Items about my actual life have been piling up in my brain, so today I am going to share them with you.

Let’s see…. My earaches have lessened considerably, and I am getting better at heading them off when I feel one coming on. The sinus spray I have been using (Avamys) seems to be doing an excellent job of keeping everything dilated, and I am learning to help things along by immediately blowing my nose when I get even the tiniest of sniffles.

I have also stopped putting ice in my drinks. This is a sacrifice for me, as like everyone else I love a icy cold beverage, but my condition is very sensitive to cold and I figure I would rather have underwhelming drinks than brutal fucking agony.

The sensitivity to cold strongly suggests that I have dental issues. Maybe not serious ones, but I feel like I need some work done. So when I get around to going to the pharmacy to pick up needle tips (I am almost out), I will also stop in on the dentist’s office across the street from the pharmacy and make an appointment.

Doing so is always tense for a person on assistance. Dentists don’t like us because they know that the government will pay for only $1500 of work and of course, it would literally kill a dentist to give you one cent of free dental care, so they get very frustrated if you need more dental care than that.

And I have pretty messed up teeth.

What else…. oh, I am in the process of actually submitting something somewhere! The Canadian science fiction magazine On Spec announced that they are open for submissions, so I went through my stuff and found a story to submit for publication.

It is this one, if you’re curious.

And I am proud of myself for going through with it. It was not easy, I can assure you. When I first got the message I just kind of froze in place. Deer in the headlights time. And their website was open in a tab on my browser for around five days before I had thawed out enough to actually do something.

I had to overcome a lot of fear to be able to select a story and then send it to dear wonderful Felicity so she can make sure it conforms to all of their publication guidelines. Intellectually, I am capable of doing that myself, but psychologically it is an entirely different story. So I am incredibly grateful to Felicity for helping tow me along the road to success when blank blind fear makes it impossible for me to do myself.

Sometimes, what we really need in life is someone who can tug us over the speed bumps.

While looking through my existing stories, I realized that there was a whole whack of ones that I had written that I had published here on the website but had not added to my official archive.

Color of Night is one of those. It was surprising in a very happy way to realize how many stories I have written. It is easy for my to get discouraged by how rarely I write actual prose, but it still adds up over time.

Heck, I might slap them together into a PDF short story collection and try to hawk them online.

Oh, and I am increasingly stoked for Vcon. It begins 11 days from now, and I can hardly wait. I always have a great time there. It just makes me happy to be a part of a community of nerds, however temporary. I could just sit there and soak up the vibe and be happy.

Of course, I won’t actually do that. I will look for panels to go to because I love panels. They are like really good lectures at the grooviest university ever, where all they teach is awesome nerdy stuff and where the professors don’t have to cop some sort of authoritarian roll because it’s all just us nerds, you dig?

Every time I go to a convention, I find myself wondering if all of life could be like that. The answer from my highly analytical and pragmatic brain is invariably no, that would be like having Christmas Day be every day. It would stop being special and turn into routine, and the temporary suspension of negative human emotions would break down, and people would go right back to being petty, selfish, and mean.

But still, it is wonderful to be a society of nerds for a weekend. We are a tribe, albeit a fairly diffuse and fractious one. When I’m at a convention, I really feel like these people are more like me than the entire remainder of humanity combined.

Nerds are my kind of people.

Last thing…. speaking of all things nerdy, I will be going to the BCSFA meeting tonight. Technically, it is the meeting of an organization, but it is a very loosely organized organization and the meetings are mostly just a monthly party where us local nerds can get together and enjoy one another’s company.

Before the meeting, my friends and I get together for supper. True, we could just go there directly and fill up on the amazing amount of food provided, but I have found that if I arrive full, I am less tempted by the stuff I should not have.

You know, the sweet stuff.

I find that, as part of my rising energy levels lately, I am increasingly uninterested in carbs, and more interested in things like protein. I have started viewing carbs, especially cheap carbs, as a waste of nutritional potential. Why eat empty carbs when you could eat something exciting like meat or cheese or whatever.

I am not out of the woods yet, of course. Carb addiction does not simply die overnight. But I am happy to feel it going. I can still feel it screaming at me to add the carbs back into my meals that I have been cutting out.

I am just not listening any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.