That con panel sounds really great -- I love reading stuff where you realize authors have thought properly about the nuts and bolts of how their world works. (And hate being jerked out a story by being brought face to face with questions like "why are they not all starving/who pays for all this stuff/where does it even come from and how does it get there?")

Well done on finding some more books to donate, and good luck with shortening the pants -- not being a standard size can be very annoying at times!

My accomplishment in the past few days was to shred some more old paperwork -- mostly just normal accumulation of incoming stuff like receipts and mail, but with a little bit of stuff weeded from the files.