We just returned from a lovely dinner with Rob’s parents at Cafe Frida. They were on a whirlwind tour of the mainland and stopped by NYC for the weekend. Sadly, I missed them last night and only saw them this evening when I came home from working on the moth. I thought that they were here longer or I would have tried to schedule the moth work differently. They head back to Hawaii tomorrow.

Short though the visit was, it was good to see them.

Finally, we got our futon. Whew. We also picked up a gorgeous bookcase from the early 1900s. The folks that sold us the futon said, “Need anything else?” And we said, “Bookcases?”

Behold, for reasons that are unclear to me, they wanted to get rid of this glassfront bookcase which had belonged to the husband’s grandparents. It’s beautiful! I am baffled but was very, very happy to buy it from them. Naturally, it was not a dimension that we had planned on having in the apartment, but so pretty that we went into make-it-fit mode. Actually, I think this will be better all around. So, what we are doing is using it as a divider in the living room and giving Rob a micro-office there.

Clearly, painting is still happening, but I hated the color I put up on the wall behind the lamp. It’s a purple that does not play well with anything else in the room. It is not at all the color that the photo makes it appear.

I am taking over the entire room that we had set aside as an office. Though my workbench was supposed to be temporary, it’s becoming pretty clear that I will always need something like it. I made this floorplan when we were moving out, to figure out what furniture would fit. It’s been very handy so far. Like when we were trying to decide if we could, in fact, make the bookcase fit. So far, we only have one piece that we don’t have a good home for. It’s a Japanese kimono rack, which is normally a lovely piece, but the right spot hasn’t presented itself yet.

I need to reorganize the office, which we are already starting to call the “workshop” but that will probably wait until Coraline is finished.

Rob and I will be in Hawaii from March 19th - March 26th to visit his parents.

This falls into the category of things that I wonder if I should blog about. See, my parents are going to worry, but there are enough things that make me cranky that I’m going ahead with it.

Let’s discuss the importance of obeying traffic laws, shall we? As I was biking to work this morning, on this great downhill stretch where I can really build up speed, a minivan pulled out in front of me without stopping. There’s a stop sign at the intersection, which she completely ignored. I had to ditch my bike to avoid slamming into the side of the van. Did the woman driving stop? No.

I seem to be fine. I was shaken and angry after it happened. My bike had a flat. There doesn’t seem to be any more damage than that, but it’s all too easy to imagine how much worse it might have been. For crying out loud, would the ten seconds that it takes to stop and look at a stop sign really have made a difference in how long it took her to get to her destination? Or did she see me and decide that she didn’t want to get stuck behind a bicyclist? I wish I had been able to get her license plate number, but I was too busy not dying.

I just saw the news that Lazytown won the BAFTA in the International Children’s category. Woot!

INTERNATIONAL

FAIRLY ODD PARENTS - Butch Hartman, Gary Conrad (Frederator Studios for Nickelodeon/Nickelodeon UK)

HARRY AND HIS BUCKET FULL OF DINOSAURS - Kristine Klohk/Helen Cohen/Graham Ralph (Collingwood O’Hare Entertainment/Silver Fox Films Ltd/CCI Entertainment/Five)

LAZY TOWN - Magnús Scheving, Raymond P Le Gué, Jonathan Judge (Lazy Town Productions for Nick Jr UK/Nick Jr UK)

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS - Paul Tibbitt, Steve Hillenberg (United Plankton Pictures Inc for Nickelodeon/Nickelodeon UK)

We just learned that Lazytown has been nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy Children’s Film and Television Award)

The winners will be announced at the ceremony on Sunday 26 November 2006 at the London Hilton.

INTERNATIONAL

FAIRLY ODD PARENTS - Butch Hartman, Gary Conrad (Frederator Studios/Nickelodeon UK)

HARRY AND HIS BUCKET FULL OF DINOSAURS - Kristine Klohk/Helen Cohen/Graham Ralph (Collingwood O’Hare Entertainment/Silver Fox Films Ltd/CCI Entertainment/Five)

LAZY TOWN - Magnus Sheving, Jonathan Judge (Lazy Town Productions/Nick Jr)

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS - Paul Tibbitt, Vincent Walls, Alan Smart (United Plankton Pictures Inc/Nickelodeon UK)

I’m lucky that my brother is visiting our parents in Chattanooga and has offered to celebrate in my stead. Rob’s dad is out of luck though. Sorry, Glenn! Once again, we are ungrateful wretches. I hope that the weather is beautiful where you are, and that you get to do everything you want to do today.

Rob’s parents arrived in Reykjavík today. They were scheduled to come in this evening, but caught an earlier flight. This is wonderful because I’m going to London today and thought I was going to miss them. So we’re off to have lunch, then they’ll drive me to the airport and go play with Rob. I’ll be back on Sunday and we can have more adventures then.

I’m going to London because Steve Savile and Alethea Kontis will be there with their anthology, Elemental.

Things on set have been very busy and while Dean was here I didn’t want to update my journal in the evenings. We are between company right now, although I just heard that our friend Wayne will be coming to visit us soon and that Rob’s folks will follow after that. I’m looking forward to seeing all of them. At this rate we’ll have out-of-town guests about every two to three weeks but, after Rob’s parents’ vist, we don’t have anyone else scheduled. C’mon people, it’s time to start booking those plane tickets.

We headed out today to Skaftafell, the glacier that I took Mom and Dad to when they came to visit last time. When we left town, it was overcast and rainy, and I was worried that a lot of the scenery would be obscured by clouds.

That turned out to be a needless concern. As we drove, we got out from under the clouds shrouding Reykjavík, and the sky became clear blue. The landscape changes dramatically several times throughout out the drive. We’ve stopped here to take a picture of this turf house. The barn that is attached to it is actually cut into the rock. We’ve got no idea how they got the galvanized tin in there like that. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but the rock that the house is in is seperate from the mountains behind it. At our back is the ocean. For kilometers, we drove with mountains on our left and the ocean on our right.

Then we got to the black sands land. The landscape became flat with mountains way, way off in the distance. At this point we could see the tip of the mountain that holds the glacier we are heading to, but the bottom of it is obscured by the curve of the earth. It will take us another two hours to get there. The silence here is impressive. We generated the only sounds and could hear each other at a normal speaking level even when separated by thirty yards.

Next we passed through green-throw pillow land, where the moss is so thick on the rocks that it looks as if someone came out and threw shag pillows all over the landscape. I didn’t take any pictures here because there wasn’t a good place to pull off the road. Though in truth, there was so little traffic and the road is so straight, that I could have stopped in the middle of the road quite safely.

When we got to the glacier it had changed substantially since I visited with my parents. We could hear and see it melting; markers along the path showed how much it has retreated over the years.

I took a picture just like this, but then had Rob take one with me standing in the frame because it’s impossible to get a real sense of scale without someone standing next to the thing.

Here we are heading back to the car. Looking past the glacier you can see the flat, moonscape that we passed through to get here. It’s a very strange sensation, to have towering mountains behind and moonscape in front. At first it feels like these two things are unrelated, but as we left we realized that all of this flat moonscape had been covered by glacier at some point.

And then, as we drove home we got lucky. I was focusing on the road when Eve said, “Are those the northern lights?” I looked up and, behold. They were. So we pulled over and the entire sky began swirling and pulsing with color. It was the most impressive display I’ve seen, touching the horizon all around us and fluttering with color. The display continued for our drive home, but in much tamer renditions. Eve and Rob have been utterly spoiled now.

I nearly forgot to tell you that the house moved! Thank heavens. My parents must be so relieved.

I just sold Cerbo in Vitra ujo to Apex Digest. It will probably be in Issue 6, which comes out in June, but I’ll post for certain when I know the date. I’m thrilled, although it is an icky, icky story–my first foray into horror. This will be the first sale that I don’t give my parents a copy of.

Mom is disturbed just knowing that I wrote a horror story.

In his notes to me, Jason Sizemore said, “Whoever wrote this has no soul…” Which I think is a compliment, given the circumstances.

As you know, my parents are having the log house moved from Walter’s property down to ours. Today, the movers dropped an oak tree on it. Yep. A tree. Not a small one either. The plus side is that it just knocked the eave of the corner of the house.

But really. Do you think that maybe they didn’t notice a house sitting there when they decided to knock the tree down? It’s not like there are other houses on the property so they had nine acres to play with. Why push it down towards the house?