Giant mutant evil squirrels

I was coming back from my daily power walk late yesterday afternoon when I saw something moving in front of the house. At first I thought it was a giant mutant squirrel but then I realized it was the groundhog our neighbours have been talking about.

It looked pretty healthy, with sleek shiny fur and lots of padding. Padding largely gleaned from eating my plants, I'm sure. Little bugger. When we came home from the cottage, one of our potted plants had nearly all the leaves and flowers chewed off, leaving only stems. Grr.



I chased the groundhog around the side of the house. Tried to get a photo of it with my iPhone, too, but the shutter was too slow and I only got a blurry shot of weeds instead.



Clearly, the neighbourhood squirrels have called in reinforcements. I couldn't help thinking of the Lord of the Rings movie when the goblins in the Mines of Moria call in the big Cave Troll to attack the good guys.

Well, I refuse to be intimidated. The groundhog has already made several attempts to infiltrate my basement office via tunnels beneath our house, razed my lettuce, attacked the mailman...but the war is not yet over. All right, I was kidding about the mailman, but it's only a matter of time, really.

Any tips on how to discourage groundhogs from vandalizing our garden would be much appreciated.



Speaking of Evil Creatures, I just received a package in the mail from my friend Seanan McGuire:



How can something so evil be so cute? Seanan's reply: "He brings evil under the guise of ADORABLE, that you might not suspect the depths to which he is capable of sinking!" :-)

Speaking of cute/evil packages in the mail, I'm excited to announce that I'm now the proud owner of a Nerd Ninja Doll! Photos/details in the next Blathering.

The squirrel in the photo is standing on a book I'm currently reading, The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison, which my niece was kind enough to lend me. It's SOOOOO GOOOOD! I'm about halfway through and am finding myself slowing down so it will last longer.




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My cards make it to the Henries finals!

Jeff has pointed out that the titles of my Blatherposts are sometimes misleading, so I've resolved to try being better about that. I'm sure I confuse search engines as well.

As promised in today's Blathertitle, therefore, I'm going to talk first about the Henries. I had never heard of them until the small letterpress company (Blush is run by a couple in North Wales) that publishes my cards let me know that my cards have made it to the finals.




Apparently the Henries are the equivalent of the Oscars of the UK greeting card business. Only five companies are in the finals, and Blush Publishing is pretty small compared to the others, who are large and well-known companies. Over 15,000 cards were entered this year.

The winners will be announced at a black tie event at The Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on October 9th. Fingers crossed!




I have the first four cards on sale in my Etsy store. I keep getting inquiries from retailers who want to buy my cards wholesale (so I direct them to Blush), which is encouraging. I'm hoping to get samples of the last eight designs soon, so I can post them as well.

The Blush people tell me that my cards are selling well in the UK, and that Australian and Japanese distributors recently put in a large order as soon as they saw my new designs. Very cool.






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I love my iPhone

Most of today's Blatherphotos were taken at the cottage. The chipmunk above was opening up pods on a nearby bush (not sure what type, sorry, but they look like this) and munching on the seeds beneath the bush. I took the photo with our Canon 70-300 telephoto lens.

High-speed access is back, yay! Jeff theorizes that the propane explosion was the culprit. We were still at the cottage during the explosion, but our neighbours said that the sound of the blast woke them up and that the sky was lit up red.

Kind of glad I wasn't around for that. I suspect I would have been pretty freaked out. (!)



Had a wonderful time at the cottage despite the rain; more details and photos in upcoming Blatherings.



A ton to catch up on, however. One of the iPhone apps I'm finding the most useful so far is Remember The Milk, which is a task organizer that syncs with the online/desktop app. I'm using status tags like "-next" and "-waiting" as well as context tags (e.g. "@work, @home, @online" etc.) and project tags to implement a version of Getting Things Done.

As someone who usually has multiple projects on the go at any one time, I'm finding this HUGELY helpful.



I love my iPhone. Instead of carrying around my usual load of books, magazines, Toronto map, notebook, pens and pencils, iPod, point-and-shoot camera, I carry all that functionality in my iPhone instead. I read two books at the cottage on my iPhone. In addition to about a dozen books, I have an English dictionary as well as a German-English dictionary/language guide and German-English vocabulary flash cards.



John Kalisz came over for dinner last night (photo above taken with my iPhone); we had arranged the visit when Jeff and I chatted with him at Rand's and Erin's wedding. Super-nice guy, and I'm excited that he may eventually be moving to Toronto. And this is a Genuine Fact, not just one of my hopeful Spontaneous Rumours!

John will be appearing at Fan Expo in a couple of weeks, so I'm probably going to attend; I figure it would be a good opportunity to research and maybe do some networking for the graphic novel project I'm doing with Beckett Gladney. Plus SEAN ASTIN (Sam from the Lord of the Rings movies) is going to be one of the guests!

As some of you already know, I have a soft spot for Sam.



I am horribly behind in e-mail right now, so please be patient as I catch up this week. For those who asked, I will eventually be restarting my Babylon Five Virgin blog but need to focus on work first, including an article for Writer's Digest magazine due within a week.



So much more I want to talk about, but my iPhone To Do list is glaring me in the face, forcing me to prioritize. :-) Happy Tuesday, everyone.



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I miss my high-speed connection

Just a brief note to say that Jeff and I just got home from our cottage visit, but it looks as if we're not going to have high-speed access for a little while. Hopefully Bell will be able to sort things out soon, but until then I'll be using dial-up.

This means minimal Web surfing and image uploading, and less time online. Please don't use Facebook mail to reach me; the Facebook interface is agonizing slow on dial-up. I can access my Gmail account on my iPhone, so that's the best way to reach me by e-mail right now.

Now to unpack and try to catch up on e-mail/snailmail...



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Chocolate, carrots and mother spiders

Will Write For Chocolate has been updated. Actually, it was updated last week but I forgot to post about it. It's been an unusually busy summer (hence the dearth of Blatherings).

Also forgot to post about my first vegetable harvest of the year! I've mentioned before that I planted some tomatoes and baby carrots in addition to herbs in my patio planters. The squirrels dug up most of my carrot seeds, but here's one that survived:



There was a big squirrel hole right beside it. Note the nibbled-off leaves on two of the stalks.

I ate it, of course. And it was the BEST CARROT I'VE EVER TASTED.



Above: spider with egg sac at the cottage. I felt sorry for the poor mother spider, lugging along this huge (in comparison to her own body) egg sac, trying to find a safe place to put it. Couldn't help but think of Charlotte's Web.

Am I correct in assuming this is a dock spider? Anyway, I ended up taking her to a hollowed-out log at the edge of the forest.



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