Friday, I was wearing my trench coat, running the space heater, and shivering a lot. Saturday, I walked to the store in my trench coat, and damn near overheated. Yesterday, I wandered around without a coat for the majority of the day, and even ran the air conditioner a bit in the evening. This morning, I put on my denim jacket.

We have had the changing of the coats. Spring has officially sprung.

I find that perfume is also a good indicator of the spring, as all the women on my morning commute begin competing with the newly-blooming flowers by attempting to smother me to death with their artificially floral scents. I like perfume as much as the next girl—my ungodly-large collection of bottles of BPAL testifies to that—but there's a difference between "wearing perfume" and "committing an act of chemical warfare." When I'm breathing through my mouth and turning green, you have crossed that line.

(My latest scent from the BPAL collection, by the way: Giant Squid. The description says it's "cannabis blossom, tonka bean, tobacco, frankincense, galangal, juniper berry, lantana, spiky aloe, green and white teas, and salty sea spray." I just like being able to answer "what's that perfume you're wearing?" with "RELEASE THE KRAKEN!" Sometimes I am a simple soul.)

The cats are responding to the spring by attempting to lose their winter coats in one fell swoop, resulting in hairballs of epic proportions springing up on my bedroom rug. Seriously, I brush Alice every day, and I still scraped an entire third cat's-worth of hair off the rug Saturday morning. I dread to think what may happen when I go to Australia for two weeks, since Alice is less willing to let Mom use the feline seam-ripper (ie, "the mat-catching brush") on her flanks and hindquarters. I'm going to come home to a house consisting of nothing but hair.

Amy arrived from Wisconsin yesterday, and brought a cheese hat for my sister-in-law. The world is occasionally very strange, as my mother's insistence on prancing about San Francisco International Airport with a giant wedge of cheese on her head clearly illustrates.

Happy spring!

This Saturday, May 8th 2010, I will be appearing at San Francisco's own Borderlands Books in my guise as Mira Grant to celebrate the release of Mira's first novel, Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. Feed is a science fiction dystopian novel of political zombie terror, best described as "Night of the Living Dead meets The West Wing and Transmetropolitan." If that sounds a little weird, well...it is. But if it sounds a little awesome, you should totally swing by.

This is going to be a more traditional event than most of my parties, because Mira's a traditional kind of girl...especially if by "traditional" you mean "fond of machetes, the undead, and things that go bump in the night." We'll be in the bookstore starting at five, and we'll be staying there until nine, providing plenty of time for undead awesomeness. There will be readings, discussion, time for wandering around the bookstore, and, yes, the world's best cupcakes. Some of my best friends from out of town will be attending, so this is your chance to finally check off "Rae" on your Seanan bingo card.

I really hope you can make it, and if you can't, remember that you can contact Borderlands to request a signed/personalized book be set aside for you.

Whee!

ETA: Festivities will begin at 5:00 PM, and continue until 9:00.