Before we go with the ball pit option

Help! Where in the Twin Cities would you go to buy carpet?

Please assume:
1) I can ask Auntie Google if I just want to know a couple of stores that sell such a thing. What I want to know is where you would go, or possibly where you have gone and how it went.

2) If you would not buy carpet, your inclination against carpet is fine but not immediately practical for the question I am asking. We are considering other options as well, with parameters that are not completely standard, but what I am asking about right now is carpet.

3) Where you would not go, out of otherwise plausible-looking Twin Cities carpet-selling options, is useful information, especially if you give a reason.

4) I am asking about wall-to-wall carpet for installation, not individual rugs to be set out on other flooring.

In somewhat related news, they are staining trim in my basement, and oh the smell. I want to put my paws over my nose and howl. Hands don't seem to work quite the same way, alas.

Six Calculus Skills

Two bits of news from the world of publishing:

1) Beneath Ceaseless Skies is taking "The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere." Which is not only something I am very fond of and wrote very recently, but it is also that dreaded beast, the novelette! I love reading novelettes. I don't mind writing novelettes. Selling novelettes is not always the easiest thing. But this time, pretty much right off the bat, boom! Sold where I most wanted it to go! Yay!

The title/inspiration comes from a pair of elisem earrings of the same name, with a little Hope Mirrlees and Louis Armstrong on the side.

2) I wasn't sure it was okay to say this, but Mary Robinette Kowal put it up on FB, and she wouldn't steer me wrong (er, at least I hope not): this weekend I found out that Year's Best SF 15 (the Hartwell and Cramer version, not the Dozois version) would like to reprint "The Calculus Plague." This is my first Year's Best sale, and I am very much pleased. (scottjames, remember when you were asking if there were any markets that would displace the ones I have listed in my boilerplate cover letter? Year's Best totally makes the cover letter. In fact, I have the urge to write back to the agents I have queried and tell them, "Also I will be in Year's Best because I am just that cool, so you should totally represent me and sell my book to a publisher who will sell a gajillion copies of it and make all of us very rich and happy kthx." I suspect that this is not what we in realityland know as "professional," however, so I won't.)

Of course as usual this has had the effect of making me go, "Ack! Must write more stories!" So papersky will be pleased to hear that I am finally writing the time dilation homecoming one she told me to write ages ago, and it's going beautifully, and not just because of the wish fulfillment of sending the protag to the Hungarian restaurant near the Guy-Concordia Metro stop either. It's currently called "Some of Them Closer," but that might change.