OK. Last set of vistors waved-farewell-to (and there may also have been hugging), last bit of cleaning ready to start, last clothing bit packed (opening my suitcase is like looking into the Abyss, but black is so versatile!) and off to GenCon. With a brand new sinus cold. Yuck.
In retrospect, of course, going off to spend four days with 40,000 people (most of notoriously questionable social skills) is probably not the best way to cap off three weeks of houseguests and sightseeing. I'm starting to resemble a rabbit in a petting zoo at 5:30 PM. I hope that something will snap and I'll just pass through all the stress and anxiety into a calm floating pool of Zen acceptance. Or sociopathy. Either-or.
I'm not dead yet! But the visitors are all starting to blur together. I was trying to continue a conversation with Suz that I'd started with Jeff, used an in-joke from Ben and Rilla with Randy, and almost sprayed Orange Guard on Chris.
Man, though, it's nice to have friends. Just thought I'd say that.
We're really really looking forwards to our visitors from Saskatoon. This morning, though, we found visitors that we didn't want. The kitchen floor was black with ants. Little teeny-tiny ants, apparently "grease ants" since they seemed to be ignoring the sugar-ant traps that we had around (we'd been invaded before, but not this exuberantly. ExuberANTly. Heh.) Something, apparently in the kitchen garbage, had drawn them in from our backyard, a distance of about 7 meters and through a patio door. I swear the garbage didn't smell that bad.
They were in a neat marching line, about a centimeter wide with a few foraging tributaries, for almost all the distance until they got to the region of the garbage can where they turned into a "freaked-out mess" in the words of a friend of ours who had had the same problem.
So a quick trip to the hardware store (which has an entire aisle of anti-ant products, our first clue that this is not a problem unique to us) produced an orange-peel based spray which, in addition to smelling really quite pleasant (pleasANT. Heh.) kills the little suckers on contact and repels future invasions. and is not so extravagantly (extravagANTly. Heh. OK, I'll stop) toxic as Raid and sprays of that ilk.
I think there's a story in here somewhere. If only Leiningen had had "Orange Guard."
Partially Clips
Does that make me a bad person?
Two days until our next deluge of visitors, and I am still full of warm and fuzzy thoughts towards Rilla for doing some major cleaning before she left. I find it difficult to clean my own house, let alone that of another, so such charity astounds me (and I'm kicking myself for not pointing her towards a few other places in the house... and the car is dusty... :))
The City of Villains beta starts soon, and I'm gingerly participating. Not gingerly because I think the game will be anything other than excellent (with R:tAG involved, how could it be?) but because of my tendancy to motion sickness, or, more accurately, simulator sickness. I was also worried because I'm pretty unfamiliar with City of Heroes, but R:tAG assures me that a novice point of view is just as valuable.
Our main computer is back and working, avec new power supply, which is a Good Thing. I hadn't realized how often I looked things up online until I needed to scout around for activities to keep our guests amused (assuming that just basking in our glorious presence isn't enough for these ingrates :)). Train and bus schedules, museum, zoo, and park locations and hours, movie listings, news... none of this is on paper for us.
And a few other links, in no real order or theme...
Tact Filters - it makes so much sense!
Royal Blood - maybe I am a bad person. These are pretty.
The Brothers Grimm - OooOOooooo, Monica Bellucci! >>drool<<
MirrorMask - This has been "coming soon" for so long now! Argh!
So, still no pictures of anything, but this time I have an excuse. Well, more of an explanation. R:tAG's computer was apparently fried by a brownout a few days ago (and this is in spite of being connected to a UPS... grrrr) so uploading pictures is way more of a pain because we're using our agonizingly slow auxiliary backup emergency computer. Plus, at the moment, R:tAG has the camera.
Anyway, I just saw Bne and Rilla safely off to the airport after their week here. It was really, really, really nice to see them both again, and our subsequent visitors should not worry about us being burnt out on guests because we really miss all y'all. Burnt out on driving, maybe (it's always a bit of a shock to realize how much time one has to spend in a car here). But as I was thinking on the drive home, there is still a lot that we actually didn't even get to with Bne and Rilla, and what we did do, I wouldn't mind doing again. Well, except for seeing Batman Begins. It's a fine movie, but three times in as many weeks would be a bit much. But we also saw the Serenity trailer, which looks so great that I'm bouncing up and down slightly just thinking about it. I'm such a raving fangirl, it's embarassing.
So now the house is quiet... too, too quiet. Quieter than it's been since Friday night, when everyone was away playtesting CoV. A different sort of quiet than three people sitting together reading (which was every morning that wasn't spent in a car getting somewhere... >>happy sigh<<) I suppose I'll just be getting used to it again by the time our next guests arrive. This is the kind of problem I don't mind having.
