Ottawa-bound

So I am off to Ottawa in the morning and trying to get a zillion things done before then. Which include:

• finish packing. This time, I’ll try to be ready the night before, especially since my publisher has me on a 4 am train. I understand this is the reason why the short-lived Biblioasis Travel Agency went out of business.
• go see Terry Griggs read at the London Central Library.
• find out if Amy Jones won the ReLit Award for her short story collection, What Boys Like. That award’s being presented tonight in Ottawa.
• figure out what I’m going to read tomorrow night in Ottawa. Yes, my book. But what part?
• mail some books to some people to whom I owe signed copies.
• fret.

On professional email etiquette

While doing research for a project, just found an email I sent to a client, in my day job, who had reported a critical software problem:

I am all over this like a towel on a wet dog that’s really wiggly and really doesn’t want to get dried with a towel because he just wants to shake the water off everywhere but you really don’t want him to do that because everything is going to get wet if he does and you don’t want everything to get wet because some things don’t work after they get wet, like iPods and so on, but fish actually work pretty well when they’re wet so you wish your house was made of fish, and the stupid dog is still wiggling like crazy.

Two years later, I remain employed. And bearing this lesson in mind, I will never build a house out of iPods.

Interviews

How I love ’em.

I retire from the cowboy life

When I was a kid, every supermarket had one of those coin-operated horsey rides that you could ride for a quarter, out by the front doors. Or maybe it was a dime; I don’t know. Money didn’t matter much to me at the time.

Flared plastic nostrils and wild eyes: it was a thrill to ride them, if you could put out of your mind that you were riding a rocking, electromechanical pony in the green fluorescent chill of the supermarket and not a wild mustang in the blazing southwestern desert, and failing that, simply because your mother had relented and indulged you with that quarter.

They don’t have those horses anymore. But we’re pretty busy these days.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Here at Banjaxed, we don’t participate in the general St. Patrick’s Day revelry. And there’s a reason for that: the only time we did, it ended badly.

Don’t let the name fool you. On my father’s side, we’re Anglo-Irish Protestants. And on my mother’s side, we’re Irish Catholics.

When I get drunk, I beat the shit out of myself in retribution for centuries of oppression.

Apropos of nothing, once more

Apropos of nothing

There’s nowt wrong with gala luncheons, lad!