The best thing about summer in Texas is the end of it, because you get a whole five months to plan for parties and events. You can peek outside your shelter, shaking your fist and the big yellow hurty thing in the sky as it turns everything you know and love to ash, or you can plan for the day when sunset is at a sane time and the air doesn’t smell like charred flint. This is what kept Texans sane in the days before air conditioning, and it really applies now. To make matters worse, all of my friends are at the Independent Garden Center 2011 show, and knowing that Amanda Thomsen of Kiss My Aster is testing the hotel staff’s tolerance of impromptu Ween karaoke and random midnight gunfire makes me grind my teeth down to the gumline. The day she finally figures out how to flush metallic sodium down the toilet so it clears out every greywater line in the hotel, I’ll stop calling her “amateur”.
Because of this, I’m tentatively making plans for a Triffid Ranch party, open to customers, patrons, and interested bystanders. It would have to be after the big show at FenCon at the end of September, but this isn’t a problem when you live in a place where October lasts for six months. It won’t be anything spectacular, such as the spectacular Sarracenia Northwest open houses, but it won’t be too embarrassing. Details to follow.
I’d just like to add one note. Once the Czarina gets involved, her addiction to bad puns will be unstoppable, and there may be trouble. It may get bad. The moment she serves anything that looks like this, all of you have permission to shoot me in the head, because it’ll be obvious that the woman I married is gone, and life won’t be worth living. Thank you in advance.