Are Snails Slugs With a Mortgage?

Yesterday as I walked to the pub in the rain, I noted how many slugs there were on the pavement (after brief thoughts about dogs and their, er, droppings). Today as I walked home from the pub in the rain, I noted how many snails there were on the pavement.

Maybe the shells allow snails to survive in the damp for longer before having to evacuate. Trapped air might allow them to float. Or something. Or the gastropods are leaving the planet, species by species.

Progress

One of the albatrosses (albatri?) round my neck from the last two years is a project on Terry Pratchett. After saying yes to this (in the midst if the depression and OCD which peaked a year after moving here), I bought a new computer which wouldn't talk to the new one. And the lack of a discdrive on the new machine and a USB on the old made the old work difficult to transfer, especially as I then moved and it was almost impossible to get work. Exhaustion and a constant stream of unproductive coughs basically meant the Big Project was almost constantly cursed throughout - in the sense of what might go wrong will go wrong rather than the $%^&%&ing book, which was also a factor. I'd work hard on it, and then burn out for a couple of months or feel too ill to work out where I was on it and how to proceed. In the grand tradition of Douglas Adams, deadlines wooshed by.

The good news is An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett is now being copy-edited, we are working on illustrations, working on covers, and me learned friends are happy no great copyright has been infringed. We even have the tacit approval, at the very least good will, of a couple of people involved in the oeuvre. And have a title which is both more or less accurate (there's non-novel stuff in there too) and which does seem unduly official.

But now to get back to all the things I've neglected in the meantime.