Congratulations to all of this year's Pegasus Award nominees, especially:

-- Nate Bucklin. "I Can't Get Over You, So..." in the A Little Bit Country category

-- Gary McGath. "Mad Scientist's Love Song" is nominated in the Best Classic Filk Song category

-- MASSFILC President Paul Estin. "Fluorine Atom" in nominated in the A Little Bit Rock and Roll category

and...

-- Boskone 47's Featured Filker, Mary Crowell. Mary is nominated in the Best Writer/Composer category.

You can listen to snippets of all nominated people and works on the ballot.

The winners will be announced in late October at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest. Voting is open to members of the filk community and the rules on the same website as the ballot do a good job of explaining what that means.

Edited to lead with my dear friend Nate's nomination after discovering that I accidentally posted this here rather than to the NESFA LiveJournal that it was written for.

During the Boskone Dead Dog party, sfrose updated the NESFA Press e-commerce site and asked papersky to post an announcement on her LiveJournal. A few minutes later, the orders started arriving. Actually, the first one showed up just before Jo posted -- someone was watching very closely, or was just plain lucky.

Monday afternoon, I went to the NESFA Clubhouse to help unload the truck as much as I could. That turned out not to be very much -- my left knee is pretty much fully recovered, but four consecutive days of 15,000+ steps following the previous week of taking it really easy left both of my knees tender and not working all that well today. The right knee in particular is really unhappy, probably because it's been doing the heavy lifting while I compensated for the bum left knee.

Okay, enough of that. I cleaned coolers, pulled heavy road cases, pushed flatbed carts, and did whatever else didn't require me to climb stairs while carrying things. And because I was curious, sfrose let me help by sorting the e-commerce orders that came in since Saturday afternoon while she worked on the Wednesday night-Friday batch and the Friday-Saturday batch.

My batch contained a satisfying stack of orders for Sibyls & Spaceships and Lifelode. My favorite part was seeing where they came from. In the first 18 hours of online sales, NESFA Press received orders for the Walton GoH publications from 14 states and 2 foreign countries: CA, MO, CO, NJ, VA, MA, TX, NM, DC, WA, NY, ID, NC, and IL, plus Australia and the United Kingdom. Please note, I jotted the location info on a piece of scrap paper and didn't double-check it -- I could well have missed a state or country (or two) in there.

Not bad considering that it was nighttime in most US time zones for at least half of those 18 hours. Not bad at all.

I picked up the NESFA Press chapbook of Jo Walton's poetry from the printer this afternoon. Ooh, shiny. (For uncoated stock values of shiny, that is.) More details and a picture of the cover are in the announcement on the Boskone LJ.

It's a good thing I left most of the Reno party supplies at the NESFA Clubhouse following Arisia. The back of my car is now mostly full of boxes from printers, and I'm going to have an interesting time fitting in the resale art and my exhibit piece for the Geek Corner...oh, yes, and my luggage. Must remember my luggage.

Here comes Boskone!

...the rest of the week doesn't get any worse.

While running an afternoon's worth of errands, I slipped on ice in the Rite-Aid parking lot in Palmer. Actually, I wasn't running, I was shuffling along really quite slowly and carefully, 'cause, y'know, it's icy out there.

Bam. Point of impact: my left knee, which seems to be my default point of impact whenever I fall. In recent years, that's been once or twice a winter, though I may have gone through one of them without falling at all. Five years ago, I spent the whole winter falling, something like five or six times, and once with the sort of pain that today's fall seems to have brought on. Needing to use an ice pack when it's cold out is cruel and unusual punishment.

One of these days, the knee is going to say "enough!" I hope it's not this time. So far, it doesn't seem to be, but it's still Not Fun.

More Not Fun awaited me at home. All that ice we've been having? It appears to have torn the gutter off the side of the garage. Or, more precisely, half-torn. Which means there's an unsightly mess, with half of the gutter still attached, a twist in the middle, and the rest of it dangling down to the ground. I've been putting off the call to s Mr. Gutter to replace the one in back that I lost a few years ago. A quick look at his website this afternoon confirmed my impression that the repairs will probably cost a little less than the amount of the deductible on my homeowner's insurance, so I'm not inclined to file a claim.

I wish the damage weren't visible to anyone coming down the driveway. I'm not inclined to try removing it myself or even to have Mr. Gutter remove it until there's something less than a foot of snow and ice on the ground underneath. Leaving it hanging there does not appear to put the garage itself at any further risk; the shabby appearance is just an embarrassment. It's affront to my sense of pride, which tends to be distinctly shaky on the home upkeep and improvement front as it is.

The day wasn't all bad, far from it.

One of the stops on my errands run was at Turley Publications to proof Sybils & Spaceships, the chapbook of Jo Walton's poetry that I edited for NESFA Press in time for her GoH appearance at Boskone 46 next week. The proof looked good; the finished chapbook should look even better. I'll post a link to ordering information as soon as the chapbook is available. Folks coming to Boskone will be able to pick it up it in person. $12 (and discounted at the convention, IIUC). 44 pages plus cover. Tasty, tasty. It's an honor to work with such good material, and a delight thanks to its creator, who is an utter pleasure to work with. Thanks, papersky! I look forward to handing you your author's copies next week!

Onward, with something of a limp.

Very afraid.

I found a recipe for breakfast cookies. Made with Grape Nuts, raisins, orange juice, and...bacon.

Really.

Yes, this is another All Peeps, All The Time post.

I ended up with more Peep solvents than jars to dissolve them in. The obvious solution was not just more jars, but a smaller set of different jars. With those, we'll have two "guess the solvent" contests -- the full 36-jar version that's been going for the last 4 weeks, and an 8-jar short attention span version with Peeps that have only been floating for a couple of days.

I picked up the jars during yesterday's final Death to Peeps shopping run. A few minutes I pulled them out to letter the tops (the full version is numbered, so this helps differentiate the two contests). The first pack of jars was rather predictably A, B, C, and D. The few moments between lettering those and pulling the next four jars from their pack was time enough for "ooh, shiny" to strike. The last 4 jars are lettered Q, X, Y, and Z.

The Peeps will be submerged just before I head to Boston tomorrow. Except for the one that's going outdoors just as soon as I finish this post. One of the jars is getting the sleet/freezing rain/snow crap that's falling from the sky as I type. I shoveled 3.5 inches of lovely powder an hour ago, which may have been a strategic error. The sleet started while I was shoveling. Ice is easier to remove if there's a layer of snow underneath. Oops. Here's hoping that tomorrow's downpour starts around 9 am like it's supposed to.

The Peeps Solubility Research continues...and it's getting interesting. I'm keeping a close watch on the cloud forming in the jar with the Bossin's Home Remedy for Nuclear War. If it coalesces into a mushroom shape, I'm outta here.

Here's a look at the current stack of jars. And there, in the background, is a Jon Singer tea cup and Don Fitch will likely recognize the orange creamer!

Peeps Solubility Research

(The link at the top will take you to all of the photos in the Peeps Research gallery. Or you can click on the photo, then go up a level to see the others.)

I'm pleased to announce that Somebody Else's Microwave will be joined by Somebody Else's Blender for the Death to Peeps Fun Fest on Friday night of Boskone 45. Now all I need to do is lay my hands on the secret ingredient Dave Langford suggested to ensure that the Peeps have a truly gruesome time of it.

There's the 4-part harmony over on the Boskone community, if you're interested in the details.

Just Born now makes Sugar-Free Peeps. That's just wrong. And I need to lay my hands on some for the Peeps Solubility Experiment.

Hmmm...now where will I find sugar-free hearts?

There are also cocoa bunnies. If I can find those before Boskone, we'll have Cocoa Cthulhu Peeps as well as the traditional Cthulhu Peeps.

And so it begins... Solubility experimentation for Death to Peeps Fun Fest at Boskone 45.

I'm having fun experimenting with Peeps for Boskone. And it occurs to me that this experiment calls out for a much better photographer than I'll ever be. And it's an opportunity that's not likely to come around very often. Well, yes, any photographer could stage as many as 36 mason jars, each with a single marshmallow Peep inside, floating on or submerged in some substance. But not many would.

The first set of ghost and heart Peeps are in their jars, and they're really rather pretty. Next Friday, I'll start the next set, and the Friday after that I'll start another. Next weekend, I'll be at Vericon, but I expect to be hanging around Toad Woods for the rest of the run-up to Boskone. If batwrangler, benveniste, kip_w, lesliet_ma, or any other photographers are interested in coming over for a photo shoot sometime between February 1st and 12th, I can gladly offer the bizarre subject material. So far, it's kind of sparkly and colorful. Who knows what the first set of jars will look like by then, but there will be an ongoing supply of freshly-immersed Peeps to work with.

We can probably work out something involving lunch or dinner, too. And one or both guest bedrooms if needed.