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Please help! Thank you in advance! Ninja clicking yours!

As we were eating fruit snacks and I was thinking about the thing I was going to post about today, we got a phone call from Dad, asking if we'd gotten the Christmas presents he and his wife sent out (he had meant to ask when we talked on Christmas but forgot). It was very important that we get that package, because it also had the Christmas presents to Celeste and her husband and Sarah and her husband. In fact, Mom was even strangely persistent in asking us if we'd gotten Sarah's, since Aurora and her husband had already gotten theirs and why hadn't Sarah gotten hers? Well, we still don't know why, because Dad says the package got sent out like on the fifteenth.

Anyway, since we hadn't gotten the package yet, Dad wanted us to go find out if maybe they'd delivered it to the apartment office without telling us, as has happened way too many times. Sheesh. It was very important, so we got all bundled up and prepared to face the freezing (not really freezing) temperatures outside. And as I put my hand on the door to go out, there was a knock. It was the mail delivery woman, with the very package in question! What timing!

We figured we might as well open our present so we could be sufficiently grateful when I called to let Dad know we got it. We knew it was something photo-y, since we had been charged with obtaining the appropriate photos to be used. And since we have sentimentality deficiency issues when it comes to family (sad but true), we weren't really looking forward to whatever was inside. We tore the wrapping off of a very nice picture frame, then removed the protective cardboard, expecting to see one of the photos of us we had sent to Dad, and in fact we did--specifically the one of us kissing Mickey Mouse. But it wasn't in the center of the frame, it was on the mat. And in the center of the frame was oh my goodness an autographed photograph of Walt Disney! What!? (I don't think it's possible to type that in the right intonation, so I'll just have to hope you guys can figure it out.) Wow!! Thanks Dad and Debbie!!

I still have to wonder where she got an autographed photo of Walt Disney. That's like, whoa.

So anyway, on to the other thing I was going to talk about. Some of you may remember a couple of months back when we were talking about entering the Kuroda Han Press Translation Prize contest thingie. On Christmas Eve--yup, Christmas Eve--we got our results back. We scored 108 points out of 150, ranking us sixth place out of twenty-nine contestants. Not too shabby, I think.

Our intent in entering the contest was to find out just how much our prose translations suck. Since we had problems with Kieli, we knew they weren't great, and we wanted to know exactly where we stood. We expected to be somewhere in the middle, and we actually did rank higher than we originally thought. On the other hand, though, after we got fired off of Kieli, and especially after a certain jerky blogger singled us out as terrible translators, we were kind of hoping to get a high enough score to say, "In your face!"

108/150 is 72%, so we got about a low C. That's not too far from a D. But then again, if the average score was less than 108, we definitely got above average (we don't know what the average score was). So I guess it just reaffirms what we already know--we're not the best at translating prose. But man, it would have been a nice confidence boost to score higher. Oh well, we'll just have to work harder at it. Or stick to manga. Y'know, assuming they don't replace us with free fan drones (<--pessimism).

Today I'm thankful for seriously? an autographed picture of Walt Disney?, funly timed package deliveries, getting the results for that contest, not scoring last, and having some places we could hang that photo (first we want to see if they're in danger of UV damage from the sun, but it's overcast today).

I got a new Mac! It's a MacBook Pro 17", and it is AMAZING! So much screen real estate! So much SPEED! It's BLAZING compared to the three and a half year old 15" MacBook Pro it replaces.

Transferring the files over proved to be a problem, due to a combined fail of Apple providing poor instruction (I know! I'm writing them a letter next!) and the old Mac having some kind of serious hardware fail. I knew about the hardware fail (spontaneous shutdown under heavy load) and it's going in to be repaired now that I have this one working. But anyway with the help of my friend Robert, I have it all up and running, and it is SO AWESOME.

Going from a maxed out 80 GB drive to the wide open spaces of a 500 GB drive is like... Like moving from Manhattan to Montana! And I can watch videos again (the sick Mac was choking on them) which is awesome. And run Photoshop and Illustrator. In fact I ran Illustrator for the first time in a couple years today, in order to create a poster/program art for my play. I feel like a real designer again!

Anyway, yay! This is my glee! I have a new Mac. Now to fix up the old one for Mom...

Thanks to friends who hunt, we have some pounds of ground venison.   The thought of venison leads to the thought of venison chili.    I used to make venison chili with venison sausage (a combination of venison and pork sausage ground together)  so, looking at this ground venison (lean is an understatement) I took about a third of a pound of pork sausage, cut it up into bits, and mixed it with the venison while starting the venison.  Then a big fat yellow onion, chopped, and six cloves of garlic, chopped, went into a Dutch oven to saute while the meat partly cooked in the iron skillet.  Then combined the two in the Dutch oven, with the packet of chili spices I like, a can of Ro-tel original and a can of plain diced tomatoes, and set it bubbling away on the back of the stove.  A couple of hours ago I ate a few spoonfuls  (good, but not quite there yet.)   I think it could've done with a bit more pork sausage--it's been several drought years and none of the deer are carrying much fat.  Still...good stuff for a cold night and predictions of more cold tomorrow.

First off, a note about the David Gemmell Legend Award. Named after the late, great UK writer of heroic fantasy, the award is in its second year and seeks to showcase novels "in the spirit or tradition of David Gemmell's own work" (for what that means, see here). Titles are nominated by publishers and then whittled down by online voting from fans. This year Tor has nominated both WARBREAKER and THE GATHERING STORM along with 11 other deserving books, making for a long list of 60 titles from all nominating publishers. Online voting on the long list of nominees has just begun and will continue through the end of March. At that point they'll tally up the top five vote-getters and start a new vote (vote totals don't carry over from the first round). I made the short list last year with HERO OF AGES (which wasn't even out in the UK at the time) and expected to get soundly beaten by Joe Abercrombie's LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS, but instead the final nod went to BLOOD OF ELVES by Andrzej Sapkowski. Anyway, if you'd like to vote on the 2009 book you feel best fits the criteria, you can do that here. The committee has also started two new awards this year, the Morningstar for best newcomer and the Ravenheart for best cover art.

In the most recent MISTBORN 3 annotations I discuss the Lord Ruler's final message as well as Sazed's memorization skills and Breeze's nobleman status. New annotations go up every Tuesday and Thursday. If you haven't checked out the annotations before, they're like the director's commentary on a DVD—I discuss my books chapter by chapter, and so far I've talked about ELANTRIS, MISTBORN: THE FINAL EMPIRE, and MISTBORN 2: THE WELL OF ASCENSION. I'll also start posting WARBREAKER annotations sometime in the next few months, possibly before I'm done posting the MISTBORN 3: THE HERO OF AGES annotations. I figure that the dedicated fans who come to my website deserve some good bonus content, so here you go!

In this week's Writing Excuses episode I discuss tragedy with Dan Wells and Howard Tayler. Why write tragedy, and how to do it well? Give the podcast a listen.

By the way, my agent, Joshua Bilmes, also represents the talented Elizabeth Moon, and he wants help tracking down a mystery. Elizabeth's book THE SPEED OF DARK sells far more copies in trade paperback in the Salt Lake City area than anywhere else in North America. Why is that? What Salt Lake-area fans/booksellers have been recommending the book to all their friends and customers? Joshua is dying to know.

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2 hatchlings with 2 1/2 days- gendered and frozen thanx!

<--2 days! Thanks!

This littlle egg has only SIX HOURS LEFT!!!!


Please help it! D:

angel, castle, doctor who, the mentalist, ncis

 

your gentle eyes like a razor blade

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, cole_chan! I love you, and I hope the kids are good to you and you also get to do many fun things. Have a great day ♥!

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This little one has 12 hours to hatch or Die!

All hatched!

Thanks all.