Wish I was at BCAUS

[We interrupt this broadcast (before I’ve even written more than the title) to say I just looked out the window, and it’s snowing! It’s been threatening rain all morning, and started to drizzle about 20 minutes ago, but it’s suddenly turned into snow – and quite heavy for Christchurch, too. I don’t know if it’ll settle, seeing as the ground is so wet already, but at least I can watch the pretty flakes fly past.

Ok, so you can’t actually see the snow falling in that picture, but you can see the flake that’s just splattered on the window.

We now return you to your irregularly scheduled programme.]

So it’s the Australian Bookcrossing Convention this weekend, and I’m not in Brisbane 🙁 Even with the added help of the airmiles I accumulated in April, it was just going to work out too expensive. Oh well, I suppose I can’t complain, seeing as I’m not long back from a world convention, but this’ll be the third year in a row I’ve missed BC-AUS, and there won’t be one next year (because they’re all coming to the world convention), so it’ll be 2010 before I get another chance.

I bet it’s nice and warm in Brisbane too…

Oh well, for all of you who are in Brisbane, hope you’re having a fantastic time, and I’ll see you all in April. Release a book for me!

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So, I’ve been typically slack in updating, and haven’t even written about my birthday last weekend. I decided to use up the couple of days leave I’d set aside in case I made it to Brisbane, so took last Friday and Monday off and had a long birthday weekend. I had loads of plans for how to use my weekend, but of course hardly got anything done, instead wasting most of it reading and playing The Sims 2 (something to do with H …um …”acquiring” (ARRR! ;-)) a copy of the Freetime expansion pack for me (I’m still boycotting the buying of any EA games until they stop the Securerom nonsense)). Not really a waste, I suppose, seeing as I probably needed some downtime.

The only day I spent really constructively, strangely enough, was my birthday itself. The day started with a breakfast meetup at Trattorie, which we’d given a cat theme too, so we all brought cat books along. Of course, because it was a miserably cold and wet day, “we all” ended up just being me, MrPloppy, rarsberry and lytteltonwitch, but we had a great time anyway, and a good pile of books on the table.

The themed books I’d brought were Cat Catcher by Caroline Shaw, Psycho Cat by Derek Hansen, Even the Cat Could Talk by Muriel Holland, and The Cat’s Elbow by Alvin Schwartz, plus a couple of birthday themed books: The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter and The Thirty-First of June by JB Priestly. I also brought along a few more general books just to share: Into the Wild by John Krakaver, A Year in Provence and Encore Provence by Peter Mayle, andThe Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.

After breakfast we collected up the unwanted books and used some to restock the OBCZ a bit (it was looking a bit depleted after certain visitors had been through), and released the rest of them into the wild (using the patented “dump and dribble” technique) on our way back to my place.

There we set to work finishing off the bookstrings for lytteltonwitch to take to Brisbane. We’d made the strings themselves back in March, but we’d run out of gift tags to put on them. So I’d got Mum to cut some more for us with her magic cuttlebug thing and send them up to me, and we spent the afternoon punching out little kiwi and fernleaf shapes to decorate them with and attaching them to the bookstrings. We worked pretty efficiently once we’d got into it, so managed to get more than enough done for Brisbane in only a couple of hours.

The rest of the afternoon was spent sitting in front of the fire chatting, mostly about convention stuff and about a few expeditions we’ve got planned for coming weekends, until I decided I needed a birthday cake, so (after a bit of googling to locate anywhere you could actually buy cakes on a Sunday evening), we dashed off to Riccarton where we found an eminently suitable (if expensive!) chocolate cheesecake, which we had, along with pizzas, for an impromptu birthday dinner (and MrPloppy and I had leftovers of for the rest of the week!).

Not a bad way to spend a birthday, really.

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Other releases in the last week or two:

Tuesday 24 June
The Snow Tiger by Desmond Bagley
Midas World by Frederik Pohl

Wednesday 25 June
The Juror by George Dawes Green (caught!)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
A Fine Night for Dying by Jack Higgins
Prey by Michael Crichton (caught, by someone who’s seen other bookcrossing books in the wild, but this was the only one to his/her taste)
Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe
Field of 13 and Shattered by Dick Frances

Thursday 26 June
After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (caught!)
Requiem for a Wren by Nevil Shute
The Little Book of Naughty Limericks edited by Tom Keegan
Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle
Star Wartz by Patrick Tilley

Friday 27 June
The Fey Victory by Kristine Kathryn
Lost by Lucy Wadham
Desert Royal by Jean Sasson
Spill by Les Standiford
Follow That Bus! by Pat Hutchins
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
Duncan’s Bride by Linda Howard
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Dolphin Dance by Colleen Payne

Monday 30 June
Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss
Games by Frances Edmonds
In the Presence of Enemies by William Coughlin
Barracuda Final Bearing by Michael Dimercurio
Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Tuesday 1 July
The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
Someone to Watch Over by Trish MacDonald Skillman

Wednesday 2 July
Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor
The Three Little Pigs
Robin Hood (Disney version) (caught!)
What’s It All About by Michael Caine

Thursday 3 July
Beneath the Skin by Nicci French
Riding Out by Sally-Anne Robinson
Red Spirit by Humphrey Hawksley
Alive by Piers Paul Read

Friday 4 July
Baby Come Back by Maeve Haran

Quite a few catches from that lot. And a few catches from older releases too:

Wheels by Arthur Hailey – gone to Tauranga, and on its way to Samoa
The Keep of Fire by Mark Anthony – a second-generation catch!
Love’s Cross-Currents by Swinburne – caught and re-released
The Scarlet Bikini by Glynn Croudace – another second-generation catch
Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell

I was going to go for another long release walk today, but seeing as the snow is not abating (oooh, and I think it’s starting to settle in a few places!!!), maybe not. Sitting in front of the fire with a good book sounds so much more tempting 🙂