mariness

Another one of those "various things" bullet posts as I try to regain the desire to blog:

1. Skipping publication order once again, I chat about Danny the Champion of the World over at Tor.com. Meanwhile, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator has arrived, along with a number of other books that I completely forgot I also requested over the holidays, so, reading ahead!

2. While we're chatting about Tor.com, my post about An Infamous Army went up on Tuesday. (I also took the moment to briefly discuss a few other books that she wrote after that.)

3. A number of science fiction writers have banded together to help pay for Jay Lake's whole genome sequencing to fight his cancer. A few things on this:

a) the situation totally sucks; I've met him only a couple of times, but Jay is a pretty awesome guy whose major bad habit is to make other writers (me) feel guilty about just sitting around and sipping tropical drinks by the pool while he continued to write away. (Although he did come out and join us by the pool from time to time.) BUT

b) the chance to do genome sequencing on a science fiction writer just seems too science fictiony not to do. Also, his fellow writers have donated some pretty whimsical things.

4) And among other things this week, I finally a) got to the Morse Museum after four years of wanting and trying to go (and I hope it won't be my last trip) and b) picked up and finished A Memory of Light, the final book of the Wheel of Time series, decades after starting the series. I am going to be honest, everyone: one of those two things was more worth the wait than the other. However, I do have quite a lot to say about both, so, we'll see if after I get a few other things done (like, rest), one or the other inspires me to blogging.

1. When the cars are piled up on the way into a parking garage, the event will either be overcrowded, disorganized, or both.

2. It helps, when organizing an event of this nature, to ensure that your parking garage people are fully aware of all of the policies concerning museum membership policies, in particular, all of the absolutely free parking that comes along with a museum membership, even if this is a special event that your parking garage people have been advised to absolutely but absolutely collect absolutely five dollars, cash, from every car, no matter what cards they may have, thus preventing a long and growing line of ever more steadily irritated people waiting to get into the parking garage unable to because your parking garage people are arguing with museum members. See, also, point one above.

3. The Orlando Museum of Science is perhaps not the best venue for this sort of event.

4. People can still be talking about the parking issues, and getting charged for parking when they shouldn't have been charged for parking, hours afterwards.

5. The reason the Orlando Museum of Science is perhaps not the best venue for this sort of event is twofold: 1) much of the museum centers around one of those large circular atriums ringed with narrow balconies that go round and round, that when filled with little tables of chocolate things and people trying to reach the little chocolate things become deeply overcrowded sending acrophobes, enchlophobes, claustrophobes, and people who love big words alike into a panic, 2) the museum has two – count them, two – small and rather slow elevators, one of which is partially accessible only by stairs (I swear I am not making this up) which, when you are hosting an event attended by many, many people using wheelchairs, scooters and very large and heavy strollers that already exhausted and cranky parents do not want to drag up and down the stairs, lead to long, long lines of people waiting hopefully for an elevator, thus blocking access to said narrow balconies and more critically, the bathroom, leading to Sad Accidents with said small children.

(I am frankly baffled as to why a museum specifically designed to appeal to families with small children, which in my experience are always accompanied by strollers, would not have added more elevators to accommodate them, although perhaps they hoped that using stairs would either help tire out small children or encourage said small children to demand candy from the museum store. Whichever.)

6. To counter this, nothing beats the awesome sight of a Tyrannosaurus Rex looming hungrily over mounds of chocolate cupcakes.

7. Apparently, Microsoft Word recognizes Tyrannosaurus as a Real Word and will even capitalize it for you. Who knew?

8. Meandering through tables of chocolate and dinosaurs can have a distressing effect on your critical faculties.

9. Chocolate covered gummy bears are actually more disgusting than they sound.

10. White chocolate raspberry gelato is actually even more delightful than it sounds.

11. A reasonable looking person can, indeed, try to persuade you that her particular form of ultra healthy chocolate will cure your fibromyalgia.

12. When you explain that, delightful as this sounds, you do not, as it happens, actually have fibromyalgia, she can, indeed, immediately switch to suggesting that her particular form of ultra healthy chocolate can prevent the development of fibromyalgia and so it's great to try anyway.

13. You will, it must be confessed, end up preferring the completely unhealthy chocolate.

14. The surprisingly hands down best selection at a chocolate festival featuring gourmet chocolatiers and the finest in chocolate stores from everyone in the greater Orlando area (except Godiva which for whatever reason was absent) will be the Key Lime cookie without any chocolate at all. (It was, I must ay, one extraordinary cookie. I appear not to be alone in this thought; the website, Brecks Cookies is dead from the number of people who, like me, were rather hoping to find out what drug was in that cookie.)

15. You can, in fact, spend a significant amount of time at a chocolate festival spinning wooden tops around and around, gleefully high on some of the Peterbrooke selections

16. An event calling itself a festival of chocolate, can, shockingly, have table after table after table and not one offering of hot chocolate. Not one. The closest was a café mocha offered by an apologetic coffee vendor. This will cause you to question your entire relationship with chocolate, the meaning of chocolate, its place in your life and the universe, and also cause you to realize that this problem can only be dealt with by tasting a few more samples of chocolate.

17. A festival of chocolate is an excellent place to explore the very evil places not all that well hidden in your soul.

18. Baby alligators are kinda cute, even when not consuming chocolate.

19. Even museums of science, apparently, cannot resist broad and false statements like "Women were forbidden to have chocolate..." No. No. And No. Even in the context of European history, no, no and no. Chocolate was absolutely an upper class luxury item until the 19th century in Europe, not because of gender issues, but the cost. Statements like this can be avoided with specifics: "The convent of St. Why Have Fun banished chocolate from its premises for fear of its effects..."

20. When Dove Chocolate announces, in some alarm, that they may be running out of supplies for chocolate mousse, it is a signal that you will be leaving the festival rather sooner than you anticipated.