From my brother:

"People who live in a social vacuum should be wary of strange attachments." :)

Okay, I needed that laugh. :)

Hugs,
Erin

I've got lots to do. But I'm going to go get in the car with my laptop and go for a ride. I may stop somewhere and get online to see that things are okay. I may do some writing. I may drive to the coast or up to the mountains or out to the desert. I may be back before midnight. I will be here tomorrow most of the day. Be good to each other, everyone and see you when I get back.

Hugs,
Erin

Bob's Stardust First Anniversary Sci-Fi Story Contest is over, the votes have been tabulated by the esteemed accounting firm, Dewey, Fleecem and Howe and the awards ceremony is being prepared even as we type. I don't know who the guest presenters are going to be but I understand that the MC is going to be WFS, old Mr. Sincerity himself. :)

I took the site down today for a cool down. Things had suddenly gone from a few posts trading mostly civil comments to five or more hot flames in half an hour then five in five minutes. I had to leave for a bit and didn't feel it would be wise to leave the site open to comments that might stay up for hours and inflame more passions, so I shut things down. I'm back, but later tonight I'll be going to sleep and tomorrow I will be occupied with taking my mother to see the cancer doctor. Let's all try to be nice to one another.

Hugs,
Erin

I'm a terrible tease. :) But does anyone have any idea what this is?

It's...

There's only been one new story posted since the contest ended Sunday. We need more stories!

Hugs,
Erin

My apologies, but here come the jokes, inspired by a thread on Donna's story.

* * *

A girl walks into a bar with a dirty duck on her head. No one says anything to her while she takes a seat. She sips her drink quietly and shares a few peanuts with the duck who is frankly, quite filthy.

For anyone who has noticed, Fictionmania was temporarily down but should be accessible for everyone within a day or two.

- Erin

Bob Arnold and I (or at least one of us) will be in the chatroom this Sunday for at least two hours. What should we talk about?

I've got some suggested topics:

I don't know how else to put this warning out but someone, whose ISP appears to be in Virginia, is running a webserver on their machine. When I look at my logs, I can see the ip address of the router and that there is a small local network. Evil types could use the available info to break into such a server and hijack it for nefarious purposes.

For anyone who was wondering, the site was down for eight hours today due to network problems at my ISP. Then, after they fixed the network problems it took them two hours to figure out they hadn't turned my server back on! SHEESH! It's all back and fluffy now, though.