Busy Weekend at Chateau Steelypips

No blogging this weekend, and not even a Links Dump for Monday morning, because I was busy with non-blog stuff all weekend. Such as fencing in Lake Steelypips:

OK, maybe that's too grandiose a name for the little decorative pond in our back yard. It's not all that large, but it is big enough to put SteelyKid at risk should she fall in, so it needed to be fenced. The actual fencing operation was dead simple, but was delayed for a bit when I forgot that I really ought to enclose the electrical outlet (for the pond pump) in the fence, requiring a second trip to Lowe's.

Between that and an Admissions event on campus Sunday morning, I didn't even have time to talk about Saturday, when I appeared at the Empire State Book Festival-- there's photographic evidence and everything. You can tell that I was talking when that was taking because of the motion blur on my hands-- in school, people used to joke that the only way to shut me up would be to tie my hands to my desk so I couldn't wave them around.

The panel on turning blogs into books went well, despite the fact that I don't have any solid constructive advice to offer beyond "Post a bunch of stuff, and hope you get picked up by a big aggregator." After that, I was down for a "Meet and Greet" aka book signing. While I didn't bring a giant poster-board reproduction of the cover of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog like some of the other authors did, I did bring one author copy that I propped up on the table in front of me. Which turned out to be a good thing, as I sold at least one book that way, to a woman who caught the title as she walked past, and stopped to ask about it. I may or may not have generated a second sale-- a different person wanted to buy the display copy from me directly, and wasn't willing to wait on line in the festival bookstore for one of their copies.

The bookstore at the festival sold several of my books-- probably half a dozen, from eyeballing the piles on their table-- so that's nice. And I had fun chatting with a few people who stopped by the table.

I didn't buy any books myself, but when I walked through the other event going on at the Empire State Plaza-- a pet-related charity event-- I had to buy a Squirrels Are Evil t-shirt from Mike Made This. Because, really, how could I not?

And that was the weekend here at Chateau Steelypips. I've got a couple of ideas for physics-y blogging that I hope to get to later, but between my 9am class, my seasonal allergies, and the Admissions Open House today, I may not get to them. We'll see what we see.