Well, I went to ChattaCon. I bought 2 t-shirts and a tumbled selenite egg (I've been getting into selenite a lot lately, this last month or so I've bought a 2 inch sphere, a handful of small pebbles and now this new egg). I hung out with Charlene a lot. I saw a lot of people that I know, bad and good, as I do at every ChattaCon. On Saturday I took my friend from work and her daughter around as it was their first convention, so that was nice. We cased the whole place. I talked to one of the DragonCon people about signing up as a guest for DragonCon, as in going as the Great and Wonderful Science-Fiction Writer Carol E. Meacham, not as just plain old geekgirl Tilt who's been lurking about like a stalker from day one. I talked to several people who I didn't know, so that's a plus in the socialization column.

So. It was ChattaCon. It was ChattaCon 31. It has now been 20 years since my first convention. And now I've been 9 years alone.


Well. Let's see what's happening in the Great Wide Open, shall we?

It's been a little over 1 year since Huygens landed on Titan and sent back that single stunning vision of a new alien world. Haze, ice rocks and not much else to an indistinct horizon. It might have been a really bad Los Angeles morning. Instead, it's an alien world seven years away by rocket and gravity assist. Those aren't white rocks. They're ice that's harder than steel.

Cassini is toodling along, taking pictures, doing loops around moons, and generally making itself an attractive nuisance.

A little over 25 years ago Voyager 1 swung past Saturn and discovered three moons, one of which was Mimas, the Death Star. George must have gotten some funny looks when those pictures came in. Episode 4 had come out only 3 years before.

The Mars Global Surveyor has found Spirit on the surface of Mars. It's a slightly darker dot. How they can tell that one dot is Spirit is beyond me. It's now spent a very respectable 3056 days in Martian orbit. Meanwhile, Mars Odyssey has spent 1552 days in orbit at Mars.

Voyager 1 is 13.66 lighthours away, heading for Ophiucus.

Voyager 2 is 11.01 lighthours away, heading for Telescopium.

Pioneer 10 is 12.36 lighthours away, heading for Taurus.

Pioneer 11 is 9.91 lighthours away, heading for Scutum.

We have 3 shuttles on indefinite hiatus.

One space station in low orbit.

Several space telescopes.

And a probe outbound for Pluto that screamed past the orbit of the Moon at a blistering 36,000 miles per hour, going in 9 hours what took Apollos 11 through 17 4 days to traverse.


ISBNs should be in sometime this week.