The operation was yesterday, and seemed to take a lot less time than we had been led to believe. By last night she was in the recovery room, and off the respirator machine, and breathing on her own. This morning she was conscious, had a cup of tea, and even has a little colour back in her cheeks, it seems. All is going better that expected, and she'll be up to visitors tomorrow.

Today is, as it happens, my mother's 72nd birthday. Happy Birthday, Claire. We all love you.

My mother is currently in Blackrock Clinic, where she will have surgery to insert a valve into her aorta at 4 o'clock this afternoon. She has been unwell for some time, and the circumstances under which she goes into surgery are not ideal.

My mother has, as long as I remember, it seems, been unwell is one way or another, so much so that we by and large put it down to a form of hypochondria, occasionally interspersed with real conditions. The past dozen year at least have seen her in and out of hospital quite often, which I have to say I didn't always take terribly seriously. Along the way she had a kidney transplant, but I couldn't honestly say when. She's also not terribly active, and couldn't really be said to have ever really done anything quantifiable as exercise. So I, along with the rest of my brothers and sisters, took a fairly relaxed and long-suffering attitude to her hospital visits.

Because of all that, it took a little while for me to realise that this particular hospital visit was more serious. To cut a long story short she is now on dialysis for her kidneys, as her body has rejected the transplanted one, she has fibroids in her lungs, which have severely diminished capacity, and is on oxygen, and they have only just discovered that one of the valves in her heart is barely functioning. They knew she'd need surgery for this as it is deteriorating, which we found out the day before we went to Paris, but they had hoped to try to build her up with steroids and general care before they had to operate. The deterioration of her valve has accelerated, so the decision has been taken to operate immediately, although she is not terribly physically robust, and really is not too well equiped to deal with all the physical trauma that goes with a major heart surgery.

Some time in the next 24 hours we'll know how it went, one way or another. In the end, much as I hate to say it, I am hoping for the best, but I am preparing for the worst.

It is 3.37am, and we're off to Dublin Airport to get a 'plane to Paris, where we will be largely electronically incommunicado for the nine days we'll be there. You're all to be good, and we'll see you all when we get back.

I guarantee this will be the Christmas Number 1!

the_magician has given me the letter "I"

Da Roolz: Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list ten things you LOVE that begin with that letter. Afterward, post this in your journal and give out some letters of your own.

1: Ireland For all her faults, which are many, there's nowhere like Ireland. For our size, we've a huge literary heritage, and not a bad scientific one either. Our influence in all sorts of areas is vastly more than our size would indicate, and the whole world loves us. And quite right too.

2: Illustration Yes, I managed to squeeze in a reference to comics! I cannot draw at all, and am always in awe of how artists can capture an expression in a few lines, and conjures up emotions without needing words. From a very early age I was drawn* to cartoons and comics, and am still fascinated and exhilarated by them.

(*No pun intended...)

3: Ice Cream Is there anything in the world better than a whole tub of Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Chocolate Fudge Ice Cream, all for me? Of course, it's now strictly forbidden, as I'm on a diet, but maybe for Christmas...

4: Information All my life I've asked questions, and will probably continue to do so for some time yet.

5: Internet The invention that has changed how I interact with the rest of the world for the past ten years. And how I buy and sell things, now that I think about it.

6: In-Laws My Mother-in-Law and I are great friends. I believe this is meant to be unusual...

7: Idiosyncracies Those little things that make us exactly who we are.

8: I I am me, and very proud of it.

9: Idleness The simple joy of doing nothing at all.

10: Irony No really. I really mean this. Honestly.

From rainboworchid (AKA Garen Ewing, whose gorgeous and sublime A-Z of comic strip characters is one of my favourite things on the internet recently) comes this preview teaser for Rainbow Orchid, finally seeing print next year. I can hardly wait!

According to the RTÉ Website Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners died this afternoon aged 73, after a long illness. To say he was iconic is simply understatement of the most egregious kind.

Here he, along with the rest of The Dubliners, on Top of the Pops with The Pogues in 1987, performing The Irish Rover.



We will not see his likes again.

Who's going to Octocon? Despite recent opinions on the subject, a number of people I know are going along, and I just can't go sit in the bar without joining up. However, it really was truly awful last year, and it's a sad reflection on its former glories that the only reason I can find to go is to see people I don't see otherwise, rather than for any intrinsic interest in the con itself. (And of course one of the reasons I ask who's going is that there's still no membership list on the site...)

Our Brown Bin has arrived from Fingal County Council. This is the one for kitchen and garden waste, and is now added to the Green Bin, for recyclables, and the Black Bin, for everything else. If only there was a Bottle Bank within walking distance, we'd be doing as much as we could, but as it is we have to wait for someone to turn up who's prepared to take them away for us. We do our best to do our bit for the environment: all our light-bulbs are long-life bulbs, and we mostly travel by public transport. I've even dedicated a goodly portion of my life to selling second-hand books, surely a form of recycling in itself?

I'm doing an email interview with Todd Klein, world's greatest letterer. This is probably the easiest interview I've ever done this way. I'm particularly happy about what mizkit had to say about meeting him in San Diego recently (here):

I *finally* caught up with Todd Klein, who is an absolutely charming man, and to whom I said hello for slovobooks/Pádraig. Inevitably, Todd wanted to know how to pronounce Pádraig’s name, which I explained wasn’t actually possible for normal human beings, and we had a nice talk and yes, I *did* get you a couple of signed bookmarks, Pádraig. :) I wasn’t bold enough, though, to ask him to design a logo for Chance for me, and I wasn’t clever enough to think to get a picture with him. He did, though, say that it was Pádraig’s fantastic interview with Alan Moore that made him decide Pádraig was the right sort of person to be interviewed by, so that was really cool. And we talked a bit about his own really fantastic essay series on comic book logos that he’s done on his blog, so it was all really pleasant and neat. And if I’d had more money I’d have bought Pádraig one of the very nifty lettering samples Todd had done, but, er, well, I didn’t. Sorry! :)

Lots of completely silly things people have said in court:
Lawyer: "The truth of the matter is that you were not an unbiased, objective witness, isn't it? You too were shot in the fracas."
Witness: "No, sir. I was shot midway between the fracas and the naval."

Long before his tenure on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Phill Jupitus was working as a punk poet and cartoonist called Porky the Poet. This cartoon strip of one of Billy Bragg's songs is from the NME of 24th November, 1984.

( Under the cut... )

According to The Death Clock, I'm going to last until the 4th of September, 2056. I'll be just short of 97 years old then!

I hope to see you all many times before then...

I no longer have Scrabulous on my Facebook profile. Is that just me, or has anyone else lost it?

I have been taged by _vomit, so...

RULES:
* 1. Post these rules.
* 2. Each tagged person must post 8 things about themself on their journal.
* 3. At the end, you have to choose and tag 8 people
* 4. Go to their pages and send a message saying you tagged them.
* 5. No tag-backs

ABOUT ME:
1. I am a non-practicing Alcoholic.
2. I once lived over a brothel. This is not as interesting as you might think.
3. The vast majority of the places I've worked no longer exist.
4. I've been known to cause the paranormal effect known as SLI, or Street Lamp Interference.
5. I turn up as a character in several books.
6. I've found myself standing in shop doorways looking out as both Bill Clinton and Prince Charles drove past.
7. I'm an agoraphobic, but I try not to let it stop me...
8. at nearly 49 years of age, I've never spent a single day in hospital.

I was tagged by: _vomit
I am tagging: katelaity, desperance, irishkate, eawen_penallion, rflong, peadarog, vveritasv, and ztoical.

(Anyone wanting expansion or further explanation on any of the above is welcome to comment...)

I see that Kennys* of Galway, having closed their quite genuinely world-famous bookshop in January 2006 to go exclusively online, have now has a bit of a volte-face, and have opened part of their warehouse as a retail shop.



(*Yes, I'm sure there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere, but they're spelling it without one, so I've no real choice but to follow suit...)

We had hoped to be going to MeCon in Belfast next month, but seem to have had the dates wrong all along, as we thought it was the weekend of the 22nd - 24th, but it turns out it's the following weekend, the 29th - 31st, instead, when we're going to be in Paris. I see Paul Cornell is no longer going to be able to make it either, which is some sort of a comfort, as he would certainly have been one of the attractions, along with most of the rest of the guests. I had vague promises to do various things with tinman0, feorag, and natural20, so apologies all 'round, and to everyone else I'll be missing, like mizkit, ianmcdonald, slimmeroftheyea, captainlucy, and the rest of you who are going.

It also looks increasingly unlikely that we'll be going to Octocon this year. We're going to NewCon 4 in Northampton the weekend before that (where we will be seeing Paul Cornell), which has a good guests list and a lot of friends on the membership list. And, it has to be said, Octocon was appallingly bad last year, and I've really seen no signs that there has been any significant effort to redress that this time around, or actually any signs of any real activity, of any kind. I've been to every single Octocon since it began in 1990 but it has really being going downhill very badly for the past several years, and I'm not getting any younger, so that time has come, I feel, to bid it farewell. I may relent and take a one-day membership on the Saturday, just to go sit with friends in the bar (although as yet I've actually no idea who's going, as there's no membership list online), but I've no intentions of attending the actual con again unless it changes, and improves, dramatically.

Try not to put your finger in your eye after you've been cutting chillies...

I've been reading some disturbing statistics about Plastic Bags. It makes me proud to be living in a country that has reduced it's use of them by 90%, just by introducing a mandatory charge on them.

I did, apparently. However...

Two weeks ago I joined WeightWatchers, weighing in at 14st 13.5lb. I've managed to lose 5.5lbs since then, and I imagine I'll continue to do so at a roughly similar rate. The plan is to hit a target weight of 12st 11lb, a futher loss of 25lbs. If I lose an average of 2lbs a week, I should do it by the end of October.

Everything I believe is encapsulated in this one cartoon...

As seen on desperance:

60% Geek

Created by OnePlusYou

I Stumbled upon this graph as part of a blog entry called The Power of Graphs. Lots more songs in graph form through the link.