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Right. Maddy has a whole new hairdo consisting of a fringe (which Americans inexplicably call bangs), or bangs (which the English mysteriously call a fringe), and she looks oddly like the Coraline puppet from the Henry Selick film, while I have, er, not quite as much hair in my eyes as I did this morning. Stopped off at DreamHaven (http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com/) after the haircut and signed a pile of stuff for them (it'll be up on www.Neilgaiman.net soon enough).

Also bought a few books, which considering how much time I've had recently to read, and how much I have sitting in piles waiting to be read (I seem to be reading everything I can find about Bert Williams right now) is madness. Still, I picked up, with joyful expectation, Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory, Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg, and Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club. It's nice to have books on the To Be Read Pile you know will be good. A Charles Vess cover drew my eye, and I found myself getting the paperback of Herminie Kavanagh's Darby O'Gill, and I wrapped up the shopping expedition with a copy of M. John Harrison's Viriconium (not to read, just so I had a copy with my introduction in).

And I just got to see some site statistics (courtesy of Dan Guy who has made the Webelf her Clouds -- the first is up at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/ and is really rather fun. Hurrah for you helpful people out there reading this) and I learned that as of the last post, I'd written One Million and Fourteen Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty One words on this blog.

I wish I'd known that 14,261 words ago. We would have had a party. With balloons.

Prepare for a jumble of blog entries.

Here's what's going to happen. Over the next two months, Damon and I will go through the pictures we took over our 85-day South America adventure.

The final stats are not in, in terms of how many pictures I took, but we filled up 75 GBs of our portable hard drive (which holds 93 GBs total). That doesn't count the pictures we deleted along the way.

As we weed through pictures and post them, I'll have stories to tell.

But.

I actually wrote a lot of entries during the trip, too, which I never posted. Whenever we got to an internet cafe, I only had a few minutes to blog; so I always had to choose: finish an older post, or start a new one? I always opted to start new ones, so I wouldn't forget what I wanted to say.

So, those entries will be "backdated" (i.e. appear farther down this page), but they're coming, too. At this point, I'll wait until I have pictures ready before making those posts viewable. (Don't worry. I'll tell you when there's something to scroll down for.)

Of course, now we're back, there's always new things to say, too. With all the forward-looking and trip re-living, right now I feel like I'm spinning 'round in little aircurrents of time. Wooo!

2007 is here. Let this life continue.

Love,
Rita

Hi!

New entries are going to appear all around this page very soon, not necessarily at the top.

Some entries stay hidden until I upload pictures. And, lately, I've also been blogging by hand, on paper! (Do you guys do this?) This is new to me—this instinct to blog when no computer is near. I was particularly itchy when serving some grueling days of jury duty last week. (Julie says moblogging is the answer!)

In spite of all this, I like to keep entries dated to when I first wrote them.

I know this is highly irregular, but that's just how this blog rolls.

love,
r