From the department of small pleasures:

–The Lysol odor neutralizer wall plug actually works on catbox odors. Due to some peculiar convection of the house, the smell of the catbox would get sucked exactly to the front hall, which is probably the worst place to have it (except possibly the kitchen.) It would smell much stronger there than if you stood over the box itself. But this thing I picked up actually works–it genuinely does what it says it does, and de-odorizes, rather than having a nasty floral stink. It smells kind of vague cleanerish–sort of like somebody shampooed the carpets last week–which is a smell I can live with much more easily than cat.

–My jewelweed seems to have survived transplanting! All four plants seem happy with the world. I didn’t expect them all to make it, but there they are.

–Some of the daylilies I liberated from the doomed garden next door are–somehow–triples. Each bloom looks like three tightly nested tiger lilies. You have to stare at them. They look like a real-world monitor glitch.

Which leads us to…

From the department of rather large pleasures:

–I have a new monitor!

It’s…a lot brighter than the old one. Which is good, because my monitor was burning very dark, which meant that a lot of the art I was posting was much more washed out than the norm. (The Fisher, for example, was nearly black when I painted it, not meant to be such a vague grey.) I hate monitor calibration with a rare and brutal passion. I hate the notion of going through and color correcting the last three months of work even more, mind you!

It’s a 21 instead of 19 inch. It looks huuuuge.

–Well, Nurk met with my agent’s approval. (Ursula, who had been in the “This is the worst bit of tripe to ever spew forth from a keyboard!” stage of insecurity falls to her knees going “Oh god, oh god, oh thank god…”) Now we’ll see if it’ll meet with a publisher’s approval.

–My agent tells me that if, when I am at HeroesCon, somebody comes up to my table and launches into the plot idea for their six thousand page epic comic saga, I can cut them off and say “Oh, god, I’m sorry, but I can’t listen to this–my agent tells me for legal reasons that I can’t read or listen to unpublished stories like this.” Since there’s always somebody at every Con that insists on telling you their great unwritten webcomic in exhaustive detail, this makes me desperately happy. I haven’t even gotten money yet, and it’s already worth it to have an agent!

Which reminds me–if you want to come and chat (which I quite like, don’t let the six thousand page saga thing throw you!) I will be at HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina, this weekend. I’ll have a table in the small press room–Indie Island? something like that?–and I am always delighted to see people. Since I’ve never done this con, I will probably be even more delighted than usual to see someone who knows who I am, so come on by!