Keeping In Touch

Have Yourself A Merry Little Solstice

2010-11-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

It's really hard to start up blogging again, but I continually feel bad about enjoying my friends' blogs and being happy when they update, and yet denying them the enormous pleasure of reading mine. So here we go.

I'm actually glad I remembered to take the occasional picture in the last few months; it reminds me of events. Going through my bookmark list also helps. I do think of y'all! I'm just terrible with the follow-through...

So in roughly chronological order, a while ago we took in the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Tech Centre, which was very good. Engineer John happened to be in town (it's so nice to live in a place where people actually get sent on business) so he accompanied us.

I have a strange fascination with Mongolia, so I was pleased to learn that there is a Naadam festival held regularly in the area. Maybe next year!

We had a Halloween thing at work, but I wasn't organized enough to really do anything elaborate* and didn't want to repeat last year.** I settled for a joke that I'm not really sure a lot of people got, which surprised me. Usually if I know about something, it's gone past pop culture and into obscure history.

(Teal Dear? TL;DR? Geddit?)

We had an election. No pictures. Argh.

The local university put on a Steampunk version of Twelfth Night so we had to go wave the cog-and-goggles flag. It was very good! I especially liked Orsino; they did him as a mopey emo-goth who kept theatrically collapsing with woe. Malvolio and Sir Toby were also standouts. Malvolio was especially excited that R:tAG also had a clockwork hand (Malvolio's mostly out of costume in this shot, sadly, but he ran backstage to put his hand back on when he saw R:tAG's )

R:tAG and I went up to Seattle for SteamCon II which was great. This year's theme was "Wild Wild West".

Next year's is 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I have some costume ideas for next year (thanks to Prof. Wright from Polygnostic U.) that will be awesometastic. Perhaps even better than the ostrich, though the ostrich was a lot of fun. Next year, though, I am going to put the costume completely on at least once before the event.*** I spent too long in the morning jury-rigging bits and pieces.

And then we visited Arizona to have (American) Thanksgiving with my folks, who were also visiting there. In the theme of "R:tAG Re-enacting Scenes From Fallout", he decided to harvest some prickly pear fruit. At least he wasn't shooting Roman legionnaires in the head.

We were staying in a town named "Surprise" which kept me in a constant state of low-level amusement. I think the locals thought I was a bit simple.

And finally, we went this weekend to the Dickens Fair**** and there saw a production of the Mikado, spoke to Edward Allan Poe and Cyrus Harding***** had some fine English comestibles****** and bought some cool stuff including a fox mask.

I only wore the mask for this picture, but it is a great mask.

And I think that brings us up to date! How are you doing?

* Also, after about 20 years of ignoring all levels of (in)activity and (un)healthy diet, my body has finally decided to change shape so many of my costumes were no longer an option. Anyone interested in a dark green and black Size 8-ish Italian Renaissance dress (Simplicity 8735, View B (lower right))? There's a slim (hah!) chance I'll be able to wear the Edwardian, Regency and Victorian outfits comfortably again, but I think the Italian Ren is a write-off.

** The delicate flower of a UI Artist has moved on, alas, so I couldn't even get up the motivation to think up something really disturbing.

*** The logistics of the costume were complicated by the fact it had to fit into checked luggage (I didn't feel like being a poster child for the new security procedures). I was explaining this to a mundane in the Seattle hotel elevator, how the costume collapsed and folded, and she said "Oh, you should be an engineer!"

**** Not for the Steampunk Day, alas, I was already committed for an all-day gaming marathon that day, but sometimes it's nice to just go straight historical and not have all the serious volunteers give you the side-eye like you're wearing LotR costumes to a Ren Faire.

***** Not really.

****** "Try our French Onion Soup! Tastes like French people! And onions!"

Just keep staring at the sun, Pray for Summer's end.

2010-10-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

More Steampunk goodness, with the Handcar Regatta on September 26. It was really really hot, but we found that a nice Italian lunch with lemon gelato takes the edge off the heat quite nicely. In addition to the actual races* there were blocks of stalls with cool stuff** and food and even some DIY-type displays like Makers' Faire.

And then Mr. Tall visited for a bit, which was a pleasure as always. We'll get him to move down here yet! Unfortunately he was here only during the week, which meant we didn't get a chance to do anything very photogenic with him.***

Thanksgiving here is called "Columbus Day"**** and we spent it in part assembling our newest impulse buy.

It's a walking eye! It's a walking eye that makes compost! It's a walking eye that makes compost and was on sale! Irresistible! It's resting on six upturned caster wheels, so you can rotate it easily in any direction. It was actually kind of fun to put together... it arrived flat-packed, if you can imagine. I think I will have the opposite problem of trying to make compost in Saskatoon; it is harder to get brown material here than green. Difficult to believe right now especially, when I'm sure the lawns of Saskatoon are ankle deep in dead leaves.

* As you can tell from even a cursory examination of the photos, actual speed was not the only consideration in judging the winners. Artistic merit also factored heavily.

** I bought a parasol with tentacles on it, mainly out of self-defence. The sun was hot!

*** Drinking and watching RiffTrax Shorts is really of interest only to the participants, and only at the time.

**** This statement is not exactly true.

This train is bound for glory, this train

2010-09-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

So, monthly round-up, I guess.

We went on a train. No, I'm not saying it right... We took a train!!!!! And we went with a bunch of very cool Steampunk people from all over.

(Ah, all the high tech in the world can't keep my thumb out of the picture, apparently. Where is my Photoshop Thumb Filter? Better pictures are here)

It's the V&T Railroad, from Carson City to Virginia City, and it was fun. We went on the steam train (of course!) which uses fuel oil and not coal but which is still very steamy! We had a group picture taken in front of the engine in Virginia City and the engineer obligingly created a big cloud of steam for atmosphere and now the back of my coat doesn't have wrinkles any more.

It took about 1.5 hours to go (IIRC) about 20 miles, so we were going slowly enough to appreciate the Nevada scenery. Virginia City was once quite large and active (during the silver rush and the Comstock Lode and all that) but now it pretty much exclusively caters to tourists and shuts down at 6 PM apparently. Still neat, though. We had a beer at the Bucket of Blood (as you do) and saw a couple of museums* and had our pictures taken by (other) tourists who thought we were part of the show.

And the next day before we headed back we walked around Carson City for a bit, which seems very small for a state capital but has a disproportionate amount of history and very nice old houses (see above re: profitable holes in the ground).

A while ago we also saw They Might Be Giants down in Santa Cruz, and I just have to share the decorations from the Rio Theatre:

I'm pretty sure that Tragedy and Comedy have been replaced by Terror and Psychosis. Should we say anything?

* Including the Red Light District Museum, which is in the dim and ancient basement of a bar and which includes medical implements from the 1850s. Nothing makes me appreciate being born in the late 20th century like seeing the state of the medical art of the mid-19th. Mind you, as one of our new steampunk friends pointed out, people in the next century might say that about this one.

'Cause you were just too busy being fabulous

2010-08-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

Inception was very, very good.
Black Dynamite was very, very good. It's like Lost Skeleton of Cadavra but with a higher budget and for a different genre. An absolutely spot-on... parody? Homage? Affectionate spoof?
The Expendables was pretty disappointing. If it was meant to be to 80's action films what Black Dynamite is to 70's blaxploitation films, I think it failed. It was no A-Team, anyway.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant was really unexpectedly good. Did that even make the theaters? I remember seeing a preview for it and then bang, it was in the Netflix queue. A pity, I really liked it and hope they make a sequel.
I do not recommend watching Inception, Franklyn and Re-Cycle within three days of each other either, and not just because I thought Re-Cycle had a pretty banal ending. You will start thinking disturbing thoughts about the nature of reality and end up not getting anything done.

We've been watching a lot of movies, haven't we? Never fear, we also did a short hike at Almaden Quicksilver County Park,* saw Cinematic Titanic live (um, does that count as a movie?), and saw Blondie and the B-52s at the Mountain Winery.**

Oh, and of course Uncle Baby Quinn and his cool pop were here for all-too-short a time on a motorcycle trip. We got up to SF to see the Asian Art Museum and the mandatory Fisherman's Wharf visit.

(the bottom picture is Quinn. Just in case of confusion).

I highly, highly recommend taking a ceramics expert with you on your visit to the Asian Art Museum. Quinn's Cool Pop made the visit about a million times more interesting (um, not that it's not an interesting museum. But having your own personal expert tour guide is great!)

And the picture-taking during all this activity raised a bunch of interesting questions thanks to my recent reading of Cognitive Surplus. At the Mountain Winery concert particularly, a sign said "No Professional Photography." What is professional these days, when literally anyone with an Internet connection has a "Publish" button?

That whole question might be another blog post, but I do highly recommend Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody, especially to those people who have read Blind Faith.*** I guarantee you will thoughtfully put the book down and say "Huh. Never thought about that," at least once.

* Motto: "Our wildlife is so full of mercury that you can tell the temperature by watching the snakes' heads bob up and down!"

** A very nice venue, and there's a restaurant up there that we'd like to try out. The view is amazing.

*** Well, at least if you found Blind Faith disturbing and dystopic, and want to be reassured of the good side of modern information technology.

Tu meri zindagi hai, tu meri har khushi hai

2010-08-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

So Cenobyte with her writeyness has mentioned this, of course, but a couple of weekends ago was the wedding of my old and dear friend to a lovely woman who I hope will become an old and dear friend. It was a blend of Vedic, Catholic and secular traditions, which provided a constant low-level cognitive dissonance that was really enjoyable. Ganesh was invoked and the sacred fire was kindled under the benevolent gaze of the Christ. I had no idea that Catholics were so ecumenical.* And of course Cenobyte and I still share a brain.**

The reception was in the basement of the Post Office.*** As I believe I said at the time, if someone had told me 28 years ago at a D&D game that one day, I'd be in the basement of the Post Office celebrating the DM marrying a supermodel ninja, I'm not sure I'd have believed it. But there we were, watching the father of the groom in full Highland fig (he had changed from his shalwar kameez), singing an Elvis song to a group of appreciative ladies in saris.

(our friends have the best weddings!)

We got to see many other friends too even though our visit was terribly short. On the bright side, we only had a few days exposure to the mosquitoes, which because of the warm, wet summer are particularly vicious. The event was two weeks ago and my legs still look like a bunch of Smurfs went on a hickey rampage. We've lost all our Saskatchewan-born instincts of self-preservation, as I realized when I paused outside the rental car to text Effigy that we were coming. Silly me.

Still, a great weekend!

* Not meant to be snarky, honestly. I really was pleasantly surprised. Apparently the Catholic Powers That Be, with the close reasoning that I associate with Jesuits, have carefully thought through how mixed marriages will be performed ("mixed" here being Catholic and non-Catholic, so a hard-shell-Baptist/Catholic wedding uses the same rules as a Hindu/Catholic wedding. This pleases me.) I gather the participants still have to be of different sexes, but baby steps.

** I wore a gray dress and decided it needed punching up a bit with a red handknit shawl. Completely independently, she wore a lovely red dress and decided to wear a gray handknit shawl. We looked like the backup singers. And she stole my shoes again!

*** Well, in a jazz club that's in the basement of the downtown building that used to be the main Post Office. To me it will always be the Post Office.

Sweet Land of Liberty

2010-08-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

So there was much rejoicing. About the only cogent argument* I've heard is one that unelected judges should not overturn decisions that the majority of people have made. But the question I'd like to ask to that in turn is: Is an unelected judge overturning a majority decision ever right? I think that it is; that judges are supposed to protect the minority from the majority, because no one else can.

I seem to have lowered my writers' block a bit; I actually have a couple of other posts fermenting in my brain-juice. But this just seemed worthy of note.

ETA: A funny yet accurate summary of the debate is here

*Some religious book defines marriage differently? Irrelevant to the law. Marriages must be for producing children? Simply untrue. It's a slippery slope that will lead to paedophilia and bestiality? Demonstrably untrue, any more than giving women the vote led to hamsters and babies voting. It will degrade hetero marriages? Bewilderingly untrue. Children must be raised by one mother and one father? Untrue, with disturbing implications for the legal future of divorce and single parenting.

Everybody has a summer holiday

2010-07-14T09:41:00.001-07:00

I don't know what it is; my writing juices have utterly dried up. There are several things I really need to write, including this, and I am just completely at a loss.

It's not as if there aren't things to share; we were back up in S'toon in June (hah!) to see my dad receive an honorary degree from the U. of S. It was really great to see that, as well as to catch up with many old friends and abuse their hospitality. We were able to get out to see R:tAG's parents, too, which is always a pleasure.* There was harness racing going on, so we went to see that (never having seen it before):

I really miss the SK skies.

Their town was very, very wet when we visited (an unusual thing by the standards of the past, oh, 20 years) and later, it got worse. R:tAG's folks, fortunately, live on relatively high ground.

And then Mr. Tall visited, and we all went to Half Moon Bay, to which none of us had ever been and which we found charming. Mr. Tall had the concept of micro-climates vividly illustrated; you go over the ridge and the temperature plunges and the sun disappears. We went to the beach anyway,

and had a meal at the Moss Beach Distillery that was awesometastic even though I was still recovering from a bad cold and mainly appreciated the textures.** Then we drove back, out of the dim, chilly fog, and into the warm golden sunshine of a California evening. The transition is quite startling.

We saw the Last Airbender movie and I'm not even going to link to it. Just watch the original TV series. The movie was really awful. On the other hand, I really enjoyed Despicable Me. Apparent key to me liking a movie; knowing nothing about it beforehand.

And now it's back to work and the never-ending patching and small improvements that are part of building an MMO. I'm finding it's not enough to (finally) learn that hacky shortcuts always come back to bite you, it's being able to persuade everyone else of that that's valuable.

* Best story of that trip; we went with R:tAG's dad to his regular Coffee Row haunt, so that he could show off his son from California, and of course every person we met asked what brought us back to Saskatchewan. I told them that my dad was getting an honorary degree from the U. of S., and on two separate occasions the questioner's eyes got wide and he gasped "You're Gordie Howe's daughter!??!" I did not have the presence of mind to say yes.

** I don't get sick very often, honestly, but it seems that when I do, it's when we have houseguests. It's a good thing I am not a paranoid sort.

Travel the world and the seven seas

2010-05-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

So normally I only mention comings and goings (mine, ours or others') after the fact because, as I have said, I have weird privacy issues about putting personal information out on Teh IntarWebz.* But our current houseguest is practically famous for writing about not being home, and I just want to brag about having such a cool friend.

So go read Pam's blog, Go See Run Eat Drink, and enjoy! We have to figure out a Weird Food for her to try here, and I have to think of a short list of must-see sights that will compete with the best Europe, Asia and Africa have to offer.**

* And yes, I just posted my full birthdate a few days ago. But I could have been lying.

** I really need to stock up on guide books; we've been going pretty much completely digital for that sort of thing but there's something about your basic Fodor's Guide that's very reassuring.

Happy Birthday To Me!

2010-05-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

Hey there.

Still here, still reasonably content, no large life changes (apart from turning 41, but that's really not a change. Not turning 41 would have been a change. I would have blogged about that).

Also not real reason or explanation for stopping blogging. Sorry about that.

So, what did I miss describing? Visitors,* lots of work, nice weather, a few movies, some really quite good meals. And more work. I need a better class of dream or something.

Oh, and today I saw a Nuttall's Woodpecker, which I had never seen before. My new office** has huge windows that look out onto treetops, since the office borders a creek valley, and I therefore have Wildlife TV on pretty much constantly. It's nice, if distracting. Squirrel!

* Wode and Tox C., and then Mr. Too-Tall. It was great to see them all. Having Tox C. around to go yarn shopping with was especially awesometastic. Am I missing anyone? It seems like there might have been more people. My sincere apologies if I'm forgetting about you.

** Not due to a promotion; I was serious about the "no changes" thing. After STO released there was a big musical-office rearrangement as the team size changed, and I got shuffled around. I think it's an upgrade on the whole, though.

Communication breakdown

2010-03-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Complete blogging fail! OK, point-form précis of the last, oh, month or so.

- Knitting Olympics DNF. "Languishing Projects Pentathlon" too ambitious. Only completed 2/5 projects (small ones). Buttons didn't arrive in time for Big Project #1, so it was completed but not on time. Small Project #3 also completed, not on time.* Big Project #2 never even left its bag.

- Swarm of house-guests. February apparently popular time to leave Canada. Once again Bne and Ferlak part of our Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt team, with the lovely addition of The Girl. Won third place for team name ("Bright Lights, Big Kitty") and came in 25th of 111 teams for actual contest. Not bad! Raven arrived later, fun times and much eating.

- Current sewing project = the fourth Steampunk Airship uniform. Making the same thing four times is about my limit. Nova Albion ahoy!

- Very insightful discussion of the current healthcare megillah.

- Work continues. Gabriel's Theory amply borne out by observation.

- Not attending GDC. Oh well.

* Small Project #3 involved randomly placing beads, holes, and ruffles. I'm really not so good with random, to the point where apparently I get hysterical project blindness.

I believe

2010-02-11T17:22:00.001-08:00

It's the Knitting Olympics time again already. Four years just fly by! I'll have to find out if Bob and Bob are still available and interested in doing the commentary.

I'm planning a pentathlon event; I've got five things on the needles that I really ought to finish. This will be a challenge, for sure. I've gotten sick of each of the projects at least once already. One of the projects is actually older than our residence in California* so there's the additional challenge there of figuring out where I left off.

And some random links:

Pretty disturbing
I might get a tattoo... this design with this ink. How cool is that?
Life will NOT be like Star Trek
Hang This Up in Your Time Machine
And more time travel musings
How To Avoid Camera Loss (made me laugh, anyway)
Where Should I Eat? (First question = are you in Canada? Marvelous.)

* Seeing as how it's a wool sweater for R:tAG, I probably ought to make sure he's still interested.

After the ball is over, after the break of morn

2010-02-08T13:07:00.001-08:00

STO is on its way, boldly going etc. etc. etc. Reaction has been favourable on the whole. My personal warm fuzzy review so far is that the UI does not suffer any huge reproach.* The software dev team got an ice-cream cake! **

Kovbasa Steve was just here, which was great even though R:tAG and I were so busy that we didn't have near enough time to spend with him.*** Plus I was completely laid up with some kind of food poisoning for the middle of the week... about 12 hours of violent, erm, "issues" followed by about 24 hours of a healing coma. Thank goodness I was the only one affected, though it happened right after the only meal we all shared. I'd really REALLY feel bad about poisoning a guest with my cooking. I guess I got the lucky E. Coli. lettuce leaf or something.

Dundracon is coming up and there are an amazing number of LARPs. It's been a while, the pain has faded, maybe I'll get back on the horse. There's also the Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt and Stitches West to look forward to. I'm glad the crunch of the game has faded to a dull roar and I'm allowed some extracurricular activities.

* OK, literal translations are always funny. It's actually "L'interface, bien plus pratique que celle de Champions Online, ne souffre d'aucun gros reproche," from this review.

** Plus personal handmade trophies from the team manager, who is a stand-up guy. Within a few minutes we'd figured out that the little Enterprise models on the trophies were designed to come off, and we were flying the ships around making "pew-pew" noises at each other. I like the game industry.

*** And it rained pretty much all the time. But that's still preferable compared to February in Calgary.

And I don't like to have the rain on my shoes

2010-01-22T10:24:00.001-08:00

To forestall any questions about the weather and us, we're fine. It has been a lot of rain, and a lot of wind, though, and even hail and tornadoes. There was a thunderstorm a few days ago too. Very unusual for the Bay Area, but also sort of exciting.

(as an indication of how acclimatized I've become, though, I walked out of the office last night and forgot my jacket. That's overcoming a lot of Saskatchewan training, right there.)

STO Open Beta is going pretty well, I've managed to sneak fixes in for some of the little things that were bothering me, and most of the big things that broke were not directly my fault.* And right now I'm not allowed to change anything because we're building The Release Version and TPTB** want that to be as simple as possible. So I'm sort of at loose ends today. It's an odd feeling.

And I must resist the lure of online shopping. Specifically, I must not go to the Fluevog site.

Again.

I think I might have a bit of a problem. I've never considered myself a shoe person; for the majority of my life I think I pretty much owned a pair of Sorels, a pair of sneakers and a pair of black pumps.*** But in the past five years... eesh. I'm afraid to count. And there's something specifically about Fluevogs. Like these and these and these and these.**** And the boots. Oh, goodness, the boots. I've managed to talk myself out of any boots because really, where would I wear them? Don't answer that.

The other thing I love about Fluevog, by the way, is their confirmation e-mails. From their last one: "It should be noted that when your order came in earlier, a few of us sat around at break and talked about how awesome your taste and decision-making ability was." I know it's boilerplate, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy. People are funny.

* Not directly. Some stuff I did broke because some other stuff on which mine depended was updated/fixed, and I'd not done my stuff in as robust a way as I ought to have. But I think that's all sorted out now.

** The Powers That Be

*** OK, OK, I'm not counting shoes required for specific activities like playing squash, hiking, or getting married.

**** Um, yeah. I own them all. In my defense, I never paid more than half price for any of them, and look at the discount on that last pair! 85% off! I was helpless! Stupid Fluevog clearance section. Stupid, stupid Fluevog clearance section.

There's Klingons on the starboard bow

2010-01-12T17:39:00.000-08:00

First day of Open Beta, and there are lots and lots of people trying the game out. It was pretty cool to watch the numbers climb this morning. Of course, there are some issues that really only happen when you get above a certain threshold of concurrent users, and they are all happening. Well, that's what Beta's for.

I've been working about 14 hours a day for the past five days straight and I'm rather tired. And I still didn't get all the little things fixed that I wanted to get fixed.*

Thank goodness for the sea-monkeys. Seriously. They're about 0.75 cm long now and scooting around in such a lively manner that I can't get a count. I think there are about nine of them. And an unexpected side benefit is that I can send my delicate flower of an office-mate into conniptions by pretending to stick a straw into the tank and take a sip.

ETA: This. What?? It's related!

* And a few big things. But we will not speak of those.

I Love My Brine Shrimp Pals

2010-01-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

My second-favourite Christmas present: Sea-Monkeys!

I wanted them to have their birthday on Jan 1, but I didn't read the instructions and the water had to settle* for a day. So their birthday is Jan 2. They're pretty visible now, wiggling around, but I still can't see their little faces and hands and crowns. I can't wait!

It is oddly relaxing having an aquarium to stare at at work, even something as tiny as the Sea Monkeys.

* mixed with the Super-duper Wonderful Water Purification Powder!

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

2009-12-31T18:55:00.000-08:00

I realized with a start that today was the last day of 2009, Dec 31, and not just Day T-4 to the next milestone. Crunch time is... interesting. Not since university finals have I been so disassociated from the calendar.

But we did manage to grab some Christmas cheer; I attended the Dickens Faire with my airship crew:

More pix here, thanks to someone who's a much more dedicated photographer than I am. The uniforms are Laughing Moon #110 (Ladies 1890's Sporting Costumes With Leggings) with some military surplus belts and hats. I made them all (go me!) and it's definitely the most comfortable Victorian costume I've ever worn. A talented friend is working on custom belt buckles and cap pins, so if we're able to attend any other Steampunk events we'll look even better.* Miss Havisham even gave us a £5 bank draft and a dead mouse, we looked so good.**

And we went up to Cow-Town to see friends and fambly, and completely missed the horribly cold weather, and had a great time until we had to try to get back to the U.S. after the Crotch Bomber had struck. That was moderately hellish but it could have been a lot worse so I can't really complain too much. At least passengers are still allowed to wear pants, and we got home on the same day we'd planned to.

And now we have to go over to our friends' place for a party. You heard it right, we are not staying at home and being anti-social this year for New Year's! Amazing!

*And there will be four of us too!

** Charles Dickens? Great Expectations? Read a book!

Beyoooooond, the rim of star light...

2009-12-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

So if you are eagerly anticipating the game I'm working on (and you should, it's gonna be good*), you should go here, scroll down and look at the "We Want to Know" section at the bottom right, and vote. I'd prefer you vote for Star Trek Online, of course, but do what you want. I won't mind. At all.

* Seriously, very good game. Pretty too. That trailer? That's all in game footage, and I don't think it even shows the ground combat.

I'm changing my name to Chrysler, I'm going down to Washington D.C.

2009-12-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

(We didn't really change our names to Chrysler. That's just a song.)

But over U.S. Thanksgiving we went to the East Coast to see my folks and introduce R:tAG to the Smithsonian, or at least parts of the Smithsonian and other museums*, which count among my favourite places in the world. We stayed in a rental condo** in Alexandria and took the Metro into D.C. which was very convenient.

It turns out R:tAG is pretty proficient at finding his way around Washington, thanks to Fallout 3. Here he is looking for mirelurks in the Metro:

The weather was rainy but we were mostly inside anyway.

This was lava. Some geologist scooped some up with a hammer and let it harden. Note the scorched handle. Geologists are crazy.

This is the Hall of Ocean Life. There's a right whale hanging from the ceiling towards the back; I thought I also remembered a blue whale when I was a sprog but maybe it's having a rest. The Natural History museum attendance seems to be benefiting from that movie; anything that gets people into the museum, I suppose (I took this picture just at closing time; the place was actually packed all day)

No pictures from the National Gallery because they were twitchy about that. But we saw a really interesting exhibit about Spanish parade armour, as well as a lot of famous paintings and sculptures, of course. It really is better to see them in the flesh, so to speak.

And then we went back to my parents' place for a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and a bit of a rest from walking.

So it was a good trip, though about an hour after we got back to work I was thinking "Man, I need a vacation." Back to the long days and long work weeks. Le sigh.

* The Natural History Museum, the Air and Space Museum, the National Gallery and very briefly the Freer Gallery just to see the Peacock Room.

** One of those old row houses with the floor space of a two bedroom apartment. But it was quite historic and comfortable and the kitchen was nice.

With my imagination I can see it, With my pencil crayons I can draw it

2009-12-04T18:08:00.000-08:00

I like working with artists. I like going to lunch with artists. They draw all the time, and sometimes what they draw is extra awesome.*

I have a bigger post about going to the East Coast for (American) Thanksgiving, which was very fun, but I do not have the time right now to write it. Soon!

* Yes,I got a lot of hair cut off. I think I look like Severus Snape now but people have kindly told me that I don't. Much.

Green is the col... Wait, what?

2009-11-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

Wow. If somebody proposed the events of the 97th Grey Cup as a movie plot, I suspect it would be rejected for implausability.

I have never before seen defeat so comprehensively snatched from the jaws of victory. See you in 25 years, I guess.

I'm under beds makin' some noises, grabbin' some legz

2009-10-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

A picture-heavy post. It was a pretty good workplace Hallowe'en.

My office-mate* does not like creepy contact lenses. At all. He didn't know this picture was being taken; I wish actually we had a picture of a few seconds later, when he turned around. That was funny. I was Zombie Jane Austen, by the way, and I owe Cenobyte bigtime for showing me how damn awesome creepy contact lenses can be. Totally worth it.

And there were punkins:

My favourites were the Borg punkin (Cucurbita of Borg!), the skelly-punkin, and the Rorschach punkin. The Borg punkin actually had a little light-and-fog show that was pretty awesome.

* He is a Talented UI Artist, so he is sensitive. This is him, drawring.

October, And the trees are stripped bare, Of all they wear

2009-10-29T10:14:00.001-07:00

Time for what's become the monthly wrap-up, I suppose. It's not fair that I grumble about people not updating their blogs when I am just as guilty.

R:tAG's parents had their 50th anniversary party, and we of course went up for that. We arrived just in time to participate in the first major snow of the season; we exited the airport to horizontal sleet. Luckily things calmed down enough that the drive to the Anniversary Town was fine.

All but one of the original wedding party were at the head table, pictured above and decorated with a lovely korovai. The celebration was really nice; R:tAG even met some cousins that he didn't even know about (his parents both come from large families) and of course we got to see lots of family again. The Ukrainian genetics are strong; the family resemblances were striking. R:tAG's oldest nephew kept getting mistaken for R:tAG, I kept mistaking one of R:tAG's uncles for his dad.*

So it was an impressive event and once again I was danced under the table by people twice my age. I wanna learn the Schottische.

The anniversary party was in the hall of a large church; I saw this on the grounds and had to take a picture.

In case of spiritual emergencies, break glass.**

And in more recent news... well, work. Lots of work. We wanted to go to the San Francisco Opera Costume Sale but by all accounts there was a five hour line just to get in, and then a two to three hour line at the checkout. Eesh. We got to see Cori during her brief visit to the area, which was very nice. We're having the work Hallowe'en party tomorrow, and maybe there will be another blog entry if the costumes and punkins are impressive enough.*** I'm going as Zombie Jane Austen, because I'm still in the undead Regency mood. Thanks, Suz!

* In my defense, only twice, and only from across a room, and I wasn't the only one. We were joking that it was a good thing we pinned a corsage on R:tAG's dad, so that we could tell him and his brother apart.

** I assume the protective cover is a winter installation, but it still struck me funny. Cryo-angel!

*** A couple years ago, one of the pumpkin carving entries was "Meat Urchin"... a smallish pumpkin covered in hotdogs stuck endwise to the pumpkin on skewers. It was rather horrifying. Many of the other pumpkins involved LEDs and robotics. Game studio employees get weird when it comes to punkin carving.

I Am the Media

2009-09-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Strings - Fantastic movie. See it. Thanks, Tall Guy!

9 - Not to be confused with District 9, which I did for a long time, much to the bewilderment of those to whom I was speaking. It's an interesting contrast to Strings, because while Strings let me have the (to me) supremely satisfying experience of saying "I wonder why that's... oh... oh right, of course things would be that way!", 9 did the opposite. The more I thought about it, the more I was going "Wait a minute, how is that even... why would..." There's also the whole CGI versus "real" thing, and I'm glad people are still experimenting with the real. At the risk of sounding like those audiophile snobs who only ever listen to vinyl on tube amps... I like the real stuff better.

Scribblenauts - Really quite fun. I can't believe I didn't think of this. For the record, it doesn't work (you get the Starite but it's inert. Though if you throw it at a muskox you will anger the beast and it will trample you).

STOnline - Got a good response at PAX. I was very pleased to hear that the space UI isn't as impenetrable as I'd thought.* Friends and Family is going gratifyingly well for what is basically an alpha test... it's good to see that we try and improve on the past. Champions learned a lot from CoX, STO is learning a lot from Champions. Onwards and upwards!

Art You Can Eat - Just cool. I think the last one's my favourite. Again, setting up the real thing and taking pictures of it is (to me) more viscerally satisfying than if the whole thing were Photoshopped.

* I'm having to adjust my design principles slightly; having someone say "it was hard at first, but I figured it out eventually" usually triggers a redesign in "grownup" UIs. In games, having someone say this can be a good thing. Which is sort of ironic; people usually have to learn to use a UI for work, yet those UIs tend to be underdesigned (to say the least) exactly because the user doesn't usually have a choice. People will adapt to just about anything. Games, which are entirely discretionary, have to have UI that carefully steers between hand-holding (insulting) and impossible (why bother?) and tries to hit the sweet spot of overcoming-an-achievable-challenge and giving a sense of accomplishment. It's a challenge.

It Was A Zombie Jamboree

2009-09-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

We're safe back now from the Pride, Prejudice and Zombie event of the year. It was a veritable hoot and a perfect celebration of the union of two charming and... distinctive people.

I really do like driving (or even being a passenger while someone else is driving) across the prairies. I miss being able to see all of the sky. I don't know if the GPS display is visible in the picture, but it's basically a blank white rectangle (the landscape) bisected by a vertical purple line (the road). Between Calgary and Saskatoon it stays that way for about 500 km. As you can see, except for colour it's an exact representation:

We unfortunately didn't get to spend as much time in either Calgary or Saskatoon as we could have wished; we have too many other commitments coming up so it was rather a whirlwind tour and mostly taken up by The Wedding. But we did manage to see quite a few people we've been missing, and we really appreciate the friends who hosted us in both cities.

It was exciting to see so many wedding guests throw themselves into the the Regency theme, the zombie theme, or both. I am the World's Most Neglectful Photographer™ even with an iPhone, so I'm glad R:tAG got some good pictures.* You can apparently see more on this "Facebook" thingy.

Favourite quotes:

(Zombie dabbing at his eye) "I always lose flesh at weddings"

(Father of the groom beginning his toast to the couple) "Aoooohhh! Uhhh, aaaaooorrrooo uuunnnh!"

"I love Regency. If you insult someone all you have to do is nod afterwards, and it's OK"

(at the Tim Horton's in Kindersley, from a stranger) "That hand dryer in the washroom is so weak it's like having a mouse fart on you." (stay classy, Saskatchewan)

* Pattern sources: My dress, bodiced petticoat and reticule from La Mode Bagatelle. The dress is the View D bodice without the mock drop front bit, View C sleeves (the longer ones) and skirt. The pattern is spendy but you can make a complete customized Regency wardrobe from it. I'm wearing white ballet slippers. R:tAG's jacket and trousers are from Butterick B3648 and his vest is from Butterick B3721 (View B with an added stand-up collar). His shirt is from J. Peterman's because it was on sale for $25 and that's cheaper and easier than me sewing it. His neckcloth is just a triangle of cotton, 55" at the base, 11" high, and his shoes are split sole jazz shoes.

Some Sweet Blue Bonnet Spring

2009-09-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

All planned Regency items complete.* I didn't finish the spencer, but that's probably OK 'cause you don't wear those indoors anyhow.

I like making bonnets. I regret that one cannot support oneself as a milliner these days, or at least I couldn't. Mind you, that bonnet did take me about 8 hours to make but a lot of that was trial and error and bad language because I seem to be incapable of following instructions as given.** But I was clever and made the permanent bits of the bonnet in a neutral dark beige. The blue ribbons and trimmings are detachable, so as I expand my Regency wardrobe I can re-trim the bonnet to match.

Sunday was odd; I woke up early full of jittery energy. My first thought was that I was dying. But I'm still alive, and I managed to get a lot done. Including buying art. Fantastic art. This kind of art that when you see it you think "I will regret forever not making this part of my environment."

It's from a series called "Millennium Birds" by a pair of artists whose names I forget and I don't have the info with me. It's fantastic. It's got so much detail, and all the found objects just mesh so nicely, and it just makes me so happy every time I see it. There are a couple of more pictures here.

It's my 10th anniversary present to us, and a celebration of Champions Online going live and doing pretty well, and just a commemoration of being happy.

* Aw, crap, I forgot I still have to hem R:tAG's neckcloth. OK, 99.9% complete.

** And have good ideas at the point when it's almost-but-not-quite too late to implement them. For example, the brim of the base hat I used was too wide; it stuck up like a satellite dish when the hat was on. So I ripped off the three outer rounds of straw braid, but I did that after I'd cut the hat up, so the force of the ripping also ripped apart several other seams that oughtn't to have been ripped (this was not a quality hat) so I had to fix them, which meant undoing other seams and gluings.

Also, I used organdy as a lining instead of nice drapy lace, because I had some lying around. But it's a lot poofier, so wrangling that into the hat took some doing. I ended up cutting it into a sort of shallow tombstone shape because it didn't want to gather without a fight. Organdy is the soccer hooligan of fabric.

Oh help me Mrs Medlicott, I don’t know what to do

2009-08-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

(ever have a verse that gets stuck in your head and won't leave? The title is the first bit of one that I'm giving involuntary brainspace to right now...)

But as R:tAG put it:

Yay us! If you were at our wedding, do you feel old yet?

Regency trousers are done, vest is in the works*, shoes are ordered, my hat and reticule are still on deck. Prognosis for achieving full costumed status: favourable.

We attended the RiffTrax Live event here in San Jose last Thursday and it was very funny. Perhaps not the best thing to attend with a friend who is suffering from a double hernia** though. I was also thinking of what they could have done to make it feel more like a live distributed event... this is a cool thing to do and it's odd that it just still felt like we were watching a taped live performance, if that makes sense.

So of course I started thinking about the U of C HCI lab and their Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) projects because they had some really neat ideas (even years and years ago when I was in academia) on how to make people who are geographically separated feel like they are still working together. So now I'm thinking of designs to make people in ~200 theatres feel like they are having a shared experience, without that becoming the main event. Like Walt Whitman nothing good will come of it,*** but it's a neat problem.

Oh, and here are some random links. It's been a while since I've done random links:

Otter Half
ZooBorns - As good as Cute Overload but without the tooth-gratingly twee text.
Cute Kitten - Hi, Bne!
Wondermark
A Handy Flowchart
Zebras

Hm. A picture-heavy link list, I notice. Maybe I've used all my words.

ETA: Yep, I'd used all my words before I mentioned that Terry and Dancin' Cicada Jen paid us an all-too-short visit last week. It was great, though it was such short notice... only six weeks!**** We just hung out and talked, really, but we also found this good Ethiopian place. Ethiopian bread is like eating sour J-cloths... but in a really good way. Yum.

* With the caveat that the collar modification is still unimplemented. And that rayon brocade is a slippery bitch goddess.

** Not a figure of speech, alas. Poor guy.

*** Hi, Cenobyte!

**** The sarcasm hand sign is up.

I'll cut it with these scissors, And I can do the sewing

2009-08-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

Coat: complete! I am happy that R:tAG is a perfect Butterick XL. I can follow any kind of correct instruction, but making diagnostic alterations* apart from a bigger or smaller hem is beyond me.

I was very happy with the pattern; Butterick 3648. It's not actually Regency, more early Victorian (note the waist seam, the square transition between the body of the coat and the tails, and the curved bottom of the tails) but the pattern was cheap, the right size**, clearly written, makes a well-designed piece of clothing, and was quickly and easily acquired. I should have made the collar facing velvet, really, but I couldn't find any in a matching green or brown and didn't have time to experiment with dye. So it's only the buttonholes/buttons to do on that. Yay!

I also made the muslin of the trousers (which, thank goodness, also require no alteration) and I think I've figured out a collar for the vest.

And I got the stuff to make a bonnet and reticule for me, so we'll see is there's time. August is just speeding by!

* i.e. saying "Oh, the horizontal wrinkles mean it's too tight here, so I need to change the seam/shape in this way..."

** Men's Regency costume patterns are not that easy to come by. The only other one I found has a reputation of running very small (and R:tAG is just barely within its upper size range), and also has reported other errors. As I said, I'm not that proficient a tailor to overcome these obstacles on a tight timeline.

The child behind Jane Austen's door

2009-08-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

I am falling behind in my sewing. The trouble with most costumes is that one needs the proper underpinnings to get the right look... the term "foundation garment" is completely accurate, in an architectural sense. So my Regency dress meant a bodiced petticoat* first. And then the dress fabric I chose (an embroidered cotton voile) was so sheer that I had to do handsewn buttonholes. And then there was the whole "inside out French seam" incident and the "drawstring casing on the outside" incident, of which I will not speak except to say that I think I have an inner ear disorder.

But at last, the dress is done!

It's hanging before its final hemming right now, and I have to see if it will fit on my tailor dummy. I really hope it does, because it makes hemming so much easier, but the "Regency silhouette" involves rearranging squishy bits which is impossible with my packing-tape dummy. The really hard-core costumers make different dummies while wearing different undergarments... one with an Elizabethan/Tudor corset, one Regency, one Victorian, etc.. I'm not that obsessed and/or blessed with storage space.

It has to be R:tAG's coat next, because in a pinch he can wear modern trousers and I can't make the vest until I see how the coat fits, because I'm altering his Victorian vest pattern to have a higher collar.** So then we'll see if I have time to make the cute spencer for myself. At least I don't have to have a hat, though a reticule would be nice. And shoes. I have to find shoes.

All this, and ten hour days at work! Whee!

* Which combines a chemise, corset and petticoat thus saving a few steps at least.

** I hope I'll just have to add a stand-up collar piece, but I also need to check the length to make sure it peeps out below the coat's waist in a stylish fashion.

Tentacles!

2009-07-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

Two posts in as many days?!!!??? Madness!

But I couldn't not share these items,* for the sake of the world. H.P. Lovecraft apparently wrote documentaries. Save yourselves!

Atlantic Herring Is Going Wild
Huge Blob of Arctic Goo - It's a shuggoth, people!

* There's nothing I don't like about double negatives!

Here comes mosquitoes from a damp green Japanese garden

2009-07-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

Not much of real interest, but I'm making a conscientious effort to update more often. I guess it's Twitter envy or something.

Since we have a Regency wedding to look forwards to, I've been immersing myself a bit; re-reading Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights*, and Persuasion, and looking around for inspiration for my dress. R:tAG, as always, amiably agreed to dress up too** so I've got a fair bit of sewing to do.*** I need to figure out the dress that I will be most likely to use again; unfortunately the archtypical "nice" dress of the time was white, and I don't want to look like I'm competing with the bride, of course.

Speaking of costumes (nice segue, eh?) we are very probably not going to GenCon this year. It is too close to the release date for R:tAG's game, and my game is not going to be featured at all at GenCon (its big marketing début is going to be PAX, which ironically is the same weekend as the aforementioned Regency wedding. Admire the multi-layered segue!) so we won't be going for work, and there are too many other events in the fall for which we must husband (wife?) our personal resources.

On the weekend, we went up to The City to see Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine, which was a cabaret-style show of lounge covers of songs that one would not expect to hear in that style. I think my personal favourite was the theme song for "The Greatest American Hero." I cannot believe that I have brain cells devoted to remembering that song. The opening band was Project Pimento and I can now say I've seen a lounge theramin band. They were surprisingly good.

And the next day, a friend was in town from England and (because we never do anything interesting unless its under the spur of out-of-town visitors) we took him to Hakone Gardens which we've been meaning to visit for ages. Although the day was a bit too hot, and the season for most of the flowers has passed, the gardens are still very nice and I'm glad we finally went. Feeding carp is fun.

* It's been a long time since I read this, but man! It's not a romance at all, is it? It's a horror story. And I don't mean the bit with the ghost at the beginning. Catherine and Heathcliff are terrifying.

** Not the Father Christmas outfit. Don't encourage him.

*** Though in a pinch he can wear his ~1860 frock coat. What's 50 years more or less?

Oh, Canada!

2009-07-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

Happy Canada Day. I am waving the flag.

Literally, because it creates a slight breeze. The AC in our office is completely out. It's about 95F in here. I no think good.

Brain needs cold.

Free popsicles are supplied by management in attempt to avoid heat stroke epidemic. I am considering stuffing one up each nostril to cool my brain off.

Bad idea?

She had six strong legs and it frightened me, She had insect eyes, but I could still see, That the looks she gave him, you give to me

2009-06-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

It was hot over the weekend. Miserably hot. So hot that I couldn't tell if I had a fever or not*. The official temperature was 103F (40C) but I'm pretty sure it was hotter in our house.

But we went to a Canada Day celebration, the regular Digital Moose Lounge one at Huddart Park and because it was up in the hills and in the big trees, the heat wasn't so bad. The bottomless beer took the edge off quite nicely too, though it was still hot enough that buying the specially imported Canadian chocolate bars ended up being an adventure in creative eating.**

And on Sunday, it being too hot to create anything big or requiring counting, I made a new friend. Literally:

It's hard to get an idea of scale from that picture, isn't it? The abdomen fits nicely in my hand, anyway. I didn't make up the pattern; it's from Amigurumi Knits which is my current favourite book.***

This weekend is a long one, I think, and I am happy. Work has been fairly high pressure. We start the "friends and family" test of our game in a couple of weeks so there's a lot of work to do. If you're interested in participating, by the way, drop me a line.**** It'll be a pre-alpha test... as the executive producer says, we're just opening it to people on whom we can count to go "Oh, it's a very nice game, dear!" and forgive us much.

* I think I did, because I also had a sore throat and that feeling like your sinuses have been packed with Tabasco-flavoured PlayDoh™. But along with the heat there was an air quality warning, so everything might have actually been external.

** Best option; bite just the corner off the package and squeeze the contents into your mouth. Pretending you're an astronaut is optional.

*** Come on, a knitted anglerfish with optional parasitic male? This is the best knitting pattern book ever.

**** Knowing a) how to do that and b) what game I'm working on is part of the "friends and family" validation. Otherwise, sorry, beta will be soon!

The Whole Trip Rubs It In That Time Is Passing

2009-06-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's May already...

Aw, crap.

Um, so we had some birthdays in there, and stuff happened, and the weather was lovely. And we worked a lot. There. I now have the perfect generic blog post.

Oh, all right, more details. Carl and MacChick got married in a lovely ceremony, and there were many out of town guests that it was lovely to see again (and some in-town guests too; we don't socialize as often as we ought).

We didn't go to KublaCon or BayCon, which was poor form on our parts but long weekends are damn few and far between here.

We went on a Vampire Walking Tour of San Francisco with Wode which was very entertaining, and we also (finally!) went to the Ferry Building and got lots of good stuff to eat.

I crocheted a darkmantle for R:tAG for a birthday present. Unfortunately it tried to eat his head, 'cause that's what darkmantles do best:

And Carl and MacChick and I went to Maker Faire which was even bigger than last year and included a new food and agricultural section and now I really want to do vermicomposting. And the steampunk mobile home was there again, and the motorized cupcakes and the Diet-Coke-And-Mentos guys and big robotic statue things on fire, wheee! R:tAG had to work, booooo!

And then my car battery died all dead, and nearly stranded R:tAG, and when I took it to the mechanic to make sure that's all that was wrong of course they found all the other maintenance items that I haven't really been keeping up with, and the timing belt needs replacing, and the tires are almost bald, and so that's going to be spendy. Still, cheaper than buying a new car plus I can remain debt-free.

And that's all I can think of and my RCS checkout's almost done, and I've got a ton of work to do on the Star Trek space controls (my job is letting people fly spaceships... whee!) so I'll try and update in a more timely fashion in the future.

Have You Seen The Little Piggies?

2009-04-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

I think the best commentary on swine flu is here (or maybe here), though I found this article about the Canadian National Microbiology Lab interesting too. It's nice to hear about emergency procedures that work.

I mainly just wanted to have a post for April on the blog; missing a whole month just seems unacceptable. Work is fine; making games is very interesting not least because of the work environment. This is typical:

He's been moving around the building, and you never know where he'll turn up.

Oh, and we went to Disneyland last weekend, to celebrate Macchick's impending nuptials.* I hadn't been since 1991, and things have definitely expanded. There's a whole 'nother park beside Disney now, which contains among other things careful reconstructions of bits of Northern California.** What has not expanded is my capacity for roller coasters, unfortunately (the opposite, in fact) so I was feeling rather wobbly by the end of the day. But there were lots of non-nausea-inducing activities also.***

I rather liked this street; the end of it is a clever facade.

And we had a fantastic brunch at a sort of secret restaurant because Macchick's sister's friend's parents (I think?) were members and gave us access. And we went on all the old favourites like the Haunted House and Pirates of the Caribbean and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and a bunch of new stuff too. The fireworks that night were cancelled due to high winds (boo!) but that was the only blot on the day.

Good Movies We've Seen

Monsters Vs. Aliens
Let The Right One In (you have to surrender yourself to the pacing. It's a dream-y movie.)

Bad Movies We've Seen

Pineapple Express (Don't bother. Just don't)

Bad Movies That We're Looking Forwards To Seeing Because Of the Riff Trax

Twilight

* Saying "nuptials" in a creepy old man voice was a running joke of the weekend.

** Which was odd. They have mini-replica of Cannery Row, except it's the restored version of Cannery Row minus the tourist tat. So it's a reproduction of something that never actually existed, which made my head hurt.

*** Like the Muppet Show! You could sit in a theater and be part of the Muppet Show! Squee!

These foolish games are tearing me apart

2009-03-31T22:18:00.000-07:00

No excuse of malfunctioning phone lines this time, just the odd antisocial malaise that seemed to come with being unemployed, for me at least. I got a lot done, though not as much as I could have/should have.*

I am employed now, though, yay, in a fairly recession-proof industry. Yep, R:tAG and I are now, efficiently enough, laboring side by side in the same salt mine. The interview was amusing; I have never before had my interviewer say, seriously, “We’re just a bit worried that you don’t play enough games.” The UI design challenges of a game, especially an MMO, are intriguingly different from those of a control system application. I’m having to think again. Ow.

The other problem with such a long pause is all the little gems that I thought at the time “I really ought to remember to blog about this” are of course lost in the mists. Here are the few that survived:

The movie Bon Cop Bad Cop is worth watching, I think, in a black-comedy kind of way.

Watchmen was a really reasonable adaptation of the graphic novel. About the only things I didn’t much like were Bubastis (why bother?) and ::clears throat nervously:: the soundtrack. Not that I didn’t like each song (I don’t really need to get the movie soundtrack because I own the majority of the songs already). I just didn’t think the soundtrack did what a soundtrack should; I thought it competed with the movie instead of supporting it.**

There was an exhibit at the De Young Museum where local florists used a work of art as an inspiration for a floral display. It was really fantastic. Some floral arrangements were amazing copies, some were more “inspired by”, but it was very interesting. More photos are here.

Coraline was a pleasure.

Repo: A Genetic Opera was extraordinarily disturbing and fascinating. Brazil meets Sweeny Todd with a dash of Sin City?

* All costumes are not complete, all minis are not painted. On the other hand, a lot of knitting is knat.

** For me, on a lot of levels. First level was the simple distraction of “Ooh, I like this song,” followed by “So this is supposed to be an alternate timeline but events were still similar enough for this band to write this song?” followed by “I wonder if they subtly changed the song to reflect the alternate timeline?” followed by “If they didn’t, why did they pick this song?” followed by “Oh, what just happened?”

Blame It On The Rain

2009-03-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

Well, sorry for the hiatus. For once it’s not exactly my fault; our landline and internet were down for ~~four days~~ ~~five days~~ almost a week and while we still had our iPhones, they are not so good for composing long stretches of text.* But today the nice technician dug up a flowerbed and fixed the problem, so we are connected again.

The endless rain may have been a factor in the line failure, but I still cannot be unhappy about it because it has been so dry for so long here. Apparently, though, all this rain still isn’t helping reservoir levels because it’s all soaking into the parched ground. Oh well, it’s better than not having the rain.

Being incommunicado like that was especially inconvenient for me because I am once again jobless. The startup I was working for is now an enddown. But to be honest, I’m enjoying being able to catch up on some completely non-computer related commissions** and since we have no debts, no dependants and no expensive addictions*** I can take some time off. I’m just irritated that this didn’t happen when we had visitors; I could have spent a lovely time with them. Ah well.

And I am still managing to amuse myself, of course. Stitches West was last Friday and I bought a bit of yarn. A little bit. Hardly anything, really. And the next day R:tAG had to go to WonderCon so I went up and joined him and wandered around the dealer floor a bit and met a Surprise Guest:

Hee! Adam Baldwin actually looks younger and thinner in person than he did as Jayne, which isn’t usually how these things work but he seems like a really nice guy, and was very kind to fans.

And then we went to see Video Games Live because we’d missed it at GenCon last year, and it was excellent. The Fox Theater is a beautiful old building, too, and they stock Hendrick’s Gin at the bar, so I heartily endorse it.

* Plus some websites don’t work so well with the mobile flavour of Safari.

** Costuming and mini-painting.

*** I keep telling myself that yarn is relatively cheap. You know, compared to heroin.

What's funny all depends upon your point of view

2009-02-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

And… breathe. No more visitors for a while. I fear the snarky comments of my Wii Fit trainer; eating, drinking and watching movies with real friends somehow took priority over strength training and yoga with an imaginary friend.

We did do the Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt* and though our team performed better than last year we didn’t get in the top five this year. We also didn’t get a team name prize, much to our disappointment**. But we all had a lot of fun, and didn’t get rained on that night (amazing!). The promised “beautiful weather in February” did not materialize, though; it was pretty much overcast and damp all the time. It still is. Still, it beats -40.

And the Ferlak and I got to go see elephant seals at Año Nuevo Park.*** Here are some pictures. It was raining off and on, but it was still pretty cool. I only had the mediocre cell phone camera so the pics of the seals are not as impressive as they should be. The big bulls are about 5,000 pounds and can move surprisingly fast. They are also loud.

And a kind gentleman took a picture of us, all sneaky-like:

After the seal pups are weaned, they are called “weaners”. Really! They stay on the beach until they’ve grown enough to swim; for a while they are so fat that if they do get into the water they just bob up and down like buoys. And the mortality rate for pups is really high, about 90% over three years, so sometimes a pup can feed from multiple mothers who have lost their own pups. Seal milk is something like 55% fat (like triple-cream Brie) so these multiple-feeding pups get almost spherical and are called “super-weaners”. That made me unreasonably happy**** but we didn’t get to see any super-weaners, alas.

Oh, and the post title comes from a song about the elephant seals of Año Nuevo.

* R:tAG didn’t; he lounged in coffee shops and watched the parade.

** “The Man From U.N.G.U.L.A.T.E (United Network of Grass-eating Udder-bearing Livestock And Taurine Enforcement)”

*** Not Ano Nuevo. The tilde is crucial.

**** And it also made me think of Bob the Kitten, who was the feline equivalent.

It's a tourist attraction, it will never be the same

2009-02-02T17:31:00.000-08:00

Wow, lots of snow in London. When I was living in Brighton circa 1993 it snowed only about 1” (very unusual) and the place shut down. My flatmates and I stayed home, made snacks, and watched from our fifth floor window as drivers unfamiliar with the physics of ice slid around the corner of our square and smacked into the iron railings around the centre. Good times, good times.

We had guests and fun the week before last. We will have guests and fun next week.

Things our just-past guests introduced to us:

The Fall in Blu-ray. Absodamnlutely amazing.
Max Raabe. I now really really like Oops, I Did It Again. Who knew that all it took was covering it in 1930’s German nightclub style?
Making hair falls out of scrap yarn.
Four player Little Big Planet.
An awesome salad with chicken breasts, dried cranberries, goat cheese, avocados, and sunflower seeds.

Things we introduced our just-past guests to:

Commentary: The Musical.
Blu-ray and its effect on fifty five inches of liquid crystal love (thanks, Ferlak)
Beautiful weather in January

Things we will be introducing our next guests to:

Elephant seals
The Chinese New Year’s Treasure Hunt
Our new robot. We have a useful robot! I love technology!
Beautiful weather in February

Things we will not be introducing our next guests to:

Plenty of Room at the Hotel California

2009-01-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

The weather here is perfect, and will be for the foreseeable future, apparently. 21 C, cloudless, windless. Trees are blooming early:*

And this is a pretty bad thing, actually. We’ve had almost no rain this winter, again. I heard a report of a grass fire (first one of the year) a few days ago, and this is awfully early to be having grass fires. We’ll be rationing water by April at this rate.

On the up side, it’s nice to have perfect weather for this, the first day of Visitor Season. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

* This is a “tulip magnolia," because it looks like someone wired tulips onto a magnolia. I guess it was 4:50 on a Friday at the Office of Tree Naming when they came up with that one. I took this picture on the way back from lunch. Life's tough.

Oh California, I'm Coming Home

2009-01-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

Guess what one of my New Year’s resolutions wasn’t? I’ll give you a hint; it rhymes with “fegular glogging.”*

So we went back up to the frozen North for the holidays, and managed to hit the window of bearable weather. It was -33 the night we arrived, but warmed up to -16 and stayed there, and stayed pretty clear, for our whole visit. The storms in Vancouver affected us hardly at all, and all in all it was as smooth a trip as one could ask for. I don’t mind winter at all when it knows its place.

Apparently also I am “turning into an American” according to R:tAG. On landing in Edmonton, normally right after Customs they have a place where you hand your checked-and-tagged-through luggage over to be put on your domestic flight. You have to go through security again, but at least you don’t have to check your luggage again. But when we were there, that place was closed and we were faced with having to wait in the blocks-long ticket line even though we had our boarding passes, luggage was tagged, etc. So I snuck under the cattle-chute railing thingys, found an unoccupied and helpful airline employee** and asked him (nicely!) if he could just take our tagged luggage and put it on the Magic Conveyor Belt, and he could and did. But apparently the Canadian thing to do would have been to unnecessarily wait for an hour in the queue, getting overheated (-er) and grumpy(-ier), until a different employee put our tagged luggage on the Magic Conveyor Belt. WhatEVer.

Anyway, it was fantastic to see friends and family again. Coming back during the holidays is hit-or-miss; on the one hand people are more likely to be busy and/or out of town and on the other hand people From Away are more likely to be in town. So we missed seeing some people, but had the delightful surprise of seeing others (Neuba, Mr. J., Baby Quinn, Furious B***, Ty, Bne) and of course the non-surprised delight of seeing the regular residents.

And because we R SMRT, we took some extra days off so as to be able to lounge idly around the house when we returned, which was also fantastic.

R:tAG got us one of these for Christmas,**** and I’ve got little baby plants already after starting them on Dec. 29. I should take a picture, shouldn’t I? They are very cute. After the herbs are done I think I’ll try the salad mix… for just the two of us that seems like it will keep us in salads for a while, and the lettuce shouldn’t bolt or wilt or get et by slugs like it does when I try to grow it outside.

EDITED TO ADD: A picture! The two pods to the far left (mint and parsley) still have their little domes on because they were late germinators and still need a bit of protection. Go team chive, though!

* Not that I make New Year’s resolutions anyway.

** I know!

*** Plus SO, with whom I am sad I didn’t get to spend more time because she seems awesometastic.

**** I was looking around that site, and the “Accessories” section is a hoot. Or am I the only one that finds the thought of a special apron to put on while you’re “tending your Aerogarden” pretty funny? It’s a mini hydroponic system about the size of a watermelon. You might as well have special protective garments for getting a can of Coke from a vending machine.

Don We Now Our Gay Apparel

2008-12-19T17:48:00.000-08:00

Inspired by his post, I’m thinking about clothes. One thing about a big move (when one is not accustomed to them) is that you have a pretty accurate dividing line between pre-move clothes and post-move clothes.* Interestingly, my clothes appear to have a half-life of four years.** There are some spectacular hold-outs; I have a plain black sweatshirt from about 1985 that’s battered but still in service, and of course things like dress coats hang around longer. Like the gentleman to whom I originally referred, I’m a believer in paying for quality because I tend to use things until they wear out. It irritates me that women’s fashion fights me in this; I have a quite expensive suit that I bought in my last year of college for interviews that is too damn ‘80s to wear these days.***

To continue in the vein of consumerism (‘tis the season!) we got an espresso maker. I have to say, it’s awesome. We bought it through Woot, so at about 70% less than regular retail price, and I really think it’s paid for itself. We haven’t been to Starbucks in ages, and not even to Peet’s nearly as often. My dad gave me the heads-up about the Woot offer on my iPhone when I was sitting by our friends’ pool in Phoenix, I ordered it then and there, and it arrived the next week. I really really like technology. R:tAG was able to make really good espresso almost instantly; it took me a bit longer to figure out the mysteries of grind and tamping. He was insisting on being addressed as “The Bean Whisperer” for a while, but I refused to indulge him.

A good thing to do, by the way, is take a double shot of espresso and add hot chocolate mix and honey (proportions to taste). That’s called a “Black Velvet”, and was apparently invented by a barista at a coffee shop near my parents’ place. I salute him.

To continue in the vein of food (‘tis also the season!), we had a potluck lunch at work today and these are a good and easy thing to bring to a potluck. I think they’d be even better with anchovies, but I am respectful of the sensibilities of my vegetarian co-workers. They outnumber me.

* I mean, I can manage to remember in which country I bought a particular item of clothing. Not much else.

** I’m going to try to forestall smart-ass comments and remind y’all that the concept of half-life does not necessarily have anything to do with radioactivity. It’s just the period of time after which there is only half of the original substance remaining, for whatever reason.

*** Plus I’ve gotten slightly broader across the beam since 1991. I can squeeze into the pencil skirt but a containment breach is a real possibility.

You left me standing here a long, long time ago

2008-12-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

The less one blogs, the harder it is to get started again. I will explain. No, it is too much. I will sum up.

I missed International Invent A Horrible Soup Day.

We went to Dia de los Muertos party that our Phoenix friends hosted, which was much fun but which reinforced my desire to not live in Phoenix. I know that technically it is very similar to living in Saskatchewan* but I don’t care for being uncomfortably hot, much less in November. That’s just wrong.

By the way, if you have babies to put into costumes (you know, before they’re old enough to fight back) you should peruse these ideas. These ones in particular. Please won’t somebody with a baby get one of those? For me? It’d be even better if it weren’t Halloween, but I’m not fussy.

The US election turned out well, I thought, though I was just glad it was over.** My only concern now is trusting anyone who would want to be President, given all the current crap. The federal election was also an opportunity for individual states to do the voting thing, and California really disappointed me with Proposition 8. Happily, there are court cases going forwards because putting minority rights up to a popular vote is not really the ideal American way of doing things. It’s made me think a lot about privilege in general, though. I like the idea I read somewhere the best; let’s treat same-sex marriage like carbon credits. For every two heterosexual divorces, we can let one homosexual couple get married. The exact number is open to negotiation, of course; even a ten-to-one ratio might make everyone happy.

I said a while ago that I should really get to Venice before it’s too late, since I didn’t learn that lesson in time for New Orleans. Well, hell.

And now it’s almost Christmas, it still hasn’t really rained here (since, um, March maybe? And last year was also very dry) so next spring it might be us that gets the big wildfires instead of LA. Boy, looking forward to that.***

We’re going to the Dickens Fair sometime soon. I spent all Thanksgiving weekend making a dress for it (what, everyone doesn’t spend their long weekends making costumes?) but then I found out there’s a special Steampunk day. Sigh. Decisions, decisions.

And that’s all I can think of.

Edited to Add: Finally remembered to take a picture of the dress. It still needs hemming, and I'm showing it without the knitted lace collar and the white undersleeves.

It's actually taffeta from the Interior Decorating section of Joann's because I really liked the colour... so yes, it's a Civil War(ish) dress made out of curtains. Just call me Scarlett.

And I didn't mention that we got new bookcases, did I? We got new bookcases. From Ikea, the "Billi" style. I like the glass doors. They keep the dust off, unify the look, and discourage me from putting random stuff down on the shelves "temporarily" instead of putting away properly.

* For about half of the year, going outside is very unpleasant and you stick to climate-controlled areas. For most of the rest of the year, it’s all right with a few perfect days.

** An educational perspective is here, though.

*** Sarcasm hand sign here

I Think We’re Alone Now

2008-10-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

Quite the blogging gap, there. Some of it was due to my eccentric reluctance to mention visitors when they’re visiting, out of some fear that an IntarWeb Stalker will deduce that they’re not home and, I don’t know, shave their pets or something. Some of it was due to very bad family news that I don’t want to reduce to a footnote. Some of it was just because of the good ol’ lazy.

Anyway, I took a few pictures of our guests and they’re safely home now.* The guests, not the pictures. We went to Monterey Bay Aquarium which is where all these pictures come from; I am not a persistent or mindful photographer even though I now have a camera with me at all times. Thanks, iPhone!

There is a place where you can crunch down in a little Plexiglas bubble and let a breaking wave crash over you. I think Rilla is imitating the fish.

R:tAG could not come with us because he was officiating at a chili cook-off for fans. So we made him a Space Otter puppet as consolation. We got some Looks in the crafts room, because we were accompanied by neither children nor adults, but we had fun. The Space Otter’s phaser is especially cool, I think (it’s to open the Space Clam that he’s holding in his other paw. Space Otters have evolved beyond rocks!). Most of the otter was pre-printed shapes to colour and cut out, but surprisingly we had to make our own phaser. Kaz did a great job with it.

And then we ate at a restaurant that was on a pier sticking out into the bay, and it was pretty good despite the aggressive seagulls and the attack seal.**

We (all of us) also went to the Exploratorium, which we’d never been to before (shame! Shame!) and despite ferocious traffic*** it was fun too. The docents there wear bright orange vests with “EXPLAINER” on them in big letters. I want one.

And there was sangria, and the Venture Brothers, and Guillotine, and D&D 4th Ed., and 80’s retrospectives, and sunburn, and eating and hanging out. It was a good time.

And we (R:tAG and I; our guests had left by then (or so we thought… they were actually still at the airport but we didn’t know that)) also saw Igor which was pretty good but not a children’s movie yet not quite an adult movie either. Pretty, though.

* After a cancelled flight and a day delay. Yay airlines! ::sarcasm hand sign here::

** The pier is beside a small beach, and there are a lot of seals and otters just off shore. So I was glancing at the water, and I saw a seal head poking up (not unusual) and heading at a really high speed towards the beach, directly for some wading children (unusual). I was just about to call attention to what I thought would be a Fox headline (“When seals attack!”) when the “seal’s” shoulders and body came into view and I realized it was actually a dog playing fetch.

*** We’d decided to take the scenic route to the Exploratorium, up I-280 and through Golden Gate Park, but the Academy of Science opened that same day, in the park, and had 10,000 visitors and, well, we chose poorly.

When You're a Professional Pirate, You Don't Have To Wear A Suit

2008-09-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

Q: Why is pirating addictive?
A: Once you lose your first hand, you get hooked!

Q: Why do pirates always bury their treasure 18 inches below th' ground?
A: Because booty is only shin deep!

Q: Why does it take pirates so long t' learn t' read?
A: Because they spend years at C!

Arrr, happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine

2008-09-03T19:27:00.000-07:00

To be more precise, “Relocations to take advantage of economic opportunities, and the concomitant expansion of social connections, are breaking up that old gang of mine” but that’s harder to fit to a catchy tune.

The Wedding of the Year was awesome, because it was a celebration of the union of two lovely people of course, but also because it was a chance to see so many old friends who have scattered to all corners of the earth. We are running out of good reasons to get together, unless somebody converts to Judaism in time for a child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

The wedding was in Ottawa* and we took the time to see some sights** as well as a jaunt up to Montreal*** to see my sister, her husband, and their cute offspring.

Highlights of the trip:

Having the sweetly sincere wedding officiant gush over the symbolism of the eagle that she’d seen flying overhead earlier, then her saying “Oh, how wonderful, there it is again!” as she pointed upwards to a turkey vulture. I’m sure it’s still very symbolic of something, though.
The wedding cake being a three-tiered tray of Timbits. Genius!
Seeing “Red Max” meet the man who privatized the Saskatchewan mining industry.
A presentation at the War Museum on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, explained by a guy wearing a Leafs jersey and a guy wearing a Canadiens jersey, watching the battle from a couch with comments like “Montcalm is leaving the high ground? What is he thinking?!?” When they started discussing the consequences of the battle, the camera moved back to reveal a third (Native) guy in a Canucks jersey (“Hey, when did you get here?” “I was here all the time, man.”) and, well, it was just really really funny and very Canadian.****
Hearing that my niece and nephew are a 7 year old Jamaican and a “forty-twenty” year old Japanese, respectively. *****
The expression on my love’s face when he finally got a plate of smoked meat poutine. It was everything he'd hoped for.

Not so good parts of the trip:

Picking up a nasty wet sinus cold from somewhere. I apologise to anyone I involuntarily infected, since I was probably “shedding virus” (as the kids say) on Saturday and Sunday before I felt the symptoms.
Forgetting to reserve a rental car on Labour Day weekend (like that wouldn’t be a high demand time) and having to do some unnecessary imposing-on-friends and expensive running about to procure one.
Mosquitoes. I’d forgotten about mosquitoes, though the smell of Deep Woods Off actually made me get all nostalgic, if you can imagine. Proust can keep his lime-flower tea; I have my DEET.

* Outside Ottawa, technically, at a lovely riverside country inn.

** The Museum of Civilization, the War Museum (I only got through a part of it, but that was more than I thought I’d be able to handle), Byward Market, the Manx pub, the Brig, Darcy McGee's… um, I guess I shouldn’t list bars, should I?

*** Outside Montreal, technically.

**** And it included the Anglo guy telling the Francophone guy "It was a long time ago, man, just get over it!" and the Native guy commenting on the influx of British refugees following the American Revolution with "Just what we needed... more white guys."

***** This is not actually the case. Just thought I’d be clear.

And Another Thing

2008-08-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

The last post was awfully long, with the zombie pictures and everything, so here’s the overflow.

A while ago a group in an on-line community that I belong to (the Ankh-Morpork Knitters’ Guild on Ravelry) decided to create a group afghan for Terry Pratchett, the author of the books upon which the group is based who was recently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.* We finally got it done, and the lovely lady who volunteered to sew all the squares together and back it got a chance to present it to Mr. Pratchett in person. Here’s a more comprehensive picture of it; assuming (1,1) is the top left square my squares are at (9,3) (a hedgehog) and (9,9) (red and white striped stocking close-up). I am quietly proud.

And the last GenCon post was more about the zombies than it was about the steampunk, wasn’t it? Rest assured that the steampunkery was not neglected!** The dance on Saturday was a steampunk theme, and yours truly and cenobyte were in fact featured (in last years’ costumes) on Page 100 of the event guide, as part of the dance advert. Again, I am quietly proud. However, I am lacking pictorial evidence of our costumes this year, since my brain was starting to leak quietly out my ears by Saturday (so I didn’t take any of myself) and I cannot find anything with a quick Google. I started making my buckled overskirt at 11:00 PM the evening before we left*** and it turned out pretty well though I need some kind of butt-bow**** to cover the placket in the back and it can benefit from more trimmings as well as something other than a safety pin to hold it closed. I may wear it to the Handcar Regatta if we can go this year.

And here’s something not related to anything else, but it’s funny; an MST treatment of some really really REALLY bad fanfic. Like, almost “Eye of Argon” bad (which itself has been MSTed here). It’s a Sailor Moon + Daria crossover. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And another thing... ChaCha is a new service that provides free answers to questions that you call or text in. It's people doing this; ChaCha has literally thousands of people (who get paid $0.20 per question) who do all the lookups for you and/or provide an opinion. If you've read The Diamond Age, you'll probably see this, as I did, as yet another example of Neal Stephenson's prescience... these people are prototype ractors. Technology provides the tools for people to interact with people, not the replacement. Interesting.

* Grammarians, I dare you to diagram that sentence!

** For example, we brainstormed some great ideas for a steampunk action movie, the tagline of which will be "I am vexed by these thrice-cursed marmosets on this thrice-cursed zeppelin!"

*** Why does inspiration always arrive when one doesn’t have the time to properly entertain it?

**** Yes, that’s the official tailoring term.

I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

2008-08-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

We're back from GenCon 2008, and I'm glad to be home in dry, cool(ish) weather.* We met up with Cenobyte, and QKv2.0, and Suz + Cheruby, and the Too Tall Guy, and Thunderhowl and Ferlak.** Here's a picture of most of them all together, too. R:tAG had to work through most of the con, but their game has gotten a lot of interest so yay!***

It was very fun. I bought some very pretty stuff, like a Shoggoth necklace complete with running victim:

And a Cthulhu necklace with a lovely piece of mother-of-pearl:

Pictures do not do them justice, especially with a cell-phone camera, but our real digital camera is on the fritz. They are handmade in silver by an artist from Quebec, and they're really lovely.

And we dressed up. Here is a photojournal of the Victorian Zombie experience:

BRAAAAAINS!
DRAAAAIIINS!
GRAAAAAINS!!!
LAAAAANES!
REFRAAAAAINS!

STAAAAAAINS!
TRAAAAAIIINS!

And probably my favouritest pic of them all:

The little girl in the stroller would not stop laughing and smiling at us. Even when we told her we would eat her brains, her smile got wider and wider, and as her parents wheeled her off we heard a high-pitched little "om nom nom!" receding into the distance. Epic zombie fail!

More GenCon pictures here, more zombie pictures here. Good times. I didn't take enough pictures at the Steampunk Ball, though. Phoo. And a small child vomited on my luggage on the airplane home. But apart from that, good times!

* Though Indianapolis was actually pretty dry and cool for the time of year. Not like last year, when walking outside was like being slapped with a hot sweaty sock.

** My one intentional pic of Thunderhowl turned out terrible, and I have none of The Mysterious Ferlak at all.

*** And yes, he is going up to Toronto in two days for another convention. No, I don't know how he does it.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2008-08-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

R:tAG is feeling better, but everyone should still noodzh him into seeing a physiotherapist to find out what preventative measures he can take. And then noodzh him into actually taking those preventative measures.

So I didn’t want to really mention this at the time, because of perhaps over-thought privacy concerns and everything, but the “quite a lot of stuff” that I mentioned in my last post including entertaining the fabulous Neuba and James, seen here experiencing Bay Area prices* for the first time:

Despite R:tAG’s lack of mobility we got a reasonable amount of stuff done, showing our guests some of our favourite places and also turning them loose to fend for themselves (and walk for miles; sorry about that) when we had to work. So it was an excellent visit and it was wonderful to see them again!

If you like fantasy on the order of George R. R. Martin or Warhammer (low, gritty, muddy, cussin’, bad-things-happening-to-good-people fantasy, in other words) then may I recommend Joe Abercrombie? I’m halfway through the second book of his “The First Law” series, and I am enjoying it quite a bit.

All the Men In My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons

2008-07-31T17:46:00.000-07:00

This is sort of turning into a “cool things we did on the weekend” themed blog, isn’t it? Anyway, that cool thing on the weekend, let me show you it!

We went back up to the same neck o’ the woods as that Firefly Shindig to see a local production of Evil Dead: The Musical. We didn’t sit in the “splatter zone”, which was probably a good idea because the fake blood smelled really gross* plus the theater was set up like a nightclub, with individual tables and chairs and waiters, so the blood would have gotten in our food and drinks. The production was marred a bit by a terrible sound system, but the tunes are really catchy and I'm glad R:tAG was so keen on going (Saturday night was the last show until next January)

In more recent news, R:tAG managed to hurt his back again and is pretty much laid up. Ah, the joys of getting old. It’s very bad timing; there was quite a lot of stuff we wanted to do in the next few days so I hope he can get some physio attention soon and get fixed up. Plus I suppose there’s the whole not-wanting-to-see-a-loved-one-in-pain thing…

* Not like blood. Not like anything organic, really. Plus it was really really pale, so the overall effect was more like a Pepto Bismo fight.

You Can't Take The Sky From Me

2008-07-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Unification Day Shindig was a lot of fun; the pictures that I took are here and here's one of me that R:tAG took at home afterward when I realized I didn't have any of me. I made the shirt; I found a Fruity Oaty Bar image on the Web and used that cool iron-on inkjet paper and an old tanktop. Everything else is just scavenged from army surplus and/or my regular wardrobe (these are my everyday goggles, not my fancy Steampunk goggles). I was considering a more elaborate costume, like a Reaver or something, but the venue was a hot 1.5 hour car ride away and elaborate makeup would have slid right off me.

The iPhone camera is not the best quality in low light (should have brought the real camera) but it gives you an idea of some of the costumes. I missed a bunch, because it wasn’t until it was suboptimally dark that I remembered that I really ought to be taking pictures. Dur. I won a prize for my Firefly trivia knowledge so go, me! The location was interesting too; a really out-of-the-way place that I don’t think I’d have ever visited on my own. But the GPS worked really well and kept us from getting lost out in the black.

So having an iPhone is a bit like having a pet; you end up getting all these little accessories for it, not to mention having to feed it more often than you expected. The best app I’ve seen for it so far is Shazam, where you basically hold your iPhone up so it can listen to the music and it tells you what the song is, who it’s by, and gives you an iTunes link to purchase it. Bloody amazing. It worked in a crowded, noisy restaurant, too.

We saw the new Batman movie, and it was really good, though it felt like ten pounds of movie in a five pound bag and (my mind being the burden that it is) I could not get past some of the more egregious violations of physics*, but I thought the acting was excellent. We also saw Tideland which was just as good a movie as The Dark Knight in its own way but really really disturbing. But not for the obvious reasons. Well, OK, a little for the obvious reasons.** Well, OK, a lot for the obvious reasons.*** But also because it really does succeed in presenting these things innocently and sort of beautifully, and then you realize what you’re watching. It was actually filmed in Saskatchewan, near Katepwa, but I don’t imagine it played well there.

* Glass is transparent to light, not sound.

** As soon as the neglected, precocious eight-year old heroine met the Faulknerian man-child, I started the anticipatory cringing.

*** Not to spoil things too much, but Faulkner really is in the same genre as this movie.

Cellular, modular, interactivodular!

2008-07-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

Eeeee! We did it! We did it! The future is now, and it’s pretty damned cool. I do think we saved money, all in all, because in the past four or five years we have bought two iPods, one digital camera, and two bog-standard cellphones. That’s all. So now the iPhones have taken the place of all the iPods, Blackberries, cameras and GPS’s that we could have bought. And they’re very, very spiff.

We got them Saturday morning, after the tumult and shouting had died, so I don’t have pictures of the baseball game that we attended on Friday night. It was hardly a squeaker; 9-2 for the Oakland A’s (they were playing the L.A. Angels) but we had really good seats* and one of the friends we went with was an extreme fan who was recording info in code on a big score sheet and everything, so she explained the finer points to us. And there was good food and beer.** And there was a fireworks show afterwards that was awesome! The pyrotechical state-of-the-art has come a long way since I last saw a big show.

And then Saturday was that Relay for Life, which was a good, if tiring, time. I did have my iPhone by then, so I took some pictures and was able to answer people’s idle questions about celebrity gossip and music lyrics! It’s the aspiring know-it-all’s dream technology! And our team raised just over $4,000, I think, both from straight-up donations (thanks, Chad!) and from the sale of various knitted items at the event. Each team had an area on the inside of the relay track where it could set up a booth to sell stuff, tents to rest in, whatever, and the only rule was that all money raised had to go to the Cancer Society. So we sold hats. Here are pictures of our booth, some of the hats, and the final lap at the end of the relay (most of the tents etc. had been taken down but you still can see a few to the right)

Oh, and we saw Hellboy 2 and it was really quite good. I want to go see it again; del Toro creates such… complicated visuals that it takes me a few passes to really appreciate them. Especially in the Troll Market scene, I badly wanted to be able to pause and zoom. I maintain that the animated Hellboy features are just as good as the first Hellboy live-action movie, but for this story, I don’t think that that simple Samurai Jack style of animation (as much as I like it) would work as well. Maybe it’s just a question of which I saw first, but del Toro’s rich visuals are really successful in making this other, parallel world believably present but different.*** Anyway, even apart from the spectacle, the story and acting were solid. Like Miyazaki’s stories, there wasn’t really a “bad” guy, just people doing what they think is right. Two thumbs up.

* So good that I was a bit nervous about being killed by a pop fly ball. It could happen!

** Good, expensive food and beer. I guess the baseball people have realized what the movie theatre people realized a while ago; you don’t make money on tickets, you make money on the concession and souvenirs.

*** If del Toro did a version of Neverwhere, I think my head would explode with glee.

The Rockets' Red Glare

2008-07-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

Well, we had a nice weekend despite the heat. I got the majority of R:tAG’s Victorian vest done with the themed fabric, and it looks all right though of course I can now think of at least two things that I should have done differently*. It just needs the buttons put on. So I think we’re set for GenCon, costuming-wise. We didn’t do anything special for either Canada Day or Independence Day, though, apart from laze around the house, eat, putter with hobbies, and listen to the sirens.**

But speaking of getting out of the house, there’s a GBACG event coming up on July 19th that I’m quite looking forward to; it’s the Unification Day Shindig, a Firefly-themed party. It should be interesting; the GBACG usually does more historical events, which of course are easier to dress up for. Not easier in terms of the actual effort required, but easier in terms of there being a “correct” look. Firefly provides a lot more… possibilities.

It’s supposed to get stinkin’ hot again this weekend, and I’ll be doing that Relay walk thing (you remember, the one to which you could donate?) but not during the hottest part of the day. At least, I hope it won’t be during the hottest part of the day; I don’t actually remember which shifts I signed up for. We’re also going to a baseball game of some sort which will be a personal first for me; I don’t believe I’ve ever been to a live baseball game before. I’m told they serve beer, though, so how bad can it be?

* Paid more attention to where the fabric pattern falls, and made a muslin first. The neck-line doesn’t fit very well; it’s like they drafted the size XL to just have more width at the side seams, without considering the fact that large gentlemen usually have larger necks also. I am not proficient with redrafting patterns, but I think next time I might try making the large instead of the XL but adding the extra width at the centre back and front sides.

** Not near as many as I’d expected, even though random neighbourhood fireworks were a pretty constant feature of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. I guess people wanted to use up their purchases.

Smoke on the Water

2008-06-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

There are 1100 wildfires burning around California. I think about 1099 of them are in this area. The smoke was so thick this morning that I couldn’t see any of the hills around our place, and my eyes and throat are getting sore. If I wanted this air quality, I’d live in London.*

I’m sad that Big Sur is burning. I camped there way back in 1991 during the Red Dirt Salsa Tour** and it was the first time I’d been in a redwood forest. It was also the first time I saw Steller’s Jays, which remain one of my favourite birds. At dawn, a bunch of them would be lined up on a branch over our tent, with their shoulders hunched up, all muttering “bleah” to themselves under their breath. I’m exactly the same way in the mornings. As the day went on, they’d get more cheerful, especially when we were eating. They’d fly down and eat off the same plates that we were eating from.

And this is just weird. It’s awfully hard not to cynically suspect “lobbyists” at work (and I finger-quote the word lobby, since I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court is not supposed to be lobbyable). The Second Amendment was pretty clearly for a militia and I really don’t follow the argument of ignoring that. The NRA is already talking about challenging states’ registration, waiting period, and limitation laws*** because they “infringe” the right to own a gun. Guh.

Today, I am leaning towards the “moving back to Canada sooner rather than later” opinion.

* A Londoner friend told me that at his university’s orientation, new foreign students were asked about how living in London was affecting them so far. After thinking a bit, one guy said solemnly “Well, my snot’s black now”

** After graduating university, two friends and I decided to drive south until we had half our money left, then turn around and drive back. We made it down to LA, because we camped most of the time. It was a fun trip – about fifteen days and $600 each, as I recall, most of which was gas.

*** Like, say, the one that says that someone with a restraining order against them shouldn’t be sold a gun. How unfair.

Those Cats Were Fast As Lightning

2008-06-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

Go see Kung Fu Panda. It’s pretty awesome. If you don’t like Jack Black, don’t be put off by the fact that his voice is in it; it’s not a typical performance (I don’t think). And like one of the reviews says, it’s really refreshingly pop-culture free but still manages to have humour and interest on all levels (child through adult).

So I’ve actually been asked to put some knitting content here; Ravelry really diverted all of it but Ravelry's still in beta so you can't see it. I think I know what someone really wants to see, but I haven’t started it yet, so she’s out of luck.

Here’s something I was pretty proud of, because the original instructions not only were in Latvian, they had a lot of errors. With language help from a lovely person on Ravelry, I came up with workable alternatives, though it did turn out a different shape from the original. The mad doily woman strikes again! It' s on 2.25mm needles, 16/2 linen, for those that care.

And also in knitting related content I joined a team for a cancer relay* that, as its shtick, has decided to knit constantly while doing the relay. Apparently, though, the Cancer Society wants money as well as knitted items. Imagine! I really hate begging, and I especially hate begging from friends, but if you were going to donate to some kind of disease-based charity anyway this year, you could consider my Relay for Life Team, maybe. If you wanted.

* Like, anti-cancer. To raise money towards finding a cure. Just to be clear.

How do we sleep when our beds are burning

2008-06-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

Owie owie owie. I have the worst sunburn I’ve yet suffered here and my face hurts. It’s only on my face; the rest of me was covered by a pirate costume*, and I suspect the worst of it happened on the ride home in a convertible, where I couldn’t wear my hat and the wind kept me from realizing the ravages that the sun was wreaking.

Speaking of burning (ooo, nice segue!) there are lots more fires here, including a big one what is burninating one of my favourite wineries and that turned the sky on Friday into a dark hazy mass and the sunset into something apocalyptic. Every morning now the traffic reports feature road-side grass fires. The moisture level in the vegetation in the hills (monitored to get an idea of the fire risk level) is at normal levels for August and it doesn’t rain here in summer. It is duh-RYE!

My company summer picnic thing was Friday; we took the day off and all went to Great America for the day, which was really quite far from my idea of fun. But I found the place that served beer, and actually had a good time chatting with some of our sales folks whom I don’t see very often. And I ended up going on one rollercoaster at the end of the day since I figured if it made me ill I’d be going home anyway, and it didn’t. Maybe I’m getting my rollercoaster legs (and stomach) back. Maybe Katamari and Lego Star Wars is training me!

Update: I just got back from lunch at one of my favourite places, and the waitress, a motherly Vietnamese lady who barely comes up to my armpit, peered into my face as she brought my iced coffee and said “Ooooooh, you got bad sunburn!” Yes, I know, thanks. My skin feels like an unpricked grilled sausage casing and I suspect it’s glowing slightly. This is going to result in something that ends in “-oma”, I just know it, even though I had so much aloe on my face last night that I looked like a glazed doughnut with limbs.

* Yes, it was NorCal Pirate Festival time again!

** The Flight Deck, to be precise. It was a short ride (like, a minute or less, I'd say) which helped a lot.

Sapphire Bullets

2008-06-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone. R:tAG went up to KublaCon and I spent the day completely alone at home. It was fantastic and just when I started to think “OK, it’s been about ten hours of isolation, maybe I am reconciled to human contact” the phone started ringing with family and friends calling. Good timing!

It’s been a shooty-action-movie sort of fortnight; we’ve seen 3:10 To Yuma, Indiana Jones and the Implausible Crystal Plot,* Iron Man, There Will be Blood,** Shoot ‘Em Up,*** and Crank, and that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there was another bulletfest in there somewhere. 3:10 To Yuma was quite good, Iron Man was good if you like the genre, the rest were enh for me (which was too bad, because I was quite excited about the Indiana Jones movie).

Other than that… hm. Not much to report. Oh, you should read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, if you like noir detective stories with a twist. I really liked it.

Oh, and with dance, I took a workshop with Sabine about sword dancing and it was great. She is amazing, and about eight feet tall, and gorgeous, and has huge sharp swords. What’s not to like? I don’t know if she’s just a really good teacher (well, she is) or if I’m starting to learn differently, or if the particular subject was just easier for me for some reason but this was a workshop where I really felt like I got something out of it. Yay, swords!

* Motto of the movie: “Wait, what?”

** Motto of the movie: “This soundtrack is violating my ears, without lubrication”

*** Motto of the movie "I call no way!"

We Didn't Start the Fire

2008-05-23T12:55:00.000-07:00

So this fire, this one is close to us. We live basically under the “P” in the words “Cambrian Park”, at about 11:00 of the fire. No danger, though the air is very hazy and the smoke smell is very strong. Luckily today there is no wind, so the fire-fighters are able to make progress containing it.

Anyway, our guests are home now, after an unexpected extra day (gee, thanks, Air Canada!) plus unexpected Dental Issues and an unexpected heat wave* that made most activities a burden. But they got to go to SuperCon** and we saw the Prince Caspian movie, and involuntarily attended a street festival,*** and visited Emperor Norton’s grave, and Cheruby got to play Irish music with some other musicians**** and it was a lot of fun.

And the weekend before, my ATS dance studio had a public recital, which went pretty well I thought. I had a solo, with belly rolls. I like the belly rolls. Here are some pictures. I need to remember to smile, apparently. It doesn’t come naturally, and I also need a head arrangement that gives me more height without being a turban (this troupe doesn’t wear the turbans that are traditional to this dance style, but honestly the good ol’ turbans really visually balance the rest of the costume).

* That coincided almost exactly with their visit. Hmmm…

** I had to work all Saturday. Phoo.

*** We only wanted olive oil! I swear!

**** It was a fun time and everyone was extremely talented, though towards the end I had to kick R:tAG every time he was about to holler “It’s all the same song!” and he’d kick me every time I was about to holler “Play ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady!’” so decorum was preserved.

Let's turn up the heat 'til we fry

2008-05-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

The visitors of Round 3 arrive today, hopefully, ‘cause their plane’s fifteen minutes late already and it hasn’t even left yet. And there have been Baggage Issues.

Here are some links that I’ve just been idly collecting. You’ve probably seen most of these. You might have even sent me these. Forgive me, the temperature outside just shot up to 100F / 38 C today, and my brain is correspondingly sluggish.

Find Your Daemon - Golden Compass related, of course. A very pretty web site. “Your profile reveals that you are modest, spontaneous, inquisitive, a leader, and assertive. You are therefore matched with the Crow Daemon.” Modest? I don’t think so, but I think all in all I’m very pleased with Anicetos. One of the other questions was about being easily distracted, and of course I

Sorry, I just saw something shiny. Where was I? Oh yeah. Crow daemon. Yeah, I like him.

Sheep Chair

Made me laugh

Flying Chocolate Pig - A culinary principle of mine is that any food can be improved by adding chocolate or bacon. But both?

Lori Nix Photography - Pritty

Desiree Palmen Photography - Amazing

Weird Japanese Fetish - Or is that triply redundant?

The Atheist Apocalypse - Look especially at the details.

My Next Sewing Project

My Next Medication

WrongCards

Weird Nature - Fascinating and horripilating.

Movie Monsters In Metal

Liz R Mugs

Miniatures by Thomas Doyle - Love. This.

The Role of Anecdotes in Science-Based Medicine

Glad to be In California

My latest earworm - "Latest" in that it's been in my head for almost a month now. Argh.

Red, Red Wine

2008-05-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

Round Two of visitor season is over, with Bne being safely delivered to the airport (hey, he’s legally a grownup; my responsibility ends there) in plenty of time to catch his flight. Too much, one might say, but I couldn’t take any more time off work. I might have managed to convince him that FAA regulations require you to check in four hours before your flight is supposed to leave… back me up on this if he asks, OK?

It was a great visit. Much wine was consumed, much “Venture Brothers” was watched. On Friday we drove up to an East German restaurant in San Francisco to meet some on-line friends of Bne’s who luckily turned out to be good people, because most of the evening was spent straightening out the web of lies that Bne had woven.*

And on Sunday we went to Maker Faire, which was AWESOMETASTIC and had a Steampunk/Victorian mobile home (my favourite!), and the biggest Diet-Coke/Mentos fountain that I ever did see**, and a hypnotizing auto-Zen garden, and a steampunk motorcycle, and motorized cupcakes, and a bigger-than-life sized robotic giraffe that people rode in, and yarn, and sewing machines, and a room full of books about making things, and music, and a traveling blacksmith, and big robots, and little robots, and just… everything. I didn’t even see Saturday night, which had the “Steampunk Lounge.” Ms. Geekchick took some great pictures here, but I’m not sure if they convey the scope of the event. Attendance was 65,000 people, with 500 exhibitor/vendors/makers. My people. And I got compliments on my apron and goggles.***

I took Monday off, partly to recover from darting around like a caffeinated hummingbird going “EeeeeeEEEEEEEeeeee!” for all of Sunday, and partly so Bne could indulge in an orgy of consumerism in preparation for his new Grownup Job. Thank me, people of Alberta, for now Bne owns decent pants.

(and I also might have bought some clothes myself. From Kenneth Cole and Calvin Klein, even. Eesh.)

On to Round Three!

* A mere sample: I mentioned that I was quite a bit older than Bne and one of the nice friends said “Really? You certainly don’t look it” and I was so pleased until Bne leaned over and said “I told her I was 43.”

** Not a great video, but it gives you the idea. There was about 200L of diet Coke involved. It was awe-inspiring.

*** What, you didn’t think I’d not go in costume, did you?

Life springs eternal, On a gaudy neon street

2008-04-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Before we begin, I want everyone to go hug or call or e-mail someone they love, right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Anyway, R:tAG and I went to Las Vegas over the weekend, thanks to his employer which flew everyone and their SOs down, gave us some spending money, and put us all up at the Palazzo for two nights. We saw O and Spamalot and the Star Trek Experience (again) lost exactly one dollar gambling (R:tAG insists on feeding a dollar into a slot machine every time we go, as some sort of appeasement to the gambling spirits) and had some really good meals* and got into this private club (the Foundation Room at the top of Mandalay Bay) and had an amazing view of the city thanks to a friend of a friend.**

Las Vegas gets more surreal every time I go, and more expensive. When I first visited in the early 1990’s, on my way to somewhere else, it was depressing and seedy and sleazy but cheap. They assumed that everyone was there to gamble, so hotel rooms and meals were pretty much loss leaders. Now that it’s more like adult Disneyland everything is about twice normal price, at least on the Strip. Most of the shops are designed to make you feel poor and fat but if you are blessed with robust self-esteem like me, it’s very entertaining to go in and giggle at what people will pay $800+ for.

You also do a lot of walking. They’ve just added a monorail which goes from the MGM to the Hilton, but because it was an afterthought and because the casino buildings are so unbelievably huge, and because it is not easy to walk in a straight line in Las Vegas,*** it usually takes almost as long to walk to the nearest monorail station as it does to walk along the street directly to your destination. In our case at least the schlep to the monorail took us through the Grand Canal, which is a pleasant if disconcerting walk because they’ve painted and lit the ceiling to look exactly like early twilight of a spring day. It is very disorienting to leave the noon-time desert sun and walk into cool spring evening.****

But we're home now and I'm glad. Las Vegas is about the one place in the world that makes the Bay Area seem humid and inexpensive. Now we just have to prepare for the next visitor and restock the wine rack.

* The tuna carpaccio at Olives immediately joined a pantheon of dishes that I keep in my head and dream about when I get hungry. The lemon crème brulee at Table 10 was also damn fine.

** The whole place was done in this over-the-top décor that I can only describe as Tibetan Bordello, and mostly consisted of dark red fabric-upholstered corridors, underlit private rooms and Buddhist statues. The main area was shoulder-to-shoulder with people far far younger and hipper than I, and we didn’t stay too long but it was a pretty neat place.

*** And not because of the tasty cocktails. The whole place is a living lab for social engineering. Maps don’t show anything outside of the area controlled by the people who provide the map. You pretty much have to rely on signs to find anything even with a map, because everything is designed to obstruct sightlines and put your attention on the advertisements or the gambling machines or the bars or the restaurants. And the signs do get you to your destination… eventually. After you get led past all the advertisements and gambling machines and bars and restaurants. Even the carpet patterns manipulate you. I kept oscillating between being appalled and lost in admiration of the psychiatry of it all and the money on display.

**** And because I was traveling with geeks, the wonder of this was expressed by “Did you see that sky file?”

And You're Working For No-One But Me

2008-04-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

Tax day is No Fun for us because we can’t seem to get the correct amount deducted from our payrolls and so for the second year running we ended up paying about $4,000. Phoo. My fault for not getting off my ass and figuring out how these Roth IRA things work last year.

But last Tuesday we went to the local instantiation of the Department of Homeland Security* and after waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting, and then a bit more waiting, R:tAG now has his Green Card. The actual Final Interview wasn’t near as stressful as we’d been thinking; we’d been picturing something like that game show where a husband and wife are (separately) asked questions and the audience merrily chuckles at the discrepancies but in our case the laughing audience would be replaced by a couple of stern officials and a deportation notice resulting from the fact that neither of us can remember the year we met.** But we brought a tote bag full of evidence that we have not been running a long con for the past nine years***, and happily it was sufficient. A key piece of evidence was our nephew, whose growth from an adorable ring-bearer to a handsome visiting teenager is handily documented in our photo albums and difficult to fake.

And Saturday was Yuri’s Night, which was like a rave-airshow-science fair up at Moffat Field. It was stinkin’ hot until the sun went down; the Bay Area had a bit of a heatwave over the weekend. We listened to a great talk by Will Wright about the Soviet space program (mainly), saw a bit of Spore, listened to music, gawked at costumes, learned about microbial mats, watched things burn, lusted after cars, and went home early like old people because I had the collywobbles from the heat and the sun. Here are pictures.

It's a walking eye, people!

Picture does not do the costume justice. All-silver body paint, silver gas mask, tangle of armor cable that made an eerie jingly scraping sound on the concrete... and then it got up on a harness thingy and did an arial show. Cool.

R:tAG in a Tesla Roadster. He wants one, but they cost more than our first house did.

Moving metal sculptures ON FIRE!

This guy did not win the costume contest, which was a crying shame. He was dressed as Sputnik, and he had little red lights on the end of the antenna bits, and he would orbit things given the least provocation. After the picture was taken, he shook my hand and said "Dosvedanya" and I managed to reply with "Spasibo! Dosvedanya!"

* Which shares a building with Gold’s Gym, and the gym’s sign is much much bigger. So that was confusing. Also, security in the building is more stringent than an airport’s, so we had to make two trips back to the car to drop off a pocketknife and then our cellphones.

** 1995? 1996? The only reason either of us remembers the year we were married is that we had it engraved on our rings. I’m glad we did that and not “Put It Back On” like I was wanting.

*** At least, I’m not.

Long Time Passing

2008-04-07T18:55:00.000-07:00

Long time, no post. Some stuff has been happening (with work) that is keeping me busy, not that that’s an excuse.

So, what to talk about? R:tAG’s sister and her two teenage sons were here for four days, which was great. We went down to Monterey, of course, then we left them to their own devices for a couple of days before joining them in The City * and going to the SF Zoo and the obligatory trip to Fisherman’s Wharf. I hadn’t been to the zoo before; it was mostly good except for a few very old** and dilapidated enclosures containing pacing, stressed animals. Those enclosures also didn’t have any kind of signage,*** which made me think that this was just temporary accommodations for the animals except normally zoos put up the cutesy “I’m waiting for my new home!” type of thing to reassure people that the animals are being taken care of. The only sign was one between two enclosures; a generic “Adopt a Zoo Animal” solicitation poster that gave the subtle impression that the animals were being held hostage. But maybe that’s just me.

Next Saturday we are going to Yuri’s Night and I’ve half a mind to wear my steampunk rig. Most of my costuming resources are not futuristic since the only sci-fi LARP I’ve done is Fading Suns, which is so futuristic that it’s gone ‘round the other side and become old-fashioned. So it’s either the steampunk apron, or a floor-length black vinyl coat**** and my other pair of goggles.

Speaking of steampunk (nice segue, eh?), this looks cool. With the T-shirt, apparently, you get a lil’ sample of their special steampunk scent described as “Burnished gold and oiled bronze notes with Abramelin incense and sage.” I’ve been circling Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs for ages now, virtually, but the shipping to Canada was prohibitive. But I finally realized I don’t live there any more (duuur!) so I ordered a six-pack sampler.

Frumious Bandersnatch (“Redolent of spicy carnations, wild plums and chrysanthemum”)
Crossroads (“A chill twilit garden of blooms over dry earth and mosses, heavily laden with incense and offertory herbs”)
Zombi (“Dried roses, rose leaf, Spanish moss, oakmoss and deep brown earth”)
Arkham (“Maple, birch, dogwood, cypress and pine softened by a garland of New England wildflowers: bergamot, columbine, rue anemone, blue violet, creeping phlox, bloodroot, toadflax, and pixie moss”)
Vicomte de Valmont (“Ambergris, white musk, white sandalwood, Spanish Moss, orange blossom, three mints, jasmine, rose geranium and a spike of rosemary”)
Kitsune-Tsuki (“Asian plum, orchid, daffodil, jasmine and white musk”)

And they sent me two freebies:

Cairo (“The essence of holy Kyphi”)
Lucy’s Kiss (“The gentle scent of rose and a blend of Victorian spices”)

My favourites are Arkham and Crossroads, though Zombi is really nice too. All the scents that involve roses seem to end up being very strongly ROSE! on me for the first while, but Crossroads and Zombi fade into something more interesting.***** The two plum-based ones are a lot sweeter than I expected. And I might just be suckered into the steampunk scent.

Mmmmm, smelliness. In a good way.

*”What, like Oakland is just a collection of houses?”
** They had plaques on them saying “Built in 1940.”
*** Luckily polar bears are difficult to mis-identify.
**** Bought at a steep discount after last Halloween.
***** R:tAG, that olfactory master, took a deep sniff of my wrist when I was wearing Crossroads, furrowed his brow, gazed into the distance, and finally said “I smell… flowers?”

Whistling In The Dark

2008-03-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

I work odd hours to beat the traffic. I’m in the office from 9:30-7:30 most days. Last in, last out. But this morning was different; there was a stream of cars leaving the parkade* which is not usual. I drove in, feeling like a salmon, and immediately noticed that all the lights were out because I am observant that way. Luckily because of the exodus I didn’t have to go down to the inky black depths for a spot. I made my way up the emergency-lit stairs to my office, and found it locked. The lock is a RFID lock. Which requires power.

Since no-one responded to my knocking, obviously there’d been a power outage (probably related to the construction next door) and everyone had been told that it would last for a while, so everyone went home. This would have been a great work-at-home situation, but I’d left my laptop in the office the night before. Just as I was heading down the stairs again to find someone with a good old fashioned non-electricity-requiring key, the lights went back on. Phoo.

I think this will be short day for me anyway; there are only two other people in the office (I called a few people to tell them the power was back on; why should I be the only one to suffer?) After all, it’s Easter, or Nawruz, or Ostara, or Mawlid-al-Nabi, or Purim**, or whatever else floats your boat, and even apart from that the house needs cleaning in a big way.***

* An unknown word here, did you know? It’s a “parking garage” here and most Americans find the word “parkade” unduly hilarious.

** If there’s anything that would encourage me to be a cultural Jew, it’s Purim. Commanded to get drunk, wear silly costumes and eat hamantaschen? I am so in!

*** Visitor Season begins this weekend.

On the Sunny Side of the Street

2008-03-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

And so the semi-annual Daylight Savings nonsense strikes again, and everyone is saying “oh, an extra hour of daylight, how wonderful.” Except no, it’s not an extra hour, now it’s just dark in the mornings. I feel like I should be running through the streets like Charlton Heston... “There is no extra hour, people! It’s all a trick!”

R:tAG’s back’s been bothering him again, so we sprung for an iNeed* thingy that is actually really really nice and I've been stealing it from him. I hope he will be up for walking more soon, because I just got a book on hiking trails in the Santa Cruz hills (the big green hills immediately to the south of us, not the dry brown hills far to the north of us, for those of y’all that have visited) and I wanna go.

A good book: Benighted by Kit Whitfield. It’s like the good bits of the Anita Blake books (i.e. not the soft-core porn, which means there is 90% of the book left to fill up with plot and characterization)

A good movie: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I had absolutely no knowledge or expectations of this movie before it showed up in our Netflix queue, and I liked it quite a bit.

A movie that I am bouncing up and down in my chair even thinking about, ever since I saw the trailer on Saturday**: The Forbidden Kingdom. Jet Li and Jackie Chan! High-budget wuxia! Eeee!

A good thing to do: Pilates. I found a class that works with my schedule, and I’ve only been once so far but I think I’ll like it. This is the “mat class” version, not the big scary Inquisition machine version, though I’m looking forwards to that too. It is like yoga, I think, in that you think “How hard can this be?” and end up kind of sweaty and shaky at the end. It’s being offered at a really nice new community centre right by us, and since they have a pool and a weight room as well as all sorts of classes, we bit the metaphorical bullet and joined up. Fitness “R” us!

Yet another case where I suspect that web cartoonists are spying on me because they are DOCUMENTING MY LIFE: here. The alternative is that I am really boring and predictable and not a speshul snowflake at all. ::sniffle::

* This “i” prefix trend is getting wearisome, isn’t it?
** We saw The Bank Job which is all right but nothing really special.

Upon Us All A Little Rain Must Fall

2008-02-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

The February malaise extends to blogging, I’m finding.

But I did the Year of the Rat Treasure Hunt* and our team (“Plague It Again, Sam”) placed fifth in the Regular division (up from about 33rd last year, and out of hundreds of teams!) We should also have won best Film-Noir Themed Team Name but apparently there was another team with the same name and they got to the podium first**. Whatever, at least we got to feel clever! The weather was pretty lousy, windy and rainy, but not as bad as the predictions said it would be.

Also, this year we were much, much cleverer in planning our route, and we hardly saw the big parade at all. This meant that we finished much sooner, but also meant, obviously, that we didn’t see the parade which was too bad even if most of the paraders were swathed in protective plastic like ambulatory parlor furniture.

Odd treasure hunt story; so I’m standing with a crowd of about 15 other people, and we’re all looking for a number that we know is somewhere on a building. A little old man*** comes up to me and says in a thick accent “I have live here forty year. I never see this people before. What is happening?” I tell him it’s a game, a treasure hunt. “Treasure?” he says, confused. “Not real treasure,” I say, “Just a game. We get clues and have to go to places and find stuff and write it down.” “I have live here forty year!” he says, louder. “That’s nice,” I say. “Here!” he says and lunges towards me. I step back, and so the thing that he was trying to put on my shoulder instead falls to the ground. At first I think it’s a flapping wind-up toy, but then I see that it’s a small white live bird, like a small dove. I barely have enough time to register this when the little old man dives for the bird, scoops it up and makes it disappear somehow into his coat.

My teammates, having found the elusive number, attract my attention and I go to leave, when the little man is in front of me again. “Here!” he says, “This treasure! You want treasure!” He’s holding out a book; I can’t quite see what it is but it looks like an elementary school atlas or something with a purple ‘70’s looking cover. It has loose pages stuffed inside. “Here!” he says insistently. I say “No thanks! Take care!” and leave with my friends.

I’ll never get to Narnia at this rate.

* R:tAG bowed out; it was lousy weather plus he wasn’t sure if his lower back could handle the strain.

** We were also all wearing trenchcoats, fedoras and mouse noses, though the noses didn't last long. They're hard to breathe through.

*** Apparently I am a veritable magnet for strange little old men. I cannot think of a way to parlay this into anything useful, but it does appear to be my superpower.

Cups and cakes

2008-02-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

Gung hay fat choi! I can’t believe it’s the Year of the Rat already… I’m still writing “Pig” on all my cheques. We’re doing the New Year Treasure Hunt again, and I am quite looking forwards to it. Last year we ended up in 33rd place (not bad for hundreds of teams and our first try!)

So we went and had a lovely afternoon tea*, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco which is an amazing and elegant place. The tea was in the “Garden Court” which I expect could stand up to the Ritz or Claridge’s in London, and moved into the “Pied Piper” pub where we admired the original Maxfield Parrish over the bar. The costumes were fantastic and I have a brain-ful of ideas now. I especially liked the driving costume with goggles that one lady had (you can sort of see her behind me in the picture below). I am a fool for a goggle.

And there is a picture of us both here. R:tAG borrowed a monocle from a friend who also likes vintage clothes, and he looked quite dashing.

The dress was the most “real” thing I’ve ever sewn… by real I mean like clothing rather than like a costume. It was tedious but not difficult, except for the back closure. Which was really my fault anyway.***

I’ve been worried about my crazydar malfunctioning, and I was relieved to find that it is miscalibrated but is not completely inoperative when we were stopped by a little old man outside the pub who initially was just complimenting us on our costumes, youth and good health** but then found out I had an engineering background. He got a light in his eye, and I thought to myself “This will be either perpetual motion or Velikovsky” and sure enough, he wanted to know if I could help him with a design for an engine he had that would run on the “free energy of the universe.”

What is it about certain memes that attract certain minds (or is it vice versa?) I’m beginning to think that just like individual bodies are physically susceptible to some things (allergies, etc.) individual minds are likewise susceptible. There are generally gullible people, who just have a weak mental immune system I guess, but then there seems to be a correlation between specific ideas and specific personalities. The perpetual motion inventor, the crazy cat lady… you can almost tell by looking what their particular meme-infection is going to be.

Anyway, we politely disengaged ourselves from the little old man and wished him luck, but if you hear of a perpetual-motion solution to the world's energy problems soon, you heard it here first.

* Not High Tea, unfortunately, as I was feeling quite peckish. But they had lovely little finger sammiches of smoked duck and salmon and pear+Stilton (yum!) and cucumber, and scones, and little dainties, and about six different kinds of tea, and it was very good.

** And who doesn’t like to listen to that?

*** The pattern said to use hooks and eyes, placed alternately for strength (like, the first set would have the hook on the right, the set below would have the hook on the left, etc.). I had a devil of a time getting them to line up so I just used snaps. Mistake. Snaps are great for holding flaps together when there’s no stress, but between the close fit of the bodice and my wide shoulders, every time I moved my hand above my waist or further than 20cm from my body, I’d hear the “plink, plink, plink” of snaps popping open. I put in a few hasty hooks and eyes, so my modesty was not compromised, but I still had to ask R:tAG to re-snap me every 20 minutes or so. He took to whispering “Grrr! Hulk smash puny Edwardians!” which gave me the giggles and usually caused more snap casualties.

You're a Hamburger

2008-02-04T18:40:00.001-08:00

Work has taken a turn for the sucky. I didn’t get home much before 9:30 PM on any night last week, mainly because some mouth-breathing fellaheen in Cairo took a backhoe to a major fiberoptic trunk or something and knocked out computer communication between us and our Bangalore office. Lo, the wonders of a global economy. And R:tAG got a promotion, which is marvelous and exciting of course, but which has also meant longer hours for him.

So we’ve eaten fast food for almost every meal for a week, and I feel like the Coles’ Notes version of Supersize Me. * The fridge contains nothing but beer and a couple of condiment bottles. And here it is, Monday again, with no foreseeable change in that situation.

Bleah.

So next weekend, assuming we both don’t die of scurvy or pellagra or beriberi or something, we’re going to the Gilded Age Tea, which means a new dress for me and a really big hat, whee! This is how I’ve been spending the spare minutes that I have. Pix to follow, and by the way the dress dummy is turning out to be a valuable tool in the sewing room especially since I appear to be constitutionally incapable of following directions as written.** I might have to make another one but taking more care and using proper materials.

Here are some random amusing links:

Pencil Sculptures
Cool Stencils
Deja Vu All Over Again
Cloverfield in 15 Minutes
Beautiful Dirigible
My Next Knitting Project
The Perils of Pantorexia (this is "pants" in the British sense, not the North American one)
I Need This Hat
Little Savages

* Though strangely, the healthiest thing I ate was an Asian grilled chicken salad from MacDonald’s.

** I already knew this about knitting, but it turns out it's true of sewing also, which means I’m doing a lot of experimentation by draping, and that’s much, much easier on a dress dummy if one is not unnaturally bendy. Which I am not.

I Just Want Some Body to Love

2008-01-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

We went to Bodyworlds 2 this weekend at the Tech Museum; even though it’s been here since September 27th, we kept putting it off until (typically) we realized “Holy crap! It’s only here for another week!” Apparently many others also felt the same way, because in spite of the extended hours * there was a line around the block to get in. We luckily arrived at a good time (when the line was only starting to go ‘round the block) and only had to wait for about an hour, but the show was worth it. Really, really fascinating stuff.

In case you haven’t heard about it or are too lazy to click the link, the show is plastinated bodies. It’s a fantastic fusion of art and science; all the bodies are arranged like sculptures but all illustrating various medical and/or anatomical things. It was very easy to get fascinated by how all the muscles and organs look, and fit together**, and then your focus would be caught by an untrimmed toenail or a bit of body hair, and the fact that these were once real live people would leap to the forefront of your realization once again. The display included a really respectful display about donating one’s body to medical research, and why people do it. So yeah, staring at corpses was the highlight of our weekend. How about you?

Speaking of death, I just found out that George MacDonald Fraser died on January 2nd. He was one of my favourite authors, and I highly, highly, recommend all his books. The Pyrates is in my personal Top Ten Books Of All Time list, and if you know how much I read you know how fierce the competition is. The Flashman series is the only reason I know anything about Victorian history, and the McAuslan trilogy still makes me laugh out loud at every reading, and Mr. American still has the only paragraph I’ve even encountered that actually made me jump in fright when I read it. Rest in peace, Mr. Fraser.

* Eight AM to midnight; apparently there are a few Tzmisce on the board of directors.

** I was just reading about someone who couldn’t sleep at night unless he convinced himself that he had no internal organs at all; that if cut in half, the inside of his body would resemble a potato.

I'll take the legs from some old table

2008-01-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

If you saw the news about the Apocalyptic! Torrential! Downpour! around here, don’t worry, we’re fine. The winds were pretty high* and there was rain and because that doesn’t happen very often here, some of the wimpier trees blew over. We don’t live in an isolated area (for this exact reason**) so really it was just another rainstorm for us.*** And as me mum always says, you don’t have to shovel rain.

I got the dress dummy finished over the weekend, using these instructions but I think I got the wrong kind of paper tape and the form ended up looking like a badly-interred mummy. So I put a layer of clear packing tape around it to hold down all the curling-up paper edges, and stuffed it with old bubble wrap and newspaper because the paper tape shell didn’t seem stiff enough. So it’s sort of a ghetto-meets-the-post office effort, but I figure it will do well enough for me to see if I really use the thing. I have to put it on a wider base and adjust the height slightly; right now it’s about a centimeter taller than I am.****

Here it is displaying my (finished! Yay!) Victorian polonaise.

I think I will take a few inches off the arms of the dummy; I wrapped my arms almost to the elbow (thinking that it would be easier to remove any excess later than to try and add extra) and I had my arms slightly out from my sides during the wrapping, and that rather distorts the clothes on it. I also may try to figure out some sort of cover for it, out of a thin jersey knit, just to hide the worst of the taping effort. There’s a 2” PVC pipe frame inside (made with a T-joint) for stability and the arms, neck and bottom are scrap cardboard. So it’s a pretty cheap effort but I think it will be useful for hemming if nothing else. And keeping in the hallway to startle people. Heh.

(title song lyrics are here, by the way. I couldn't find any lyrics about dummies in my head so I had to turn to Google.)

* One bridge was closed completely, and a few more closed to heavy truck traffic, because the gusts were strong enough to push a semi around)

** A friend of ours who lives way up in the hills was stranded in his house by a landslide on the sole access road, which sucks for him but on the other hand, he’s chosen to live way up in the hills. What do you expect?

*** Though there was lightning and thunder! Yay!

**** And slightly too big in the waist and small in the bust; it was a bit of a relief to find out that I’m not quite as cylindrical as the form makes me look.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

2008-01-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

Bonne Année, all. Wow, for having just had a holiday with absolutely no planned activities, I’m sure tired. It’s amazing how activities just expand to fill the available space. I didn’t touch a keyboard for the entire vacation* and I had a long optimistic list of stuff to get done. I think I managed two items.

This was one; my own version of the HPLHS tentacle stocking. It’s a design-on-the-needles prototype; I have a few improvements in mind for V2.

The other was finally getting my polonaise skirt done, which was two full days of Ruffle Hell. It was straightforward** but tedious. Pictures will appear when I get my dress dummy finished, which was an uncompleted item on the to-do list.

We had several lovely holiday meals, a Christmas dinner at friends’, the Hillfolk’s annual fondue treat, and a spur-of-the-moment New Year's Eve dinner at Crimson, a neighbourhood place that reminds us a bit of Calories. We decided to go out at about 6pm, and found that Crimson had reservations available for 9:15. Unhappily, they mis-estimated the time that people took lingering over dinner, and it’s a very very small place. So we had to wait outside in the cold until 10:20 before we were seated, but the heaters and free champagne took the edge off that.*** And the food was very good, and because we started so late and there were four courses, we were still eating when midnight rolled around and the restaurant (staff and customers) erupted with noisemakers and general hootin’ and hollerin’. It was rather fun, but I apologize to everyone we didn't manage to phone with New Year's greetings.

Random amusing story; I needed to stock up on allergy medicine, since our friends persist in willfully and maliciously owning cats. Chlorotriplon is not sold here (at least not as such; could someone do me a favour and tell me the real active ingredient name?) and Claritin and Alleve don’t do jack for me, so I asked the pharmacist if she knew the American equivalent.

Me: “I’m looking for an allergy medication. It’s called Chlorotriplon in Canada. Have you heard of it? It’s for a cat allergy.”
Pharmacist: “Well, it sounds like it’s X. Do you know the dosage? It comes in 4 mg, 8 mg and 16 mg.”
Me: “Um, no. I just bought it over the counter.”
Pharmacist: “Oh. You’re sure you can’t remember the dosage? Is there anyone you can phone?”
Me: “Uh… I guess I can find out. But it’s over the counter medicine, right?”
Pharmacist: “Well, yes, but I really don’t want to sell it to you if you don’t know the correct dosage.”
Me: (really confused, but thinking maybe there’s a problem with it being used in meth manufacturing or something) “Can't I just get the lowest dosage and see if that works?”
Pharmacist: “I’m really not comfortable with that.”
Me: (going for the sympathy angle) “But I’d really like to take it tonight; I’m going over to a friends’ place and they have cats and I’ll be all sneezy and miserable otherwise…”
Pharmacist: “Oh, it’s for you! I thought you said it was for your cat!”
Me: “Uh. No. For me. I’m the one that’s allergic to cats. Can cats be allergic to cats?”
Pharmacist: “It’s been a long day.”

* I did touch a game controller. R:tAG got me Beautiful Katamari, so of course I had to finish up Katamari Damacy first, and I got R:tAG Godzilla Unleashed, so we had to choose monsters and beat each other up in the ruins of San Francisco. Much fun.

** Except for the Moebius Ruffle Incident, but we will not speak of that. I had bought a ruffling foot and a rolled hem foot for my sewing machine just for this project, and they both ended up being useless. Stupid useless sewing machine feet.

*** Free champagne to drink while we were waiting, then a free bottle when we left as well as extra dessert and appetizers served with profuse apologies. It’s a good place. The chef himself kept popping out to bring more champagne and reassure us that the food was worth waiting for.

Have Yourself A Scary Little Solstice

2007-12-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

So I wrote my congress representative an e-mail, expressing my dismay at how he voted on a recent bill.

This is part of the reply I got back.

“Thank you for taking the time to write to me. I always appreciate hearing comments from my constituents, especially young people who are taking an interest in our legislative process.
I enjoy hearing your thoughts about our helmet laws, and they are important in shaping the way I represent our district. Please know that I have taken the time to read your letter carefully, and will take your views into serious consideration as I continue my work throughout the 110th Congress.”

Somehow I do not believe him, since my original e-mail did not concern helmet laws in the slightest. I suppose I’ll be turning to pen and paper. That seems to get taken more seriously these days.

Oh, and we went to the Dickens’ Fair last weekend, which is like a Ren Faire except set 200 years later, and had a great time with the Hillfolk. Some pictures (Ms. Hillfolk's, not mine; I had stupidly forgotten the camera) are here. I dithered about dressing up or not and finally decided not to*, but I was kicking myself as soon as I saw the steampunk people. Why didn’t I think to do that instead? We met an intrepid pioneer with a new invention that ameliorates the soiling of shoes and clothes while traveling. Science!!!

There were people all over the place acting out various snippets of Victorian stories; mostly "A Christmas Carol," of course, but some other Dickens stuff, and (as you may have guessed from the above) some H.G. Wells, Doyle, etc. Like most things we’ve attended here** we were amazed at the scope and quality of the event. A densely populated area plus years of experience means that you have the time and resources to do things right, and we’re more than happy to benefit. Also, R:tAG found a very reasonably priced frock coat, gloves and spats, which is one less thing I have to make for him. I think I will make him a weskit, since he'll probably want an unusual fabric. I got a hat, but it's too early-period for my polonaise, so that's another dress I have to make. Alas, what a burden!

* I still haven’t completely finished the Victorian polonaise outfit, plus I discovered that an hour’s drive in a corset isn’t all that pleasant. Walking and sitting in chairs is fine, but there’s something about the design of the Honda’s driver’s seat that just doesn’t work well with corsetry.

** The Gilroy Garlic Festival, the Ren Faire, the Pirate Festival, the Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt…

These Titanic Days

2007-12-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

Reasons to be sad and glum and gray and generally wondering why we came down from the trees in the first place:

The usual early December reason
A couple of new reasons
Bad things happening to good people
We’re not going to be visiting Canada this year at Christmas. R:tAG’s been advised to stay close to home because of the state of his Green Card application.

Reasons to be happy:

Doing another beta test of a friend’s treasure hunt in Palo Alto
The movie Saving Grace
That we have our health and are living comfortably doing things we enjoy
That I actually managed to get card and presents in the mail in time for them to arrive before Christmas. I hope.
Trader Joe’s just started carrying these frozen chocolate croissants that you take out of the freezer the night before and they magically triple their size and then the next morning you bake them for twenty minutes and jeezum crow, they’re good.

Five versus four. Happy wins, right?

Carry me back to old Virginny

2007-11-29T18:08:00.000-08:00

So as I hinted in my last post, we left town for the US Thanksgiving weekend to go visit my parents in Virginia. I didn’t really mention anything because I’m sort of leery about announcing to the world that our house will be relatively unattended.*

As is traditional, we ate ourselves stupid though the highlight for me was the supper of rockfish in wine sauce, not the turkey (though the turkey was damn fine). The three hour time change plus the inherent difference in our typical schedule versus my folks’** meant that we were almost as lagged as if we’d traveled to England, but the food was way better.

We also went to Jamestown, a colonial recreation site, and visited the glassblowers’ which is one of my favourite places anywhere. When I was a pup my parents had to practically resort to force to get me away from the place. They still have to nudge pretty hard, but I’m harder to move these days.***

We also went to the Mariner’s Museum to see the progress on the Monitor exhibit, which was quite neat.

The funniest thing that happened was probably on Thursday, when my dad said “OK, we have to get to bed early so that we can go shopping and hit all the sales tomorrow!” He managed to keep a straight face for all of two seconds, while we were frozen en tableau, before everyone fell about laughing. OK, maybe that’s only funny if you know my father, but trust me, it was hi-larious. It got even funnier when we saw that an anti-consumerism organization was offering free hugs at a local mall. Shopping, large crowds, and hugging. Just what my family’s all about.****

But now we’re home, anyway, and back to the grind. And an incipient cold that I probably picked up on the plane. Bleah.

* Relatively. There’s still Rocco and the pitbulls, of course.

** Hint: The phrase “Early to bed, early to rise” does not and never has included us.

*** Especially after being ballasted with turkey and potatoes.

**** You may imagine the sarcasm hand sign here. My sisters were attendants at my wedding, and when the photographer squished us all together for a “picture of the sisters together, awww!” one said “I think this is the closest we’ve ever been to each other.” She may have been correct.

Green is the Colour

2007-11-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

Whoo hoo!

Every 20 years, whether we need it or not!

Edited to Add: Flying home last night, I glanced at the images from the news programs on the airport TVs and I swear, my first thought was "Man, Rider Pride may have gone too far."

The winter changes everything

2007-11-20T13:19:00.000-08:00

Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m trying NaBloNoPoMo. No posting for me for November.

Oh, wait. Damn.

Well, now that I’ve broken the seal, I might as well post something. Wait, I’m remembering why I haven’t posted anything. My brain’s empty.

However, my teeth are whiter. Coincidence?* I mentioned that tooth-whitening deal that my nephew won when he was visiting; it expired in December so I used it.** The fun bit was when the dentist made the mold of my teeth because I got to bite into that squishy dental plaster. I love that. It’s like walking through mud barefoot, but with your teeth.

It’s almost Thanksgiving here, and it will be nice to have a holiday. I miss the stat holidays of Canada. We went up to San Francisco for a Remembrance Day get together, but because of late notice and a last-minute location change, we and the organizer were the only ones there. We hoisted a few in honour of the vets anyway.

And did I mention that there was Christmas stuff on the shelves before Halloween? I always thought the States was better for that, because they have Thanksgiving here as the barrier, but I guess because of the economic downturn, retailers are putting the screws to consumers really, really early. Consume! Consume!***

Oh, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company made me laugh. You can get their production of all Shakespeare’s plays on DVD now, and I think it’s worth checking out.**** Other good movies we’ve seen are The Host, Vampires in Havana (thanks, David!) and Layer Cake.

And now my brain is really, really empty.

* There may actually be a causal relationship, because during the whitening process I was not supposed to eat or drink anything stain-ey, including tea and coffee. I thought I’d shaken the caffeine addiction, AKA the brown monkey, but apparently even my modest two cup a day habit has a pretty profound effect on my mood and mental capability. Or I’ve gone and caught the depression.

** Funny, isn’t it… the thing didn’t cost me anything, so letting it expire would not have put me out of pocket in any way. It’s not something I’d ever get for myself. Yet I still felt that it would be a waste it if I didn’t use it. People are funny.

*** What movie was that? Oh yeah…

**** Their interpretation of Titus Andronicus as a cooking show was particularly inspired, I thought.

Shake it left and shake it right 'Cause it's Halloween tonight.

2007-10-31T10:31:00.002-07:00

Whee! We're real Californians now!

We, and all of our possessions, are fine; the house shook for about 10 seconds and everything rattled on the shelves. Apparently, if you were in a place (like a shop) with plate glass windows, the quake was strong enough that the glass actually rolled; like a wave traveling through the glass. That would be interesting, if rather nerve-wracking, to see.

I have shame because we are totally unprepared for Hallowe'en this year - not even a pumpkin. We did manage to remember to get a bag of candy from the drug store, so we won't be reduced to giving out packets of take-out soy sauce to the little ones, but I'm not sure if we'll be home early enough to see the majority of the trick-or-treaters.

A friend from R:tAG's work had a Hallowe'en part last Saturday, which was fun though we ended up watching Feast which I could have lived happily without ever seeing. I kind of wussed out for a costume; I just wore the Steampunk outfit (the apron one, not the red velvet coat; it's still warm here) instead of making something new. I have a great idea for a Kali costume, though I idly wonder how offensive that would be to the average Hindu. Mind you, there's nothing new there.

Here are some Hallowe'en links!

Fantastic Entree
Fantastic Cupcakes - and links to other spooky food too
Slutoween
Fantastic Project
Solstice Wreath - OK, a little early.

Edited to Add: We did get a pumpkin! R:tAG's workplace had a punkin-carving contest (and I hope he posts pix - some were awesome) and there were a couple left over when I went to pick him up. So I grabbed one and did some hasty jack-o-lanterning:

We only got two trick-or-treaters, though; it seems like no-one goes out after dark (which happens around 6:30 now; don't even get me started about Daylight Savings Time and the gummint's mucking about with it). Luckily, we anticipated this by buying candy that we like. None of those horrid little wax-paper-wrapped molasses chewy things for us!

But that's the way the movie ends

2007-10-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

Movies, movies, movies… always the go-to subject for blogs, n’est-ce pas?

Edited to add: I didn't realize people might be worried about us what with all the fires in San Diego. The fires are awful, but we're fine, San Diego's about 700 km away, and as far as I know our area hasn't even been seeing refugees. Back to movies!

A while ago we took a flyer on Coffee and Cigarettes, which Netflix recommended to us apparently based on our renting history. I have to say, it was a good choice, and we’ve actually discussed this movie more than any other we’ve rented. It’s very arty; a collection of short and seemingly pointless dialogues* in different places, all between two or three people, always involving coffee and cigarettes. All the scenes are shot in black and white, so visually the differences are smoothed out and you’re free to concentrate on the other content. Figuring out the relationships, parallels and differences between the scenes is actually really interesting, if vaguely reminiscent of a first-year English class (but hey, I liked first year English). This is a very subtle and nuanced movie, which to some of y’all will mean “excruciatingly boring” but if you want a conversation starter, this is good.

On the absolute other end of the scale, we had to go see Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D. I was very pleased to find that the Disney 3D technology (polarized lenses, not the old red/green cellophane kind) actually works for my wonky eyes. Since this was a remake of original content, the 3D was rather understated... more 2.5D. You won’t find yourself dodging 3D-effect spears or anything but I still found that the dimensionality let me notice new things. Or maybe that was just ‘cause this is the first time since its release that I’ve watched it on a big screen. Either way, it was fun.

And lastly, we also went to 30 Days of Night, because hey, vampires! I had never read the comic** so I had no idea what to expect. A friend expressed surprise that I was going to see it since I don’t like horror movies*** and I asked ‘Isn’t it going to be sort of Anne Rice meets Northern Exposure?” Well, not so much. It’s a stock horror/shock film, with some pretty gaping plot holes, but at least the vampires were pretty smart**** and there was some good atmosphere. The film was shot in New Zealand, apparently! I guess the real Barrow didn’t look real enough, though I’m pleased to see that the film-makers got little details like the name of the airport and the houses on stilts correct. Also, the movie ought to have been called “67 Days of Night” but now I’m just being picky.

* There’s one scene in particular that gets tooth-grindingly repetitive but which has a moment at the end that for me completely redeemed it and made it fascinating. I emphasize “for me”; R:tAG still found it annoying.

** Graphic novel!

*** There is no way to covey that in-joke properly via typing, is there?

**** Favourite line “Yeah, the UV light worked, but they’re going to cut the power soo…” [[click]]

After The Ball

2007-10-15T12:16:00.001-07:00

Well, we went on the Victorian Cemetary Walk and Picnic and it was a hoot. I didn’t finish the ruffled skirt to go with my polonaise so I used a black modern velvet one, and we had to rent a hat (for me) and a frock coat (for R:tAG) but we still looked quite smart if I do say so myself.

The walk was fascinating and fun; the organizer was full of interesting stories about the cemetery in general (designed by the same man, Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York), and the inhabitants in particular.

This is the mausoleum of the Ghirardelli family, famous for their chocolate,* and this was also my favourite story. A daughter of Mr G. died tragically young, and the priest did not come in time to give her the Last Rites. Until then, the Ghirardellis, being a good Catholic family, had buried their dead in a Catholic cemetery. But after the no-show priest, Mr. G. had this mausoleum built in Mountain View, and then he and two of his sons went in the dead of night to the Catholic cemetery and moved all the Ghirardelli dead to this new plot.** But the absolute best part was when R:tAG leaned over at the end and whispered to me “And in the Catholic cemetery, he left replacement bodies made of chocolate!” I’m still laughing about that.

If you’ve seen the Dr. Who episode Blink, you’ll know why this creeped me right the hell out. The angel statue is in front of the door to the crypt, and there’s a mechanism to swing it out of the way when someone needs to be interred. The mechanism is still functioning, by the way, and it was just poor timing that we couldn’t see it in action (the caretaker couldn’t be there the day that we were).

Here’s another geek reference, which also shows one of the marvelous views from the cemetery. It’s still a very popular place to stroll, dog walk and picnic.

We also played a game along the walk; identifying famous Victorians by their supposed last words. I got one, but it was hardly a challenge.***

And then we had a picnic, where people had brought tables and chairs and china and real silverware and everything so it started off as a proper Victorian affair but because these were 20th century costumers, some people ended up in only corsets and bloomers to show off the finer points of their undergarment construction. It didn’t get to the point of “Le déjeuner sur l'herbe” or anything, though.

So it was a very good weekend; we got out of the house, met some great new people and learned more about a local landmark. I'd like to go back to the cemetery with a sketchbook and the camera. We didn't see near enough of it.

* Some of you who have visited us might recall Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.

** He also included some decoration that would be deliberately offensive to Catholics (the Masonic symbol, though he wasn’t a Mason, and the upside-down torches). I’m not clear on how the upside down torches would wound Catholic sensibilities. Maybe it was a Victorian thing. Any culture where you can insult someone using flowers has some pretty complicated semantic layers.

*** Oscar Wilde: "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do." Probably apocryphal, though.

Sweet Home Rygasaki

2007-10-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

A friend of ours just lent us a movie and warned us that we probably would hate it because it was “weird”. Well, I loved it. It’s Kamikaze Girls, and all y’all should see it. It gave me great dreams last night, where the girl-biker gangs from the movie sort of blended into a W:tA LARP, and it was a lot of fun. Our social life here isn’t at near the same level as it was in S’toon (a combination of time, aging, and laziness) so I think the thought of belonging to a gang (or pack) has even a stronger fascination for me than usual.

In that vein, there was rather pointless bickering in a knitting forum about the practice of calling non-knitters “muggles”* and whether this is bad because it means we’re identifying people as “other.” To me this is sensitivity taken to the ridiculous extreme. Everybody is someone else’s “other.” Language becomes pointless without the ability to classify.

Here are some links! Enjoy!

Why Women Worry So Much - So the summary seems to be that women are more likely to apply past experience to predict the future. Isn’t that also called… intelligence? Also, in the Yahoo feed where I read this, this headline was immediately followed by the headline Six Die From Brain-Eating Amoeba In Lake which I found sort of amusing in that I think the first headline should maybe have then been “Why Men Don’t Worry Enough”.

Red Figure Chucks - beautiful beautiful shoes. I can’t imagine ever wearing these.

To Live and Die in D&D - R:tAG just ran an introductory D&D session for The Apple Couple and me, starting at first level, and we got two hit points away from TPK. And those hit points were not possessed by the same character, even.

Happy Solstice!

Really good headline

Maybe a new contender for best LOLCats

Cool photo

* A Harry Potter reference; “muggles” are non-magicians. In the books it’s value-neutral, and Ms. Rowling herself said that she spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a term that didn’t sound derogatory

Curling is Good Fun

2007-09-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

There are not a lot of songs that mention curling. In fact, there seems to be one. Okay, two.

Our weekend was notable for us finally making an effort and taking advantage of the rich milieu in which we now live. Of course, one can only take so much culcher at once, so we went up to Berkeley to see a comic re-telling of Citizen Kane, where Kane is possessed by a demon sled that gives him the power to create zombie minions, and which can only be defeated by the touch of a holy curling rock. The play is Aah! Rosebud! and except for the length (two acts) it would be right at home in any Canadian Fringe Festival.* Of course, then the play would probably no longer be able to assume that the word “Saskatchewan” is automatically funny, and might have to tone down the comic-relief Canadian character (a Bob-n-Doug Mackenzie type).** Or maybe not; self-depreciation goes down pretty well in Canada.

We’ve been watching Season One of Heroes thanks to Netflix, and it’s pretty good. We also have The Devil Wears Prada, but R:tAG is less keen to see it since he found out it’s not actually called “The Devil Wears Pravda.” I don’t know what he thought it was about, but I guess that’s why I was able to get it with no objections from him. And it’s too late now!

[EDIT AFTER WATCHING THE SHOW - OK, who else has seen this? Did anyone else get the take-home message that women shouldn't have careers? This movie actually made me pretty angry, and not for the reasons that I was expecting.]

Other than that, we have been leading extremely dull lives. I am still working on my outfit for the Victorian Cemetery Walk, but slowly because taffeta is a slippery bitch goddess. I am still knitting, of course, but Ravelry is sparing you all that (though I still will probably inflict pictures of finished projects upon you, once I have some. Ravelry is really great for organizing one’s work-in-progress queue, one’s I-have-everything-I-need-except-time queue and one’s someday-somehow queue. And you can look at everyone else’s queues also!***).

And you know, a few carrots in the form of comments help keep the donkey going.

* I just realized that that could be taken wrong. I mean it in a positive way.

** Who did have what (to me) was the funniest line in the play, the other characters were commenting on how odd it is for a sled to have a name and the Canadian says “That’s not strange at all, eh. I had a hockey stick named Cooper!”

*** My Ravelry user name is “sputnik,” for anyone else who drinks the Kool-Aid.

A Swinging Sword, a Skull and Bones, and Pleasant Company

2007-09-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

Arrr, shoot a horse and call me Susan!*

It be International Talk Like a Pirate day again, arr, the third one since we turned our sails to westward and sailed away from the Prairies. Damme, can ye fathom it?

It saddens me heart to report that none of the scallywags in me office, curse their black hearts, are celebratin’ today. But when I was havin’ me grog and hardtack at eight bells, I noticed a saucy wench in a striped cap and eyepatch. She was across the galley from me, belike, and I didn’t catch her eye before she weighed anchor.

Me and me hearty R:tAG have been workin’ like galley slaves for the past few weeks, with no shore leave or chance of roisterin’.** It’s a sorry state of things, ta be sure.

And in special honour of the day: What does a pirate with cardiac arrhythmia say? Arrrrrr, me hearty!

* All right, ye dogs, it’s not actual-like a pirate sayin’ but it be damned funny anyway, by th' powers!

** We did manage to see Blood and Chocolate. A pretty tale, but as predictable as Teach needin' a light, arr.

All the Leaves Are Brown

2007-09-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Six years ago. There’s been some foomphetting* about how memorials are getting ignored, commemorative events are getting smaller, but isn’t that natural?

Still no rain here; the leaves are brown because they are dry and dead. There are two fairly major fires going on in the area; and the air has been very hazy. It makes for some pretty images, though (I know, that last one is a few years old. Still a neat picture.) And yet I still see people on the highway throwing lit cigarette butts out their windows. People are stupid.

In day to day news, our Xbox 360 has succumbed to the disease of its kind, but we hope that fixing it will be painless. Microsoft will send us a shipping box to return the original unit, then just give us a new one. The really bad thing is that this happened in the middle of playing BioShock, which is the first game since American McGee’s Alice that I’ve wanted to watch all the way through.** Grrr. At least we have the hard drive.

In the “Movies That I’ve Never Even Heard Of But Can’t Imagine Why I Haven’t Department” (MTINEHOBCIWIHD), I present to you Perfect Creature. It’s a New Zealand movie, which probably explains it, but check it out. It’s essentially steampunk vampires and the female lead is strong,*** resourceful, and wears beautiful handknit stuff. It’s like they know me.

* This probably isn’t a real word. Is there a real word meaning “To talk like Sam the Eagle on the Muppet Show”?

** And I help with the mini-games! I’m a good helper!

*** And I mean strong, not the typical Hollywood “plays hard to get and/or makes stupid decisions just to be “independent” but ends up just standing around on the sidelines or being rescued while some man actually does everything” definition.

Let A Man Come In And Do The Popcorn

2007-09-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

OK, first of all, HAH! I told you it was evil and disgusting!

Second, I don’t understand why this is funny. I’d watch it.

Thirdly, why was I not told about The DM of the Rings?

Fourthly… ah, the hell with the numbering thing. Here are some more cool links.

The Reader’s Manifesto - Cenobyte, read this.

And on a related note (sort of) the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Contest results

Goth dance instructions

The pinnacle of Lolcats (it gets no better)

Eyeball Pincushions - I’m going to make a batch of these. Who wants one?

Laid-Back Labour - Hobbies and economics. Actually interesting.

Oh, and we had an anti-Labour Day weekend because R:tAG had to work for most of it. On the plus side, I finished off three items in my knitting queue, made progress on another, and started two new ones, and since I was alone in the house, was able to commandeer most of the living room floor to block the Mystery Stole.* I keep forgetting how much lace grows when it’s blocked (no pictures of it being worn; I’ve tried and tried to get decent pictures in the only full length mirror in the house but the light is just not right.)

* My room is taken up right now with the construction of a polonaise. It is fiddly but straightforward. I even remembered to use my corseted measurements, which meant that I could use a fabric width of 36" instead of the recommended 45" (barely!), which meant that I didn't feel quite as stupid for accidentally buying 36" fabric (the lesson here is if the price seems really low for a fabric, CHECK ITS WIDTH!).

People don't live or die, people just float

2007-08-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been busy at work and sort of down-ish… I think English needs to borrow a few words to describe moods. Weltschmerz? Anomie? Hulihudu? Dukkha?

Then, of course, Cat and Girl came to my rescue and cheered me right up. There’s some really deep truth there, I think.

I’ve been meaning to take pictures of stuff, but I’ve been getting home after dark, and last weekend R:tAG took the camera to PAX* . I especially wanted to take pictures for Ravelry, which is a social networking site for knitters that might divert knitting content from this blog. Probably not, though.

I’m pretty antisocial, as it turns out,** so Ravelry for me is more of an on-line project diary and occasional resource to answer the question “What does Garment X look like on a real person under real circumstances?” instead of a way to meet people and/or talk on forums.

I finished the Mystery Stole a while ago, by the way, but wanted to take pre- and post-blocking pictures. I am also wibbling over whether or not to add this to my large line-up of projects-to-make. I love it a lot, but I have a ridiculous number of things in the queue.

At next year’s GenCon, I hope, R:tAG will be releasing his game. So I’m planning my costume already (he might get one too). I just got my pattern in the mail, and coincidentally got a 40% off coupon from Joann’s,*** and also found additional incentive to finish really early by finding out about a Victorian cemetery walking tour coming up soon. Since we didn’t end up going to the Revolutionary Picnic, I’m going to try for this one. R:tAG might end up in something rented, though.

I’m not sure that the dress that I’m picturing, being more on the mourning/undead end of the spectrum, will be suitable for the Christmas Dickens Fair. Perhaps I could do something in dark red or purple or gray or green, which would be more versatile than the black that was in my head. Hmm. Maybe not dark red, though, as all the pictures from the long red steampunk coat show what that does to my colouring. Mind you, I was pretty warm.

I am also excited about possibly designing an Empire of Bone-themed knit lace shawl. There’re patterns out there for lace skulls, and bats, and generally gothic patterns so it should work. OK, dress first, shawl second.

* I didn’t go, but I probably should have. I can take or leave PAX itself, but the hotel at which R:tAG was staying was right next to Pike Place Market, and I could happily have spent a weekend there. Ah well, probably better for the budget that I didn’t go. R:tAG did bring me back about half a pound of smoked salmon. Yum!

** I know y’all are gasping in amazement, but it’s true!

*** Not the nicest fabric store (they have no woolen fabrics, for example, and are heavy on the quilting cottons and sparkly novelty stuff) but for my first attempt I think I want something fairly cheap and plain anyway.

Home for A Rest (Third Chorus)

2007-08-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

I know I’ve used this song’s lyrics already. Twice. But damn, it’s so true.

So R:tAG’s brother and fambly were here, and we had a great time. Though trying to hit the highlights of the Bay Area in only five and a half days, while still eating and sleeping sufficiently to sustain life, was a challenge.

Most notable bits:

The look on our 13-year-old nephew’s face after spinning a dentist’s “Wheel of Fortune” display at a local community fair, and instead of winning a toothpaste squeezer like everyone else (and which he’d actually been hoping for), winning the Grand Prize of a $500 tooth-whitening procedure.*
Getting seriously sunburned on the right half of my body watching a lacrosse game in San Francisco when the tricksy tricksy fog decided to part. In about 15 minutes I looked like a Cheron variant.**
My sinister in-laws dragging – yes, dragging! – us to an outlet mall and forcing us to spend lots of money on kitchen gadgets and discount clothes! We were helpless!
Finding out that it’s not just me that gets really weirded out by the steepness of San Francisco’s hills. Seriously, you almost get dizzy after a while because of the discrepancy between the ground plane and the direction of gravity.

And then the fambly had to leave, and we had to get ready for GenCon. I’d done most of the costuming work previously except for the clockwork hand that I’d been planning. Of course, that turned out to be the fiddliest thing, but luckily it was just a lot of hand sewing (haw!) and I finished it in the hotel room on Wednesday night. What with the 3 hour time difference, I was staying up late anyway.

The steampunk costumes turned out well, I thought, and later that night, when Cenobyte and I were trying to go see a movie,*** a gentleman with gold teeth offered her $1,000 for her goggles. He produced an impressive bankroll lest we think he wasn’t serious, but Cenobyte declined (much to his confusion, I think).

We entered the costume contest, but didn’t win.**** I can’t argue; the winner (of our category and overall) did a replica of Queen Amidala’s outfit that was movie-quality. The closer you were, the more impressive it got. And the second place winner was pretty impressive also. *****

There were lots of goodies to be had on the dealers’ floor, and of course thousands of great games that I didn’t manage to play, and a few I did, and the usual stench of Indianapolis in the summer****** and a magnificent thunderstorm on Sunday night that made us very very happy. We miss thunderstorms.

And Stardust is really, really good. Go see it.

Oh, and it was R:tAG's and my eighth anniversary yesterday, so yay for us (does it seem like eight years to you?) So, a good couple of weeks. How ‘bout you?

* He gave it to me, bless his heart, since they weren’t staying long enough to use it. Tooth whitening? I am on my way to becoming completely assimilated by California. I suppose breast implants and hair extensions are next. Though a woman in our office just had extensions put in, with real hair, and now all I can think of when I look at her is “EEEEEE YOU’RE WEARING SOMEONE ELSE’S HAIR!”

** Hoo boy, the geek doesn’t even scrub off, does it?

*** We ended up going to the White Wolf party instead, at a rather cool industrial club that made me sort of nostalgic for PPM and where I told a punk with a 12” mohawk that he wasn’t a real libertarian. He was a great guy, and apparently quite involved in the punk scene (he’s the vocalist).

**** Thing I liked the most about the costume contest… there was Dr. Girlfriend, one of the Monarch’s henchmen, and Rusty Venture himself, and they all had come separately! Here’s a better picture of the last two.

***** And looking for pictures of us, I realized how much I didn’t see. This is a collection of links to collections of pictures that gives you some idea of the size of GenCon.

****** A bouquet of decomposing corpses, feces, and mildew, with a top note of urine. Downtown Indy is steam heated, which apparently means all the runoff of all the gutters gets blended, simmered, vaporized, and sent back to the surface via steaming manhole covers and gratings. There is a theory that GenCon moved to Indy because after walking downtown, entering a hall full of close-packed gamers is actually a nasal relief.

I'm like a swan, I only love once

2007-08-10T11:58:00.001-07:00

R:tAG’s brother and fambly are here for a visit, and then we’re off to GenCon right after they leave. Another busy late summer for us. It’s amazing what the addition of two teenagers to a household does to its water consumption.

Oh, I think I solved the Mystery of the Disappearing Coffee. R:tAG had another early-morning physio appointment* so I stole another cup of coffee from his workplace. This time, I tried to surreptitiously** pay attention to my drinking it. I’m pretty sure that the first time I actually just drank more than I thought I did, because I took a few big sips (to try and get the level down) and then put it in the cup holder without taking my eyes off the road. The big sips were bigger than I thought, so the level was much lower than when I last actually looked at it. So. You can all resume your normal lives; I know that y’all were on tenterhooks waiting to find out the answer to the mystery.

Speaking of mysteries (nice segue, eh?) the Mystery Stole is almost done. It turns out to be an interesting asymmetrical design. The designer had you put in a lifeline at one point, and I was going wild with speculation as to why… I was picturing some really cool techniques with lots of dropped and raveled stitches, or three-dimensional inserts to make godets, or something. Turns out it was just so if you didn’t like the proposed asymmetry, you could rip back and work a mirror image. Once again, reality fails to live up to my imagination.

I think I forgot to get a picture of Clue 4, but here is Clue 5. For Clue 4, just picture the same thing but without the odd flappy bit to the right where the direction of work changes to go diagonally. Eventually that bit will be as long as the body of the stole is wide, if that makes sense. I think this will end up being pretty short for me, as I had feared. But blocking will tell the tale, and at worst some shorter person will get a lovely Christmas present. I’m all about the process, not the product.

The final shape of the stole will be something like this:

But look closely! The rumours are true! It is the Lacy Mark of the Beast!

The official theme of the stole is “Swan Lake,” by the way, in case you were wondering about the post title. The border pattern is called “Wings of the Swan,” the Russian-y motif at the pointy end is from the costumes in a certain production, the center lace pattern is called “Cat’s Paw” (the standard choreography for a famous bit in the ballet uses a step called “Pas de Chat”) and the part I’m working on now will be a feathered wing shape as if the stole is changing into a swan. The suggested colours (black and white) represent Odile and Odette, and while the designer said she just added the beads because she liked them, someone pointed out that they look like droplets of water which is suitable, of course, for an aquatic bird theme.*** The designer originally said it might not be suitable for a wedding because the ballet is a tragedy with suicides and such, but I think it's a nice design and anyone who's that sensitive will just find something else to be upset about at their wedding anyway ("That butter knife is pointing right at me! You ruined it for the WHOLE LOG!")

* Hopefully his second-last one! Yay!

** Well, I was trying to duplicate the effect of not paying attention, so I had to kind of fool myself into acting like I was absentmindedly drinking it, while in reality observing. It’s hard to live in my head sometimes.

*** A note of interest to knitters; this post vividly shows the importance of checking gauge and how the suggested needles and yarn are only a starting point and no substitute for a swatch.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2007-08-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

Dammit! I was fooling around with changing templates and managed to lose the content of all my link lists. They don't warn you that that's going to happen (even if you restore your old templates the content of your custom widgets is lost).

I don't have time to fix it right now, but rest assured I still love all y'all and I'll get your blog links back as soon as possible.

EDITED TO ADD

Well, I sort of fixed it for Firefox, but in IE it seems like the secondary content (the stuff in the left-most column) is now only accessible through scrolling, which sucks.

If there's anyone out there who knows CSS better than I, I'd appreciate advice.

All Dressed Up

2007-07-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

Where did July go? Man…

I had a weekend that scared even me in its hyperfocussedness. Cenobyte needed a steampunk costume for GenCon too (yes, needed!) and that apron just kept calling to me, since it’s adjustable enough to fit both of us.. So I made one. And embroidered it. And made my goggles. And shopped for the cybernetic hand.* And started the embroidery on my costume.

I wonder if I should pursue the possibility of doing stuff like this for a living wage more assiduously. Or would it, Tom Sawyer-like, become a chore once I have to do it?

For your consideration… The Case of the Disappearing Coffee. R:tAG had an early morning physio appointment, so when I dropped him off at work I came in to steal a cup of coffee. They had no lids, so I drank the coffee down to half-way and hoped for the best. Driving to my workplace, I got engrossed in the radio** and forgot about the coffee. I got to work… and the coffee was almost gone. I swear I didn’t drink it (when you drive a standard in the California rush-hour, there is no such thing as absentmindedly taking your hand off the wheel or the gear shift) but there was no detectable spillage. Oooooo, mysteeeerious.

Oh, and a cooking tip, do not use a really hoppy beer (like an IPA) to deglaze a pan and make a sauce. The good flavours of the beer go away, and all that’s left is palate-assaulting bitterness.

And just to make this post be a completely random collection of statements, here are some links! An abnormal number have to do with fashion, since I’m sort of in a costuming head-space.

Before and After Makeovers - Some of these cannot be considered improvements, by any standards.
What-the-hell-is-this Knitting - Well, as costumes...
I Don’t Do Walking - Horrifying.
Facebook: Big Brother with a Smile - Noooo! Don’t do it!
Literary Lolcats - I mentioned the Lolcats thing before… this is really, really, funny.
Scary Soap - Because a list of links just isn’t complete without a horrifying picture.
Beautiful Wildlife Photography
World’s Biggest Yarn Stash – This is not a shop. This is a private collection. I now feel better.
Construction Site Floods – Wow!

* Not a euphemism

** A discussion on veterans’ health administration… some caller was trying to use the current VA mess as an example of why socialized medicine could never work. Because, somehow, people working for the government can never have the best interests of a patient in mind, but people working for an insurance company always do. Grrr.

Getting Better All the Time

2007-07-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

R:tAG is doing much better. The physiotherapist seems to be throwing a grab bag of treatments at him (twisting and pulling - which I’m sure has some fancy medical term - massage, electric shocks, ice, and ultrasound. Not all at once) but some of them at least seem to be sticking.

He was well enough that we walked around a farmers’ market on Sunday. It’s peach and plum season, and I’ve never seen such huge peaches. Grapefruit-sized, some of them. So there’s lots of peach pie in our immediate future, which is A-OK by me.

We also went to the local military surplus/camping/survivalist store to get some goggles for my GenCon costume… I’m doing basic steampunk this year so of course one needs the goggles. Here are a few links that I’ve been perusing for inspiration:

The Motherlode of Steampunk Costuming
Steampunkifying Welding Goggles
Awesome Apron
Awesome Monitor - and also see the keyboard... so beautiful!
Cog Embroidery

Oh, and you know that knitted lace Mystery Stole that I’ve been ~~boring you with~~ talking about for a while? It got a bit more interesting when the rumour went ‘round that it was going to incorporate Satanic symbols, which caused some people to state that they weren’t going to work on it any more until the designer reassured them, which caused other people to deride the first group, which caused other people to weigh in on religious freedom, being mean, persecution of Christianity, and a host of other topics. I am so glad that I don’t actually subscribe to the message boards for the Mystery Stole group.

As far as the original rumour, I can only quote dear Mr Babbage: “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”* The whole concept of this Mystery Stole thing is that you don’t know what the final product will be, but there’s certainly an element of trust. I looked at the designer’s previous work and read her blog, and I was fairly confident that the design would not end up being a) her name in 12” tall letters b) a huge phallus c) swastikas d) a high-res rendering of an alien abduction, or e) anything else that would appeal to the thin end of any given bell curve, including overt religious symbolism of any flavour.**

But even if you did think that the designer was deliberately including Satanic symbols to fool you into wearing The Lacy Mark of the Beast, why would you expect her to admit it?***

* Mr. Babbage of course was responding to the question "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" but I find the phrase appropriate to many situations.

** Though now I have some great ideas for my Mystery Stole knit-a-long…

*** I really don’t want to know more about this, and most of the discussion is apparently in a forum to which I do not have access (thank goodness) but there seems to be a possibility that all this started because someone guessed that the theme of the stole might be Dante’s Inferno. Can’t see it, myself, but I don’t even want to think about the mindset that would equate Dante with Satanism.

It’s the pelvic thrusts, that really drive you insay-ay-ay-ay-ane

2007-07-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

So, R:tAG’s X-rays show nothing wrong with the spine (yay!) and the physiotherapist says it’s “innominate pelvic shear” or something like that (R:tAG didn’t hear him quite right and I wasn’t there*). The important bit is that it’s a fairly common thing, there’s a standard series of exercises to do, it can happen to almost anyone, anytime** and R:tAG is getting better each day and ought to be able to go to work on Monday. This is a huge relief. R:tAG will have to go for physio twice a week for the next while, but the clinic is fairly close by and he says even this single therapy session helped noticeably. Double yay!

And it’s Mystery Stole Friday and Clue #4 has just been posted! Triple yay!

Here’s the progress after Clue 2, with half-assed pinning-out (that's causing the scalloped edges):

And Clue 3 with no pinning out:

These pictures make the yarn look lighter than it is, and don't show the beads very well. When it's done, I'll have to actually make an effort to figure out the camera settings and get better lighting.

At this point, according to the author, it’s 1/3 done. So I have to decide whether that’s going to be long enough…lace is tricksy before it’s blocked but it seems short-ish right now (the above picture has some foreshortening happening but it's still pretty stubby). She gives directions for lengthening it in 11” increments, which is a fair bit but I guess that’s the shortest repeat for the border and the centre to get back in synch. I’ll have to do a quick on-the-needles blocking, measure it properly, and see how an extra 11” would affect the proportions. I don’t want it looking too skinny, or be so long that I'll pull an Isadora Duncan.

* The clinic happens to be near my favourite LYS. Hey, what was I supposed to do, just sit yarn-less in a waiting room? I don’t think so! And besides, I had to go back there because I'd bought some sale yarn there and then changed my mind about what I was going to do with it, so I needed two more skeins, which I found out was exactly the amount they had left. So obviously that was the right thing to do.

** The physiotherapist said that one of his patients had had this happen just by shifting his weight in a chair during a long meeting. Eek! We’re such fragile bags of thinking water…

King of Pain

2007-07-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

So, Reason Number 48 for not being a complete slob; if EMTs have to come to take your husband away on a stretcher, they won’t be tripping over books, piles of clothing, and Rubbermaid bins of yarn in your bedroom.

No, it actually didn’t come to that, but at one point I’d dialed the first two digits of 911 while waiting to see if R:tAG was going to start screaming again. That was pretty horrible. It’s his lower back… he merely leaned the wrong way on Saturday afternoon and something went terribly wrong. The pain kept getting worse until he had to remain flat on his back and immobile to get any relief, and then even that started hurting. By 5:00 AM on Sunday he was having full-blown back spasms. Not fun, and there was no way I could get him even to my car, much less into it, to get him to any place where they could help him. So it looked like it would be an $X,000.00 ambulance ride.

However, R:tAG is a trooper and we agreed that since it had been about five hours since he’d had any medicine, he’d take some more and see what happened before we called 911.* Thank goodness, the spasms responded to the drugs, and the pain gradually ebbed and his mobility returned to some extent… enough that he could stand, sit, and walk (with help, and considerable discomfort, but still a vast improvement over the previous blinding agony). We saw the doctor this morning** and got the good painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and we’re waiting for the X-ray results and physiotherapy recommendations.***

So, we had a lousy weekend.**** How was yours?

* Which also gave me the chance to pick up the bedroom a bit. Now we are ready for EMTs!

**I guess we’ve never been in quite this situation before, having a really-urgent-but-not-actually-life-threatening medical situation, so I can’t really compare the Canadian and American responses. It helped that all the doctors in the clinic are part of our HMO deal, so R:tAG could see the first one available, but being able to be seen within two hours of calling was sure nice. We had to wait about an hour for X-rays… comparable to my experience at the Community Clinic.

*** On the various papers documenting the experience, R:tAG’s condition was listed as "Lubar Spam," which would be a great name for a rock band, and also as "Back Spasums." The first might have just been poor handwriting, but the second was typed. I guess they don't teach spelling in med school. Oh well, as long as they give us Vicodin!

**** Never did get to that Bastille Day picnic, but I didn’t get the costumes finished in time anyway. Plus, it was stinkin’ hot.

Twenty-Seven 8x10 Colour Glossy Photographs

2007-07-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

Lots of pictures! First some of the ones that should have illustrated some of the events I missed:

Carl and me at the Digital Moose Canada Day celebration. I managed to look away from the iPhone long enough to sing the anthem, but it was a close thing.

We went to friends’ for a July 4 BBQ* and I finally had the excuse to make this cake. I halved the recipe and got an 8”x12” cake, which I thought would be plenty, but damn, this cake is astonishingly good and we probably could have eaten the whole thing. You certainly don’t have to do the flag pattern with the fruit… I strongly recommend that you make this cake even if you end up just dumping a couple of handfuls of berries on top of the icing.

And finally, a schwack of knitting.

The Arrrgyle socks with some additional help. I’ve never wanted to make argyle socks before, but these overcame me. Unfortunately, they ended up too big for me, but R:tAG says he’ll wear them.

This is why I never wanted to make argyle socks. I really dislike weaving in ends. Unfortunately I didn’t convince R:tAG that they were meant to be shaggy on the inside (“No really! They’re thrummed!”) so I made all the wretched little ends disappear. Eventually.

A shawl for me dear Mum.** I meant to get a pre-blocking picture, but the heat made me forget.

I also blame the heat for something else… I’m not much of a joiner, so I passed on the the whole Mystery Stole thing last year, and had no intention of doing it this year. But then I saw that the sign-up closed this Friday. So I signed up, just to see if I liked the design. It looked very nice. It began with a point. I love things that begin with a point.*** But I didn’t think I had any unspoken for laceweight…

Well, not counting that Merino Oro that I was going to use once and discovered upon winding it up that carpet beetles or something had turned it into Simpson’s Individual Stringettes**** However, I’m a pro at spit-splicing now, so I could use it. But I don’t have any suitable beads, and I hate stringing the little buggers anyway.

Huh. I do have suitable beads. And the pattern uses my new favourite way of adding beads, instead of pre-stringing them. But I don’t have time to even swatch… I have a bunch of work to do this weekend.

OK, so I have the fiercely-blocked swatches and chose a needle (3.75mm... the top swatch), and the yarn will work well, and the beads look great, but I really should wait until I have enough spare time…

Oh dear. That’s Clue #1 done. I blame the heat.

* Highlight of the evening: watching some neighbours set off some (illegal) fireworks and having the box tip over so that the fireworks – real grownup go-high-in-the-air-and-explode-many-times fireworks – were shooting horizontally a foot off the ground into someone’s yard and ricocheting off the house. We were too far away to see the aftermath, but apparently nothing and no-one was damaged. Amazing.

** "A Curved Shawl" from Victorian Lace Today, 2 balls of Misti Alpaca laceweight, 3.75 mm needles. Addi's new lace needles are awesometastic.

*** Literally and figuratively.

**** Two points for getting the reference.

Happy Birthday

2007-07-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve missed posting about a bunch of birthdays… Canada’s, America’s and this blog’s. Well, I guess I’m not technically too late for America’s. Happy Fourth!

I’ve been working a normal full day (or a bit longer) plus every evening has been taken up by a conference call to Bangalore. We’re in the middle of a crunch, and the time has just flown by.

Today’s a stat holiday (one of the few) and so I’m idling at home. R:tAG’s still asleep because he was up ‘til 6 AM playing Overlord. Silly, silly R:tAG. I tried unwinding just now by playing Katamari Damacy, but perhaps because of stress, perhaps because I’ve been staring at a screen every day for the past two weeks for 8+ hours, it’s making me very motion sick (a lot more than normal). Too bad; I think I’ve finally figured out the route for the level 8 star but it’s not worth throwing up over.

So instead, I stare at a screen to update the blog! Oh well, the cosmos’ loss is your gain.

So, changing subjects completely, I don’t put a lot of pictures on this blog, do I? I finally found one of me that I don’t mind. I don’t think I’m very photogenic (I’m not fishing for compliments here, it’s just a fact. Some people look good in pictures. I’m not one of them. I made my peace with that a while ago). But I think the key might be not smiling. And a 3/4 profile to showcase my pointy nose.

This was at my company’s summer picnic, at a place called Saratoga Springs. R:tAG’s summer picnic will also be there; there must have been a deal. The person who took this picture titled it "Look into my eyes." I think R:tAG must have asked if he had anything in his teeth.

Changing subjects again, I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole “lolcats” meme, as particularly showcased on I Can Has Cheezburger.* There are three spin-offs in particular that made me very happy:

I can hath cheezburger - by Geoffrey Chaucer
T-shirt - that makes me really, really, reconsider my moratorium on T-shirts.
Haw!

Oh, and as I was idly browsing, following links that other people seem to like, I found Girls With Slingshots on Carla’s new blog. This one is scary in the same way that Something Positive initially scared me… do I have a stalker, or am I just more predictable than I ever thought?

* Personal fave. The whole “lolrus” thread is the best in general, I think. This is the one that started it all.

Memory brushes the same years

2007-06-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I’ve found a lot of cool stuff recently, probably because I’m browsing more (since most of the restaurants around are closing, it’s easier for me to bring my lunch and eat at my desk… not a bad thing from a nutritional and financial point of view, though I probably should get more fresh air).

Hearing that a casual mention of a funny site helped someone during a funk made me feel good. If I can’t have coffee with all y’all every week, at least I can point you to things that I liked or that reminded me of you. Yes, you.*

Build Your Own Poi – for all my dance buddies.

99 Wolves Crash Into Glass - for all my werewolf buddies (an extraordinarily visually compelling work of art with no wolves harmed, don’t worry).

What the World Eats - I think Cenobyte will like this especially.

Smitten Kitchen - My new favourite food blog – have you seen this, Steve?

Geeky Yarn - For all my knitting buddies, especially Marcia and I hope she feels better soon. I'm putting the crochet Dalek near the top of my "to do" list.

The Joys of Home Fries and Wine - (you have to watch an ad to get to the site… totally worth it) The Achewood guys wrote a cookbook. If you don’t know who this reminds me of, you haven’t met him.

The Comics Curmudgeon - Why was I not told of this earlier? Sweet fancy Moses, this is funny, and I can almost hear Rilla laughing until she becomes inaudible.

PVP Online - for Carl, Mickey, and the other Apple slaves.

Another PVP Online - for Ferlak, especially. Eerie, eh?

Sinfest - The whole thing reminds me of Bne, but that was the one in particular that made me fire up Yahoo and send him the link.

Partially Clips - This one’s for Alamalan despite the lack of octopuses.

Best Office Ever - This is so nice. And it reminded me of Suz because she’s so unnaturally happy with her job even without office furniture like this. Imagine!

Ninjas - For Quinn, of course.

Japan - For Paul, of course

Natureza Viva - To all my cross-stitching buddies… OK, I think I’m the only one crazy enough to have done cross stitch**, but if you’re at all interested in UI design or animation this is worth checking out. It’s strangely compelling and very well executed. Note the subtle use of fisheye distortion!

AT-AT stroller - For Seamus and Jen, and congratulations.

Narcissistic Blog Disorder - For Terry. It seems to bother him when I don't tell him why I think a thing is appropriate for him, so I won't. Heh.

* And if you don’t see your name explicitly here, it’s because of my poor memory. I promise that I was thinking of you at some point but probably forgot to bookmark. Leave a comment and I'll try to re-find whatever it was that reminded me of you.

** I think I’m on record as saying it’s like paint-by-numbers, but without the creativity.

I want to sing and dance

2007-06-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

I often feel guilty that we don’t do all the stuff that we can here. There’s so much going on, but most nights and weekends we have a far more boring schedule than we did in Saskatoon (a combination of a smaller social circle and the formidable travel logistics; man, I miss living a block away from Broadway). So sometimes we make an effort to actually get off our butts and do things. And then I’m reminded why we mostly don’t… I’m tired!

Saturday was my regular dance class, and then we ran some errands and went up to have a lovely but expensive supper with friends in San Francisco, and go to a Jazz Age Swing Party. Our friends are big into the swing dancing, and they persuaded us to give it a try… there were lessons included.* It was actually pretty fun; there were all skill levels represented so we were not obvious in our ignorance, but ‘20’s dancing is tiring! Here I always thought that those old movies were speeded up (à la the Keystone Kops) when they showed all the jazz babies doing the Charleston but nope, you actually are supposed to look like that. The really embarrassing part was the old folks, some of whom looked like they might have been around to learn the original dances, who were still going strong after I had to be led to a bench and fanned. My ankles still are a bit achey.

And then Sunday was pirates! Yarrr! I guess the “pirate weekend” of the Renaissance Festival was popular enough that someone said “Hey, we could probably just do that bit!” and the First NorCal Pirate Festival was born. And it was free, at which I am amazed. It was a bit of a drive, and it was very hot, but still a good time. There was actors from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies signing autographs (which we missed, unfortunately; one of the suggestions I would have for next year’s planners would be to have a posted schedule of events, also more shade-providing structures), constant entertainment (this guy sang a very good song titled “You Can’t be a Pirate With All of Your Parts”),

a guy with amazingly tolerant parrots (there's one on my shoulder as well as the one I'm holding... yes, they're live birds),

and some really cute costumes.

We left sort of early-ish because the heat and the sun took their toll, but after some time reviving in an air-conditioned car** we realized we were pretty hungry, and we happened to be driving past the only Fuddruckers we’ve seen here***. Cheeseboat! Sweet, sweet cheeseboat!**** But the best part was because the Fuddruckers was in a strip mall with a movie theater, people would stop us and say “Nice costumes! You were just at the pirate movie?” to which we would smile, say “Nope!” and move on. Let ‘em wonder.

* Personal fave, the Collegiate Shag. Easily 90% of the joy was hearing R:tAG muttering “HOP hop HOP hop HOP HOP!” under his breath in a Sesame Street monster voice to try and get the footwork.

** Our friends drove. I still don’t have AC in my car. My resistance is crumbling, though.

*** The website makes it look like Northern California is littered with them, but I think they lie.

**** Somewhere in the back of my mind is a shanty-type song about pirates and cheeseboats. I don’t know what will become of it.

Oh, Susie was a tuna...

2007-06-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

… and she swam the seven seas,
And some folks called her Susie-Q or Susan if you please,
And some called her Susannah like the Steven Foster song,
But those who called her Sushi weren’t her friends for very long.

The sushi-boat camera link from the last post gave me a craving, so I went twice to my sushi-boat place this week. Madness! But its last day is June 24, so I have a deadline to finally try all the scary little things I’ve been too chicken to.*

One of the reasons I like it is how quick it is (no waiting, at least for a single seat by the boats), the fact that I can be making decisions about my lunch right up until it’s time to pay**, and just how pretty all the little plates are going ‘round. Salmon roe in particular is just beautiful.

I’m pretty sure this “How to Eat at a Sushi Bar” is not completely serious.

Because of the massive construction, there aren’t many shops left in my immediate area. As their leases expire, they’re all moving out. I am pessimistic about what will replace them in the new downtown incarnation; the old area was one of those sort of past-its-prime strip malls*** with a great collection of really eclectic shops. Coins and stamps, fish and aquarium supplies, watch repair, a pawn shop, a couple of shoe repair places, a drycleaner, an optometrist, a furniture store, clothing, a bunch of non-chain restaurants…

Oh well. Change happens, especially around here.

* Except for maybe the baby octopuses. They just look so sad. I don’t think they’re very popular to eat, so they just keep going ‘round and ‘round, looking more and more disconsolate. Sometimes their little tentacles drag in the water, like a languishing Victorian lady in a canoe.

** It's like dim-sum; you take as many plates as you have a mind to, and the server just tallies them up at the end. The plates are colour-coded by price.

*** Well, not really a strip mall. A downtown area, designed for pedestrians, where each block is one big building full of little shops, but each has a separate entrance and the sidewalks are all sheltered by the eaves of the building… OK, maybe it is a strip mall. But I sort of like it. Oh, hey, here’s a picture.

Mother be quick, second verse

2007-06-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

A little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Tricksy intestinal bugs. I thought I was over it, but I really, really wasn’t. Ooog.

I’m better now, though slightly floaty from eating nothing solid for four days. Bless Jamba Juice (the local equivalent of Booster Juice) and VitaminWater.

I have the energy for nothing but mucking out the link stables. Enjoy.

If we Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics
Don’t Let Body-Mod Envy Ruin Your Entire Day - Now I wanna play Shadowrun…
American Food Manifesto
Birth of One Parrot - Awwwww!
OMGSOCREEPY!
Snowglobe Art - Sooooo pretty
Chinese Ballet Circus - OK, this is possibly the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
Sushi Boat Camera
Fuzzy Thinking Bingo - A list of common “arguments” (and the quotes are definitely needed) that you can use to play bingo during discussions about woo.
VisiGoth - Heh.

Mother be quick, I’m going to be sick, and lay me down to die

2007-06-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

This was the second weekend in a row that I was sick. Blargh.

Last weekend, it was the Western Canadian Lingering Lung Crud, which at least left me ambulatory. This weekend, it was some food poisoning/stomach flu thing that R:tAG might have given to me… he’d been under the weather all week and finally felt close to normal on Saturday, then Sunday I woke up knowing that I was going to be spending all day horizontal, sucking on ice cubes, with a bucket beside me. At least for me it was over after one day.* I guess between us we had the extremes of feeling kinda-sorta-bad for a long time, or really wretched for a short time. On the whole I prefer the “really wretched for a short time,” except when it is on a weekend day that I’d planned to use for other purposes.

What other purposes, you ask? Well, there’s this event coming up that I’d really like to attend, but it requires a costume. It’s the French Revolution Picnic and since I’ve been thinking about making a general purpose working-class Elizabethan outfit for a while,** and since I think that could easily be turned into working-class Revolutionary (it’s all about the accessories), and since I tend to need a concrete purpose before I can motivate myself to do anything, why not?

Getting R:tAG kitted up in time might be more of a challenge. At least time and budget pretty much dictate peasant revolutionaries instead of aristos.

* I was better enough this morning to come to work, but I’m still feeling the effects of not being able to eat or drink anything for all of yesterday. Well, more accurately, having nothing stay eaten or drunk yesterday. You really needed to know that, didn’t you? You’re welcome.

** I’ve got most of the material already, it’s just been patiently waiting…

We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs

2007-05-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

(ETA: I'm talking here about Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - At World's End. I guess that wasn't obvious enough for some people.)

As always, she summarized the points better than I (spoiler warning in the link, I’ll try to avoid spoilers in this post*).

It’s rare that I think a movie is too subtle, but it really felt like a lot was left out. I know that you don’t want to do too many “As you know, your father the King…” type speeches, but no explanation at all just means I’m sitting there going “Wait, what… now she’s… and he has to… but why didn’t they…”** and lots of it just feels like retconning rather than a thoughtful overplot. They foreshadowed a lot of stuff successfully (e.g. Tia Dalma’s locket) which to me just emphasized what they didn’t foreshadow. There were too many places where I was saying “But if that’s the case, then why didn’t someone say something back then?” The whole Calypso thing, a major plot point, is introduced seemingly out of left field.

But I liked the movie and plan on seeing it again many times. A warning for those planning to take children; see it by yourself first. I do not think it’s suitable for sensitive young ‘uns, but watch the first ten minutes and judge for yourself.

I’m also a bit bitter because of what happens to my favourite character. Hmph.

Oh, and apparently there’s a whole explanation for the ending that is nowhere in the actual movie, which makes several things make a bit more sense or at least provides better closure. Be sure and stay for the post-credit bit, and brush up on the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

* But my absolute favourite Cleolinda quote from the above link is: “Taking my mother to see this movie is going to be hellish. 'Where are they? Is that China? Who's Calypso? Why are there so many Jacks? Why would multiple Jacks be hell? Is Will with the bad people now? Why is Will with the bad people? Why doesn't his father remember him? Why is Elizabeth Calypso? Well, why isn't she—' OH MY GOD.”

** Of course, some of that is undoubtedly because we went to see the midnight show and the movie is three freakin’ hours long. My level of intellectual analysis was basically “Oooh, ‘splody boats!”

Yo-ho, so it's your birthday

2007-05-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

(song lyrics here… heh. I hadn’t heard this before, but how perfect is it?)

It’s awfully short notice, but since today’s our birthday, and it’s also the official release date of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, we’re having a barbeque* featuring screenings of the first and second movies, then attending the third at midnight. It’s rated Arrr!

I came back to work yesterday and three people in a row reacted with “Whoa! You look like you need to take a few more days off!” The lung issues that plagued me throughout the weekend have segued from allergy-triggered asthma into some deep-seated crud that has me coughing continuously,** much to the detriment of my sleep schedule (and poor R:tAG’s). I am glad that a long weekend is coming up, and I am unspeakably grateful to Dancin’ Cicada Jen, hereafter known as Saint Jen, who came through with the prescription meds in a pinch because I am an idiot. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

But enough about depressing sickness! Boo, coughy lungs! Hooray beer!*** The week in Canada was great; old friends with new partnerships and new babies and new houses, dry ribs, Big Rock Traditional, Broadway Roastery mochaccinos, Firefly episodes plus red wine, and lots of driving across the prairies, which I happen to love.**** The only thing missing was a thunderstorm. I miss those very much. We had high hopes of one on our last night in Canada (Tuesday in Edmonton) where the wind was so strong that there were dust devils in the street intersections, the clouds were greenish gray, and the air had that heavy, foreboding feeling. Alas, everything just blew past.

Oh, and I did get the lace shawl done in time to wear it to the wedding; I finished it up on the plane, and did a half-assed job of blocking it on Ben’s living room floor. Luckily, Edmonton’s climate means that it dried almost within minutes. I don’t have any good pictures yet, alas, but I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I’ll re-block it and show you soon!

Thanks to Al and Jen for hosting such a great wedding, thanks to Suzi for hosting such a great party, thanks to Bne, Alamalan and Trent for the hospitality, and thanks to everyone for being such good friends. I apologize to anyone we didn’t see or weren’t able to spend enough time with; we underestimated the amount of time we need to do justice to y’all. We really, really miss you. Come visit!

*The etymology of “Buccaneer” and “Barbeque” is the same! It’s true!

** A “productive” cough, in medical terminology. We shall draw a discreet curtain over the disgusting details.

*** Have you seen the Red Stripe ads? They’re a hoot. And, unlike some of my favourite ads, you actually remember what they’re for.

**** Though not so much in a PT Cruiser. I cannot honestly recommend the car; very poor mileage, mediocre performance, not very comfortable, high-centered and tippy feeling (though of course some of that might be because I'm used to a much smaller car).