Dear blog, I made it. The flight was ok. Comfortable, with good movies. Chatted with Trevor for a good part of the flight. Way too jetlagged to think. More soon…

Yesterday was Sophie’s big sixth birthday party, which was a huge success thanks to all of Marianne’s hard work and planning, and the help of Nanny Wendy and Aunts Barbara and Bec. Now it’s all about the travelling. In less than 48 hours I’ll be enjoying the hospitality of Qantas Airways. Sydney first, where I hook up with Trevor, then on to San Francisco. It’s only a very short visit – two days – and I’ll be spending as much time as I can with my wonderful publisher Jason, before heading off to see Springsteen with Cheryl and Kevin. And on Friday I fly on to Manhattan for the beginning of the grand Aussie Processional. It really should be fun. I’m actually happy I’ve got time in Oakland on the way home. I can spend a lot of time with CHARLES, and hopefully also get to see Ellen, Karen & Bob, and the Night Shade gang.

The reason I’m mentioning this now, other than because I need to get everything planned and it’s on my mind, is that I am a lousy travel blogger. I mean to record what I do, who I see, and where I go, but I never do. I hereby do not promise to do it this time. I will try, though. I’d like to. I’m also not promising to blog about what will effectively be my holiday reading.  I’ve got eighteen days that I’m not including in my official ‘reading time’, so I’m going to read whatever suits. As soon as I get home, it’s on to 2008 stuff, so I’m looking forward to some self-indulgence.

This actually touches on something which I’m trying to puzzle out. I’d like to blog a lot more about what I read. I’d like to try to use blogging as a kind of tool to keep me self-disciplined and talking about what I read. The problem is it’s public and that causes problems. Without an audience, I won’t do it. With an audience, too much  can be read into a simple comment. Hmm. I have to think on it, because I want to blog the 2008 reading year, or find some way to keep a record of it that I’ll actually follow through on.

Today has been shopping and baking. I picked up a bunch of the bits and pieces I need for traveling, and baked a couple dozen muffins for Sophie’s birthday party tomorrow. I did the choc-chip ones, and will probably do one or two dozen blueberry ones tonight or tomorrow morning. Then we have twenty five six-year-olds showing up for a party a 2pm tomorrow, which should be fun. When that’s all done, I have sixty-six hours till I get on a plane for San Francisco. I have no idea if I’m remotely ready, but my schedule is filling up and, apart from buying a jacket in Manhattan, I can’t think of a lot of things I need to do. I’m sending the year’s best in on Tuesday, and the Vance book will follow very shortly behind. I need something to read, and to bring some paperwork along. Gack. Don’t know. And I need to work out a mobile phone. Not sure the one I have will do the job.  Arg.

My Locus colleague, and canny year’s best compiler, Rich Horton is doing his annual magazine summaries, which you can read on his Livejournal. Go do it. He’s suffering so you don’t have to.

So, for about a week now my left ear has been blocked. Not all head stuffed up blocked, so I can’t travel on planes. And not, I think, all stuffed up with wax blocked. Just some kind of stupid infection blocked. It’s driving me insane. I can’t hear as well as I normally do. I have a tinnitus thing going on. And when there’s more than one noise source going on, I just can’t make much out at all. I’m off to the doctor’s as soon as I can make an appt., and then we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll be cleared up by the weekend. In other news, I’m not reading. Not at all. Nothing. Nada. I feel, intellectually, that I should want to be reading, but with the year’s best pretty much put to bed I can’t seem to summon up much enthusiasm for reading anything. Maybe a Harry Dresden mystery, or something mindless.  Apart from that, it’s all six-year-old princess parties, and getting ready to travel.

Oh. A weird thing. Way back when in that mythical summer of ’79 I spent a couple weeks at a caravan park. My family would go down to Mandurah (then a WA holiday spot; now a suburb), rent a caravan for two weeks, hang out and go swimming and stuff. Nice. Anyhow, that summer the caravan park we stayed at had an entertainment area with trampolines and such. There was a jukebox near the trampolines, and I would spend a chunk of my days exploring the jukebox and jump, jump, jumping for hours and hours. The record that played more than any other – possibly to the point where it threatened the mental stability of others – was a Status Quo cover of an old John Fogerty song, ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. Yesterday I found out that my six-year-old daughter is learning to sing the song in her pre-school music class. That bends my mind around unexpected corners, just a little.