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.
I started at IRD in June of '96. And you two had just started going out.
Did you seriously not remember?
Yeah, seriously, neither of us remembered.
I did remember that we met at Wizard's Challenge, in Regina, and Simon and I had driven down in a sleet storm and nearly slipped off the road at Lumsden, and I was very focussed on getting to the bar in the con hotel to have a beer or five to relax when this guy dressed as an old man stopped me and asked if I wanted to attend a lecture on Cthulhu. And I thought he was from Winnipeg, and apparently ignored him for most of the con.
I just didn't remember what year it was.