Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Tag: travel Page 2 of 4

Upcoming travel – Massachusetts in September

We’ve already told a few people about this, but in the interest of making sure that everyone who reads this space knows.

kitanzi and I will be visiting Massachusetts in September, specifically Sept 5-8. Our primary purpose for visiting is to visit some friends from outside our normal social circle and meet up with a group at the Ren Faire, but since we know a large number of you would likely hunt us down and do unpleasant bodily harm to us if we didn’t make some effort to see you, we plan on attending the MASSFILC meeting on Saturday.

So, if you’re inclined to be the sort of person who wants to see us, that’s the place to be. (It would have been great fun to just show up and surprise everyone, but I didn’t want to risk someone being disappointed afterwards because they didn’t end up going that month.)

Hope to see all you New England types there!

Home.

Home from OVFF. Fall down now go boom. More later.

OVFF

Our plane tickets for OVFF have been purchased. Here’s our itinerary, in case anyone’s interested:

                                 Bkng                          Meals/ Seat/
Day Date       Flight     Status Class       City        Time  Other  Cabin
--- ----- --------------- ------ ----- ---------------- ------ ------ -------
Thu 25OCT DELTA 958         OK     T   LV ATLANTA       244P           24D
                                       AR COLUMBUS OH   415P          COACH

Mon 29OCT DELTA 6441*       OK     T   LV COLUMBUS OH   1149A          8C
                                       AR ATLANTA       128P          COACH

Looking forward to seeing everyone who will be there? Who’s coming? 🙂

The rest of the trip

The rest of my trip was both fun and relaxing. Here’s the highlights.

A brief, semi-grammatical update

Am home. Am safe. Am exhausted. Am in much pain.

However, heart is light and full of joy. Much love.

Am fall down now. More later.

Down and Safe

This has been a trip, thus far, of exceptionally useful voluntary purchases.

I might get rich, you know i might get busted…

I am sitting on a train which will take me to a plane that will take me to a car that will take me to cadhla!

See you all on the flip side!

Ups and Downs, but mostly Ups

  • Our housewarming party was a great success! Thanks to Alice, thatcrazycajun, hilfy, anaisdjuna, joyeuse13, and abovenyquist for coming over!
  • kitanzi and I met up with Alice and thatcrazycajun to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I thought it was a fine film, and the gal playing Luna Lovegood is just spot-perfect. Thumbs up!
  • hilfy came over for dinner Friday night. We had good food, good wine, and good conversation. A very enjoyable evening.
  • We went to see Ben Wakeman play on Saturday. I’ve been a big fan of Ben’s for years, and have even covered a few of his songs in filk circles. He gave his usual great show, and I got chat with him briefly to let him know he has a fan in the UK (bardling: he says hi and thanks!). One funny moment came when he forgot the first line to one of the songs on his new album. After two false starts, he said “Does anyone know the words to this song?” I carefully called out the first line for him, and he said “Thank you!” and launched into it. Later, by request, he did “White Male Folk Singer” and forgot the words to that too. *grin*
  • The check engine light (also known on some models of car as the “set aside $400” light) came on while we were driving back from the concert, and I noticed it was idling funny. We got home OK, but i made plans to put it in the shop on Monday.
  • Our 3rd wedding anniversary was Sunday! We celebrated by going out for lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings Cafe, and then went shopping for stuff for the cats. What glamorous lives we lead! Sunday night, we watched the premiere of “Masters of Science Fiction”, an anthology series that ABC has already canceled. Which is a pity, because the debut episode was brilliant. I recommend picking up the 3 remaining episodes if you have a chance, and keep a look out for an eventual DVD release.
  • The auto place called me back this morning, after I dropped the car off yesterday afternoon. The actual thing I took it in for was pretty minor, but there’s about $2600 worth of maintenance that need to be done. Fluid changes, full tune up with new spark plugs and cables, radiator hose, and, most expensively, new struts. We discussed the need and urgency of the various items, and I ended up authorizing them for about $1200 of the repairs. The remaining part will have to be budgeted out over the next few months.
  • Shortly after the car people called, I got a half-hour warning call from the delivery service that was bringing us our anniversary present to each other. We got a king-sized bed from The Original Mattress Factory. This is something we’d wanted for quite some time, because while there was nothing structurally wrong with our queen-sized bed, it had become to small. When I started sleeping with the CPAP, I started sleeping on my back, and suddenly was taking up a lot more bed than I used to. The queen bed will now be the guest room bed, and has already been moved into place. Who wants to come visit?
  • Speaking of visiting, I am going to be in San Francisco on Labor Day weekend! The reason for my trip is to visit cadhla, so I have no idea what sort of availability I may have otherwise, but, hey, y’know, I’m gonna be there all weekend, including Monday. (My return flight leaves at 10:30pm Monday and will land me back in Atlanta at 6am, just in time to go to work on Tuesday morning.) I now proceed to do the bouncy I-get-to-see-Seanan chair dance, which I’m told is very cute in a demented sort of way.
  • kitanzi just e-mailed me to let me know she’d won a pair of tickets to see Peter Paul and Mary at Chastain Park Amphitheatre on Friday! Wheee!
  • My friend Dina, who I have not seen in far too long, is coming down the last weekend of September with her two children, and we’re going to go to the zoo and the aquarium and the pool and who knows what else?

And that’s most of the news that’s fit to print. On the whole, it’s mostly positive, and what isn’t positive isn’t really more than annoying. So I declare it, on the whole, good.

Heading home

Kitanzi and I are sitting at the gate at SFO, waiting to board. Con was good, more later.

Flashback: D’zenove (Part the Third)

Saturday

Despite being one of the last people to go to bed on Friday, I woke up on Saturday morning in time to avail myself of the free breakfast. I sat with filkerdave, and after finishing my food, later sat and chatted with katyhh and tarkrai. At some point, I realized the time and caught the last half of Lady Mondegreen’s “Choose Your Own Adventure Workshop”, where they had put a bunch of topics into a hat and drew a new one out every time they exhausted the previous topic.

Once that was done, I wandered out into the lounge area and chatted with various people, so I missed the next couple of concerts. I was in and out of the Main Concert, but I did fortunately catch the Crooklets singing “Alien Salad Abduction” and also demoneyes brilliant parody of callylevy‘s “Just Beyond”. I had stepped out to fetch some folks for filkerdave‘s spot when I got waylaid by the charming photographer who was at the con to cover the vent for an Irish youth magazine, and I spent a good deal of the next hour chatting with her and letting her take my picture.

The main concert was followed by a reunion of the original lineup of Three Weird Sisters. Since all three of them happened to be at the con, they decided to put on an hour set, and, while I admit to being greatly biased, they were fantastic. if you had told a total stranger that these three hadn’t performed together in over a year, I’m not sure you could have convinced them. The set was tight, high energy, and a hell of a lot of fun, and it was really nice to see the old dynamic still exists when they get on stage.

After the 3WS concert was supposed to be dinner, but that was when the first of the major hotel snafus struck. It seems that somehow the hotel had interpreted “Dinner from 5-7pm” as “Dinner at 7pm”, so there was a scramble to get dinner out. Worse, at this time we discovered that the hotel had, despite a contractual prohibition against booking other noisy events into the facility, booked a disco and a skittle alley for Saturday night; in fact, they rather comically wanted to set the skittle alley up in the main Programming room. This led to a great number of the concom having to jump into crisis mode, but fortunately, everything was eventually sorted out, with the skittles being put out of doors, dinner moved to a function room on the far end of the hotel, and coordination between the disco DJ and the con’s sound tech crew to try and ensure there’d be little interference from the dance.

The fears of the noisy disco also required a slight rearrangement of the evening programming, moving UK GOH Mike Richards up an hour, as he would tend to be quieter than the other two performers. What with the delay of dinner and lending support to the committee, I didn’t get to catch all of it, but I really enjoyed what I heard.

After Mike was the band Chimes, who aptly demonstrated how you can make sure everyone at the con gets a concert slot despite limited time. I lost track of the number of personnel changes the band went through, as various people filled in for the band members who were sidelined by illness. All of it was amazing, but my favourite song had to be “Thief in Little Pieces”, wherein little_cinnamon learned to not to let Phil rewrite his lyrics without checking on them beforehand. This rule belongs in the same category as “Don’t look at Judi Miller while you’re on stage.”

The evening wrapped up with the absolutely fabulous Lady Mondegreen, who delivered everything I’d come to expect from them over the years since they debuted. I’m a sucker for harmony and pretty girls, and LMG is rather obviously strong in both suits, and I’m biased to begin with for various personal reasons, but to say they blew the room away is rank understatement. I especially loved the ultra funky filk of “Lady Marmelade”, with fleetfootmike and demoneyes providing guitar and drum backing. The only regret I have is having the camera battery die shortly after sweetmusic_27 joined the band to turn the trio into a quartet. But not being able to take pictures meant I got to kick back and enjoy the music.

Once the concerts were officially over, I went to hang out with cadhla and sweetmusic_27, and we played the exciting parlour game called “Quick! Find something Seanan can eat!” This is no mean feat after 10pm on a Saturday night in Basingstoke, but the game was finally won by securing an expensive but indifferent cheese-and-veg pizza from room service. Once fortified, we wandered into Open Filk, where I recall singing a couple of adamselzer‘s songs, and I don’t remember what else. We stayed up until way too late singing, and then Amy and I stayed up talking until later still, and I finally got to sleep somewhere around 5am.

End Part the Third…

(Coming soon: Part the fourth, in which there is oversleeping, closing ceremonies, and we get in trouble for singing in a pub. Don’t miss the thrilling conclusion, next time on Flashback!)

Page 2 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén