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.

It always happens, but the trip schedule is starting to fill up, and fill up fast. I have a few emails from lovely people to reply to, and I need to actually sit down and write it all down so I don’t forget anything. I think dinner at Saratoga is now completely spoken for (nice), I’m making a few plans in Manhattan, and I am going to see Bruce Springsteen!!! Did I mention that? Springsteen. Me. I’ve been waiting for this since the first time I heard “Jungleland” played over headphones on a small stereo in a city record shop in the summer of 1979. They had a huge poster at the front of the shop for a new ELO record, but the guy in the shop insisted I listen to this track. It knocked me out. Twenty eight years ago. A lifetime. I honestly never thought it would happen. The Boss and the Big Man and the band. Here we go!

It would appear that I’m busy next Thursday night. Got plans. Somewhere to be. Here precisely. Magic. Many thanks to Cheryl and Kevin for organising the night out. It should be very special.