• Location: ~/Brainstorm
• Mood: disappointed
• Music: Indigo Girls, "Hammer and a Nail"

Two things

1) Does anybody (preferably someone at a university, with access to scientific journal archives) have any idea where the species name of the beetle Cetonia baxil came from? Google fails.

2) Due to sudden and extreme poverty, I am going to have to skip Further Confusion this year. :-(

Between holidays (and being forced to sit out four workdays), a wave of vet bills for Ocras' kidney problems, and a little fiscal miscalculation, keeping up with expenses this month is completely flatlining our slowly dwindling financial reserves. To the point where even the gas for driving down to San Jose and back is starting to look like a luxury expense. Unless someone wants me at the con desperately enough to give me a complete Friday-night-to-Sunday-afternoon free ride, I'll have to take a pass and start saving up for 2009 once kadyg gets out of cooking school.

Unfortunately, it's likely this will be the case for Pantheacon as well. (And kadyg is hosting a ritual downstairs on that weekend, anyway.) Apologies to the people I was looking forward to meeting there.