Kestrell

Why is it that, no matter how much I prepare ahead of time and how careful I try to be, whenever I do tie-dying I end up looking as if I have eviscerated a Smurf with my bare hands? And yes, I often use gloves and still end up with trickles getting inside the gloves.

I'm trying to find a brand of white 100 percent cotton t-shirts suitable for dying. My default is some variety of Hanes heavyweight or "beefy" t-shirt. What I don't like is the t-shirt material that feels stretchy and thin. I'm also confused as to what terms like ring-spun mean, along with the 5 or 6 number which seems to refer to weight.

Any recommendations/explanations would be welcome, thanks!

My antibiotics-and-Vicodin phase is over, for now at least, and I felt better just in time for ReaderCon, which was wonderful. I need to emphasize how wonderful the staff of the Burlington Marriot was in making sure I had an easily accessible room--it turned out that they have handicapped accessible rooms on the same floor as the convention space for ReaderCon--which made my convention just a completely different experience than, say, Arisia, where trying to get to convention space is always such a hurdle. For ReaderCon I felt pretty comfortable wandering around by myself a lot of the time, and thanks to everyone who helped point me in the right direction. A really big thank you to Steve/LJ user MrOctober, with whom I got to hang out on Saturday morning. Most of the larger Salon rooms were too cold for me to spend much time in, even with my denim jacket (it's an arthritis thing), so I spent a lot of time just socializing and listening to authors like Peter Straub and Liz Hand read from upcoming works. I got to talk to Peter Straub for a while and confess my feeling that the blind woman in his latest (still unreleased) novel _The Skylark_ was a bit of cliche. He was very gracious about my critique, for which I respect his work even more. You can read
my review of _The Skylark_ here
http://greenmanreview.com/book/book_straub_skylark.html
and also my review of _Apocalyptic Shakespeare_
http://greenmanreview.com/book/book_ve_apocalypticshakespeare.html

The big book find of my ReaderCon came through my Favorite Fanboy, who really does know me well, and tugged me along to the table where there were a bunch of out-of-print Walter de la Mare short story collections. Walter de la Mare is probably my favorite author ever, and the vendor--Bill Keaveny, of VanishingBooks.com , and I had a lot of fun talking about our favorite de la Mare stories and how fantastic his writing was and hey, wouldn't Walter de la Mare make a great ReaderCon dead guest of honor?Finally, I realized I should just take everything Bill had by de la Mare, thus earning myself a twenty percent discount. I am now applying myself to The Great Walter de la Mare Scanning Project, which I expect to keep me busy through the rest of July, if not the rest of the summer.

I only stayed at ReaderCon through dinnertime on Saturday, as I'm still getting tired kind of early, and I didn't feel I could realistically spring for another night at the hotel, no matter how wonderful. Also, the lack of healthy food choices--I've had a lot of cravings for salads and pasta lately--was a definite factor in that decision. I called the general manager of the Burlington Marriot mostly to give positive reinforcement about how wonderful the hotel staff was for helping with my access needs, but I also mentioned the lackof healthy food choices and the over-perfumed bath supplies as being in the negative category.

Sunday I went off to a tie-dye party where it turns out my intended projects of a bedspread and a denim jacket exceeded the space restrictions of the available buckets, so I am thinking of having my own tie-dye party in the back yard sometime in September. Does anyone else have an interest in tie-dying?

I was not present for the Shirley Jackson Awards, but here is the list of winners, via Locus Online http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/07/shirley-jackson-awards-winners.html

Shirley Jackson Awards Winners  - posted at
7/14/2009 11:11:00 PM

The 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced on Sunday, July 12, 2009, at Readercon 20, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington,
Massachusetts. Winners and finalist are:

NOVEL
The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
NOVELLA
Disquiet, Julia Leigh (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton)
NOVELETTE
"Pride and Prometheus", John Kessel (FSF)
SHORT STORY
"The Pile", Michael Bishop (Subterranean Online, Winter 2008)
COLLECTION
The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
ANTHOLOGY
The New Uncanny, Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, eds. (Comma)
which I have on my "to be scanned" pile, though my favorite is still
Bound for Evil, Tom English, ed. (Dead Letter Press)
because a book about evil books just, you know, speaks to me (especially once I scan it and run it through my text-to-speech program, though sadly, I don't really have a synthetic voice that really does justice to evil books)