New word of the week: Nerdgassing

"Nerdgassing: I Coin This Word In the Name of Humanity". http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=834 Definition: The venting nerds emit when some (often minor) detail of a book/movie/TV show/comic book/etc either conflicts with canon and/or handwaves through some some suspect science. I enjoyed the comments, and the masthead photo on the blog, too. And the whole topic reminded me of the reactions of some people, especially a subset of professional editors, when faced with incorrect punctuation or usage (or what they see as incorrect punctuation or usage, which in many cases includes the way the Brits and Aussies do it).

Reno in 2011 Worldcon bid

I'm now the Australian agent for the "Reno in 2011" WorldCon bid. A large group of my friends (scattered all over the US) are running this bid, in opposition to a bid from Seattle that is run by people I don't know. The Reno bid's website is http://www.rcfi.org/ I probably wouldn't attend (I don't do WorldCons unless they are in Australia), but I like their attitude... and I know that among the group is plenty of conrunning experience so they should do a good job of it.

Leg improvement

On Saturday evening I stood up from sitting in Eric's recliner chair and something in my left leg went click and it HURT LIKE HELL when I put any weight on it. He helped me into the bedroom to lie down, and we both freaked. Saturday of a 3-day weekend—what a time for something to happen! Fortunately it didn't hurt when I was lying down, so I stayed in bed. Now the weird part—when I got up on Sunday morning, my leg felt—and functioned—better than it had for months. I was walking without lurching! We assume something snapped back into place (instead of out of place, as we'd first thought). It's still doing fine, and I’m finally improving my walking distance and speed. Oh, and as an extra bonus—my bad left knee has been hurting a lot less than before.

New cupboards

For years I've been making do with two open-fronted sets of shelves as my "pantry" in the hall, but a few months ago I decided it was time to seriously attempt to replace them with something a bit tidier, that is with doors to hide the jumble of contents. After looking at lots of unsuitable (and often overpriced) cupboards in several stores, I finally located ones I liked and ordered from one of the local hardware stores three single-door flat-pack pantry cupboards. To the surprise of both me and Eric, the cupboards turned out to be really easy to put together. The instructions were good (good English, readily under­standable, with good clear diagrams), and the quality control of the cutting of the pieces and the hole spacing for screws was excellent. The quality is conspicuously better than most of the cheap flat-pack stuff we've bought in the past 10+ years, and not much more expensive. They are from a company in Western Australia. I did most of the assembly myself, enlisting Eric only for the heavy lifting.

Kookaburras visit

Two kookaburras visited us this evening. We fed one some strips of chicken. It was interesting to watch the bird whack the chicken against the railing before eating it, as if it were a lizard or something that needed to be stunned or killed. One of those "wish I had the video camera out" moments!