BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I can’t even mimic Brando at this point…

Not my night? Hell, it ain’t been my week apparently.

If you read my previous blog you know that Momma Nature in all her bitchy glory, sent freezing rain and sleet down upon our heads today. And, as a result, my flight to Detroit was canceled, effectively keeping me from arriving at ConVocation, where I was to sign books, present workshops, and hang out with tons of really cool people.

Well, okay… bad enough… The airline managed to re-book me for a flight early tomorrow morning. All good. Not exactly the most convenient time as far as getting to the airport, etc, but I made the arrangements, left my bags packed and by the door… I was ready.

Well, Mistress Nature is gearing up to give us another ice lashing. She should start in on us again around midnight and continue on through tomorrow evening. Soooooo, in what must have been a preemptive move on the part of the airline, my flight was canceled, yet again…

I just can’t catch a break…

I suppose it was probably a combination of the weather, and accommodating passengers from other flights as well as those already booked prior to all this. Not to mention that for all I know the new flight might have been coming from one of the points East that is now getting beaten by waves 1 and 2 of this storm system.

At any rate, the best they could do is get me to Detroit sometime Saturday. Maybe. If I was lucky, the weather dominatrix sleeps tonight, and if I held my tongue just right while clicking my heels together and saying “There’s no place like Detroit, there’s no place like Detroit…”

I was willing to give that a go, but the problem is this – I would get in sometime Saturday… Maybe morning, maybe afternoon… Maybe even evening… Not really sure. They were shooting for morning, but hey, they were also shooting for today as I recall, and we saw how that turned out… Either way, the event ends by noon on Sunday. So, in essence I would have arrived (maybe) and someone would have had to come pick me up, then get me back to the hotel, check me in, etc, etc… By that time I might be able to mingle for a bit then go to bed, get up, pack, and go to the airport to come home.

The long and short of it… I’m not going to be at ConVocation this year. I’m not happy about it and neither are they. But, we all realize there isn’t much we can do.

So, save your programs. If you see me in the future, I’ll be glad to sign them… Hey, it will be a collectors item. The event I was supposed to be at but never made it to… If you are after one of my books while at the con, they have those there too. Tell Dorothy Morrison I said she could sign them for me.

My next tour date? The Ostara Festival in Harker Heights, Texas… That’s a couple of weeks away yet… Let’s hope the weather bitch is in a better mood by then…

More to come…

Murv

Relax. It’s all good.

Having been in other parts of the country while on tour, settling in to my hotel room and grabbing a quick look at the news before crashing, I know that things can get blown out of proportion by the national news. Like, the time they were reporting killer storms all but leveling Saint Louis when I was on the east coast. When I called my wife to check on her and the munchkin’s safety, I was met with, “What? It sprinkled here for a bit. Minor shower, but that’s about it.” (This is not to say we’ve never had killer storms, as we certainly have…remember that power outage a couple of years back? And the flood of ’93? Well those were certainly real…)

My point is, you can’t always believe what you hear on the news, so if you are in some part of the country, looking at some talking head on the tube who is telling you that Saint Louis has come to a standstill because of a massive blizzard burying the city…Well, change the channels.

Yes, we did get a healthy snowstorm here. It started yesterday afternoon and ended around 4:30 – 5:00 AM today…At times it was heavy… Up to 1.5 inches per hour… But, when all was said and done we only got hit with a little over 8 inches of the white stuff. Minor inconvenience. Not a citywide emergency by any stretch of the imagination.

Anywho, here are some pictures to prove that everything is okay here and that we aren’t really buried forever, never to thaw…

There…Now EK can go to work and make money to support me in the style to which I am accustomed… (Grin)

I started shoveling around 5:45AM…Only took about a half hour. The worst part was the end of the driveway where the street department had plowed and deposited a substantial snowbank…

From the front porch…

Gotta get the hedge trimmers hold of those shrubs this spring. They never got their final 2007 “haircut” last fall and they grow like nobody’s business.

Do, Do, Do, Lookin’ Out My Back Door…

Yeah…The neighbors are too damn close here in the burbs… But, EK doesn’t want to move to the country.