and the...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-07T00:56:00

Nick Stathopoulos often tells people that SF conventions are family coming together. That's what this weekend felt like. And as soon as I realised this (which took me until Saturday, me being so very slow on the uptake) most things were easy. Not everything. Doing four panels in a day was tough and panel #3 that day was especially tough, but in every audience I could look out and see people I cared for and every time I left a panel or tried walking from one place to another, it took forever...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-06T00:43:00

I still don't have much in the way of normal convention reporting to do, because this convention is very much not an ordinary convention.

My Harold Holt evil plot has grown wings. Of this I am inordinately proud.

I seem to have drawn the ire of someone who moderated one of my panels (one of those sessions where I was doing 3 hours straight) - I find this worrying, but there's nothing I can do about it. It makes me nervous about most of tomorrow's panels, however. The one panel I did prepara...

gillpolack @ 2010-09-05T01:09:00

Still a happy little vegemite! I can't blog though. I have emails that need answering and sleep that very much needs to happen.

Thanks to the utter awesomeness that is my supervisor, I can take a few days off after AussieCon. I don't quite understand the concept of days off, but I'm a fast learner and will surely manage.

gillpolack @ 2010-09-04T01:47:00

I knew I'd have a late night tonight (though not quite this late) so I drafted notes as I went today. My notes say that Kaaron Warren won the Ditmar for best novel (which she did - yay!!!). They also say that I didn't win a Ditmar. This is quite, quite wrong. I - and everyone else who worked on the Southern Gothic banquet - won the Ditmar for Best Achievement. I'm really not very good at predicting the future. I am, however, very happy.

It's quite late, so you're only going to get scraps ...