Thanksgiving weekend
We had a pleasant visit with my parents, my sister, and
her two kids on Thursday. My 15-year-old nephew, as I
mentioned previously, behaved much better than I expected
given past experience. I had hoped that my niece would
tell us more about how college is going for her (she's a
freshman), but she's been going through an anti-social
phase so she didn't say much (and spent the entire non-meal
part of the visit reading a book).
Thor, the golden retriever, is 13 years old now and definitely showing his age. My parents have to help him up stairs; they have a special sling that they slide under his body just in front of his rear legs so they can lift while he walks. Other than that he seems healthy and happy, but it seems like we're seeing the beginning of the end and I can imagine how much this must upset my parents. They love that dog.
My mother had asked me to bring a (pareve) pie, which I did. I knew that she also had a (dairy) carrot cake lined up, so there was definitely a self-interest factor here anyway. (She did insist that I take a piece of the cake home, though.) I was completely surprised by the third dessert, a cheesecake. There were only seven of us; one dessert would have been just fine! The cheesecake was store-bought, so it's not that someone got a last-minute baking bug. I don't know what was up with that.
My sister cut my piece of pie first, before cutting the other desserts with the same knife, and I didn't even have to ask. This made me happy. I'm not sure it wasn't dumb luck, but I choose to give the benefit of the doubt. :-)
My father has a new Mac (I'm assuming an iMac but don't know). The noticably-odd feature was the monitor (LCD) with an unusual aspect ratio. It looked like 16:9 (like widescreen movies), which I'm guessing is not a coincidence. I didn't get a close look at it because my nephew was using it to play games (and kids these days shun turn-based games in favor of real-time ones, and having his aunt peering over his shoulder would clearly cramp his style).
I brought along a 25-ounce bottle of Omegang ale that I had gotten in a recent beer buy and which I thought my father would like. (I cannot drink 25 ounces of beer in a sitting, and Dani doesn't like beer, so the large bottles wait for some occasion like this.) I was correct about my father liking it, so I should find out how to get more and gift him with it.
Aside: the beer buy. In Pennyslvania, you have two options for buying beer: by the bottle at restaurant prices from restaurants, or by the case from beer distributors. (Maybe there's a third option, involving six-packs and bars, but I've lost track. Beers more exotic than Miller are unlikely to come that way anyway.) So, what is the person who wants a variety of beer at affordable prices to do? Why, to get together with friends in multiples of eight people, so you can do a cooperative buy and get three bottles each of eight different beers. A former co-worker organizes such excursions every couple months. I've encountered some nice beers that I never would have met otherwise, without committing to an entire case of the ones I don't like (which happens often enough to matter). I'm not a big beer drinker, and participate maybe twice a year -- and take some of that to Pennsic.
Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.
It felt like there were fewer people there this year than last -- and last year I said the same thing. The average age is also rising; I saw a lot more gray than I'm used to. (Mind, I contribute some of that myself.) Some specific people I'm used to seeing were not there, including the only other Pittsburghers who still live in Pittsburgh and still go.
I got to spend time with Yaakov and Rivka, including Shabbat dinner and lunch, which was pleasant. Aaron has gotten big; if he hadn't been standing next to Yaakov and wearing a kippah I might not have recognized him. I assume he is now in school (as opposed to daycare), because he turned five this summer, but I forgot to ask.
I didn't get to spend a lot of time with Cliff and Eileen; Cliff was organizing the music program and was also performing in three concerts (Clam Chowder, Cliff Art, and backup for John Huff), so I guess he was pretty busy. It was good to see him, though, and I like his music. I still can't describe what Cliff Art does; my vocabulary is lacking. But it's cool, whatever it is. (Two people: Art plays Chapman stick and Cliff plays bass and appalachian dulcimer. They have a fair bit of equipment on stage to apply post-processing. It's all instrumental and electronic; it's cool, mellow, and intricate enough to be interesting.)
I saw dglenn Friday, but apparently he got sick on Saturday and didn't make it back to the con. I enjoyed hearing his band, Homespun Celeidh (sp?) Band, on Friday; he adds a lot of energy to their performances that was absent on Saturday. Glenn also introduced me to some other LJ folks, though I failed to record names and have now forgotten them. If he's reading this maybe he'll remind me.
Kludge got married! This apparently surprised a lot of people. (I don't know him well enough to have known that he was involved.) He looked happy.
The Clam Chowder concert was fun as always. They have, for several years, been doing a fund-raiser for the local children's hospital. It all started as a bribe to sing "Bend Over Greek Sailor". These days it's a given that they will do the song and the fans will cough up between $2000 and $3000 collectively. Ed Sobansky, the group's manager, gets matching funds for this (from his employer?), so it turns into a hefty donation. Officially, though, we are not allowed to tell Kathy's mother that she sings this song. :-) (This is easy, as most of us don't know her mother.)
A few years ago they added to this fund-raiser, auctioning off pairs of comfortable front-row seats for the concert. And this year, they added the "Clam Chowder Karaoke" fund-raiser: they auctioned off two opportunities to sing a song (from their repertoire) with them on stage. Both of the winners this year did good jobs and it looked like everyone had fun, so I hope they keep that. I've been trying to figure out what song I would pick next year. :-)
Our concert went well. There were just the three of us and we performed in the small room, so we didn't have lots of stuff in the way. (The main hazard of the large room is all the mike stands and monitors. In the small room it's all accoustic. We requested the small room.) We resurrected a couple of old songs that we haven't done in years, added some new material, and rearranged a bunch of stuff to work with just three people. Kathy managed to add almost the entire flute line for "Guenevere and the Fire" to the existing keyboard line, playing the whole thing on keyboard, which impresses me no end. (She says this would be easy for real pianists, but none of us is a real pianist.)
Robert does a better job with "Lusty Young Smith" if he can flirt with someone on stage (a role previously occupied by first Jana, then Andrea, and then Jenn). Kathy and I were both busy and unavailable for flirting, so we told him to "recruit a babe" before the concert. He did this and they had fun with it. This is a trick we should remember for the future; audience members can sometimes be pressed into service.
We had intended to recruit some "unsavory musicians" for "A Chat With Your Mother", but logistics challenges got in the way. Ah well; another time. We're not about to stop doing that song, and there are plenty of ways to keep it fresh. :-)
Set list: Saltarello la Regina (instrumental), Lusty Young Smith, Everyman (about the engineers/ground crews/etc who make space flight possible), What News (Heather Rose Jones), Marchesana (instrumental), Friar in the Well (outsmarting a lusty monk), Plastic or Paper (weirdness from the Bobs), Guenevere and the Fire (be careful with your bigotry; it can kill you), Rostiboli Gioioso (instrumental), Pict Song (Kipling/Fish - the quiet, subersive version, rather than the rousing one), Rasputin's HMO (Austin Lounge Lizards), Ho Ho Ho (a 16th-century drinking song), Hashir Sheli (instrumental, Israeli), Little Gomez (squashed chihuahua), A Reason For It All (Eric Bogle), Jai Trop (instrumental), Abort Retry Ignore (aka Undiscovered Poe), Flowers for Algernon, Coronation (instrumental), The Youth Shall See Visions (Debbie Friedman), Amoroso (instrumental), A Chat With Your Mother.
The room where we performed has some physical-plant challenges: you can have heat and noise, or you can have quiet and cold. A number of performers were having trouble with this. I wonder if there is any other room in the function space that would be better for the smaller performances. I know that some performers lost audience members due to the HVAC system.
Speaking of HVAC, this year I remembered that some rooms in this hotel have thermostats, rather than scale-less "hotter - colder" knobs with manual fan control (on or off). The latter is a real pain on Shabbat, as you have to guess and whatever you guess, it'll be wrong by Saturday afternoon. Last year I saw a thermostat in a regular room, so I asked for one when I checked in. This confused the person at the desk, who apparently knew how to give me two beds and non-smoking but had no clues about thermostats. After she and a manager conferred over a map of the hotel, she came back with a room on the fifth floor, which I took. I later commented to Yaakov that the Almighty had clearly decreed, since I would not be walking the mile to and from shul this week, that I should get my exercise in some other way. It wasn't bad, though; the ceilings are relatively low, so there are only 14 steps between floors.
I had never seen the rooms on the fifth floor before, and apparently this is their "executive floor". (I'm guessing they don't give out these rooms to fen without being asked.) The rooms were a little cushier, and included a desk and chair with data port and a TV in an entertainment center rather than perched on a dresser. The chairs were also a little more comfortable and less worn. (Robert had brought his laptop, but we never found out if there was a charge for the data port because the entire hotel is now set up for wireless, so he used that for free.)
Yaakov and Rivka were on the second floor, which was more convenient for them. (I forgot to notice if they had a thermostat...) Their only issue was that the promised refrigerator was not there, and it took them several hours to get it. (It was not there by the end of Shabbat dinner, but it was before they went to sleep. They were also waiting for a cot for Aaron.) I did not have a refrigerator; I had a cooler, less-perishable food, and the knowledge that the food I would be contributing to the Shabbat meals could live in their fridge. I'm glad it got sorted out before we had to figure out how to keep meat safely.
Note to self: this is the second year in a row that hard-boiled eggs have not been happy after spending a day in the cooler. Figure out why or don't plan on hard-boiled eggs for future cons. (I use frozen ice packs, not actual ice cubes, in the cooler. Well, ice packs and a few pint bottles filled with water and frozen.)
I ran into the folks from that Trek con in Tennessee. They missed Darkover last year, so they hadn't seen us since we performed at their convention in 2002. It was nice to see them again, and they were just as friendly and cheeful as I remembered. They were disappointed to hear that On the Mark is taking a year off, but glad they made it up this year.
We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.
The CD did end up posing one Shabbat challenge for me, and 30 seconds too late I realized how I should have handled it. The background: I don't have anything to do with CD sales on Shabbat, and this project was really Robert's baby anyway. I don't worry about the trivial amounts of income that CD sales theoretically generate for me, because really, it all goes back into the group kitty to make the next CD anyway. So I'm ok with other group members selling our CDs at concerts on Shabbat; I'm not making money, and that's not why I'm doing those concerts anyway.
Fine so far. Now normally, I don't carry my wallet on Shabbat. At a convention, though, I leave it in my pocket (and then just don't reach into that pocket), because I'm not comfortable leaving it in an unattended hotel room. (I just realized that the hotel probably has secure storage available; I should check that out next time.) So I went to our 5pm concert with a wallet in my pocket. Shabbat ended during the concert, but of course I didn't make havdalah until after.
At the end of the show, while selling CDs, Robert needed to break a 20. So I looked at my watch (I knew, but to be obvious about it), then got my wallet and pulled out money for him. But, of course, I hadn't actually ended Shabbat yet, so I shouldn't have done that. And while I was standing there making change with Yaakov in the room, I realized that what I should have done was to tell him to take my wallet. I trust him more than I trust hotel staff. :-)
On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)
All in all, it was a fun weekend!
Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!
Thor, the golden retriever, is 13 years old now and definitely showing his age. My parents have to help him up stairs; they have a special sling that they slide under his body just in front of his rear legs so they can lift while he walks. Other than that he seems healthy and happy, but it seems like we're seeing the beginning of the end and I can imagine how much this must upset my parents. They love that dog.
My mother had asked me to bring a (pareve) pie, which I did. I knew that she also had a (dairy) carrot cake lined up, so there was definitely a self-interest factor here anyway. (She did insist that I take a piece of the cake home, though.) I was completely surprised by the third dessert, a cheesecake. There were only seven of us; one dessert would have been just fine! The cheesecake was store-bought, so it's not that someone got a last-minute baking bug. I don't know what was up with that.
My sister cut my piece of pie first, before cutting the other desserts with the same knife, and I didn't even have to ask. This made me happy. I'm not sure it wasn't dumb luck, but I choose to give the benefit of the doubt. :-)
My father has a new Mac (I'm assuming an iMac but don't know). The noticably-odd feature was the monitor (LCD) with an unusual aspect ratio. It looked like 16:9 (like widescreen movies), which I'm guessing is not a coincidence. I didn't get a close look at it because my nephew was using it to play games (and kids these days shun turn-based games in favor of real-time ones, and having his aunt peering over his shoulder would clearly cramp his style).
I brought along a 25-ounce bottle of Omegang ale that I had gotten in a recent beer buy and which I thought my father would like. (I cannot drink 25 ounces of beer in a sitting, and Dani doesn't like beer, so the large bottles wait for some occasion like this.) I was correct about my father liking it, so I should find out how to get more and gift him with it.
Aside: the beer buy. In Pennyslvania, you have two options for buying beer: by the bottle at restaurant prices from restaurants, or by the case from beer distributors. (Maybe there's a third option, involving six-packs and bars, but I've lost track. Beers more exotic than Miller are unlikely to come that way anyway.) So, what is the person who wants a variety of beer at affordable prices to do? Why, to get together with friends in multiples of eight people, so you can do a cooperative buy and get three bottles each of eight different beers. A former co-worker organizes such excursions every couple months. I've encountered some nice beers that I never would have met otherwise, without committing to an entire case of the ones I don't like (which happens often enough to matter). I'm not a big beer drinker, and participate maybe twice a year -- and take some of that to Pennsic.
Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.
It felt like there were fewer people there this year than last -- and last year I said the same thing. The average age is also rising; I saw a lot more gray than I'm used to. (Mind, I contribute some of that myself.) Some specific people I'm used to seeing were not there, including the only other Pittsburghers who still live in Pittsburgh and still go.
I got to spend time with Yaakov and Rivka, including Shabbat dinner and lunch, which was pleasant. Aaron has gotten big; if he hadn't been standing next to Yaakov and wearing a kippah I might not have recognized him. I assume he is now in school (as opposed to daycare), because he turned five this summer, but I forgot to ask.
I didn't get to spend a lot of time with Cliff and Eileen; Cliff was organizing the music program and was also performing in three concerts (Clam Chowder, Cliff Art, and backup for John Huff), so I guess he was pretty busy. It was good to see him, though, and I like his music. I still can't describe what Cliff Art does; my vocabulary is lacking. But it's cool, whatever it is. (Two people: Art plays Chapman stick and Cliff plays bass and appalachian dulcimer. They have a fair bit of equipment on stage to apply post-processing. It's all instrumental and electronic; it's cool, mellow, and intricate enough to be interesting.)
I saw dglenn Friday, but apparently he got sick on Saturday and didn't make it back to the con. I enjoyed hearing his band, Homespun Celeidh (sp?) Band, on Friday; he adds a lot of energy to their performances that was absent on Saturday. Glenn also introduced me to some other LJ folks, though I failed to record names and have now forgotten them. If he's reading this maybe he'll remind me.
Kludge got married! This apparently surprised a lot of people. (I don't know him well enough to have known that he was involved.) He looked happy.
The Clam Chowder concert was fun as always. They have, for several years, been doing a fund-raiser for the local children's hospital. It all started as a bribe to sing "Bend Over Greek Sailor". These days it's a given that they will do the song and the fans will cough up between $2000 and $3000 collectively. Ed Sobansky, the group's manager, gets matching funds for this (from his employer?), so it turns into a hefty donation. Officially, though, we are not allowed to tell Kathy's mother that she sings this song. :-) (This is easy, as most of us don't know her mother.)
A few years ago they added to this fund-raiser, auctioning off pairs of comfortable front-row seats for the concert. And this year, they added the "Clam Chowder Karaoke" fund-raiser: they auctioned off two opportunities to sing a song (from their repertoire) with them on stage. Both of the winners this year did good jobs and it looked like everyone had fun, so I hope they keep that. I've been trying to figure out what song I would pick next year. :-)
Our concert went well. There were just the three of us and we performed in the small room, so we didn't have lots of stuff in the way. (The main hazard of the large room is all the mike stands and monitors. In the small room it's all accoustic. We requested the small room.) We resurrected a couple of old songs that we haven't done in years, added some new material, and rearranged a bunch of stuff to work with just three people. Kathy managed to add almost the entire flute line for "Guenevere and the Fire" to the existing keyboard line, playing the whole thing on keyboard, which impresses me no end. (She says this would be easy for real pianists, but none of us is a real pianist.)
Robert does a better job with "Lusty Young Smith" if he can flirt with someone on stage (a role previously occupied by first Jana, then Andrea, and then Jenn). Kathy and I were both busy and unavailable for flirting, so we told him to "recruit a babe" before the concert. He did this and they had fun with it. This is a trick we should remember for the future; audience members can sometimes be pressed into service.
We had intended to recruit some "unsavory musicians" for "A Chat With Your Mother", but logistics challenges got in the way. Ah well; another time. We're not about to stop doing that song, and there are plenty of ways to keep it fresh. :-)
Set list: Saltarello la Regina (instrumental), Lusty Young Smith, Everyman (about the engineers/ground crews/etc who make space flight possible), What News (Heather Rose Jones), Marchesana (instrumental), Friar in the Well (outsmarting a lusty monk), Plastic or Paper (weirdness from the Bobs), Guenevere and the Fire (be careful with your bigotry; it can kill you), Rostiboli Gioioso (instrumental), Pict Song (Kipling/Fish - the quiet, subersive version, rather than the rousing one), Rasputin's HMO (Austin Lounge Lizards), Ho Ho Ho (a 16th-century drinking song), Hashir Sheli (instrumental, Israeli), Little Gomez (squashed chihuahua), A Reason For It All (Eric Bogle), Jai Trop (instrumental), Abort Retry Ignore (aka Undiscovered Poe), Flowers for Algernon, Coronation (instrumental), The Youth Shall See Visions (Debbie Friedman), Amoroso (instrumental), A Chat With Your Mother.
The room where we performed has some physical-plant challenges: you can have heat and noise, or you can have quiet and cold. A number of performers were having trouble with this. I wonder if there is any other room in the function space that would be better for the smaller performances. I know that some performers lost audience members due to the HVAC system.
Speaking of HVAC, this year I remembered that some rooms in this hotel have thermostats, rather than scale-less "hotter - colder" knobs with manual fan control (on or off). The latter is a real pain on Shabbat, as you have to guess and whatever you guess, it'll be wrong by Saturday afternoon. Last year I saw a thermostat in a regular room, so I asked for one when I checked in. This confused the person at the desk, who apparently knew how to give me two beds and non-smoking but had no clues about thermostats. After she and a manager conferred over a map of the hotel, she came back with a room on the fifth floor, which I took. I later commented to Yaakov that the Almighty had clearly decreed, since I would not be walking the mile to and from shul this week, that I should get my exercise in some other way. It wasn't bad, though; the ceilings are relatively low, so there are only 14 steps between floors.
I had never seen the rooms on the fifth floor before, and apparently this is their "executive floor". (I'm guessing they don't give out these rooms to fen without being asked.) The rooms were a little cushier, and included a desk and chair with data port and a TV in an entertainment center rather than perched on a dresser. The chairs were also a little more comfortable and less worn. (Robert had brought his laptop, but we never found out if there was a charge for the data port because the entire hotel is now set up for wireless, so he used that for free.)
Yaakov and Rivka were on the second floor, which was more convenient for them. (I forgot to notice if they had a thermostat...) Their only issue was that the promised refrigerator was not there, and it took them several hours to get it. (It was not there by the end of Shabbat dinner, but it was before they went to sleep. They were also waiting for a cot for Aaron.) I did not have a refrigerator; I had a cooler, less-perishable food, and the knowledge that the food I would be contributing to the Shabbat meals could live in their fridge. I'm glad it got sorted out before we had to figure out how to keep meat safely.
Note to self: this is the second year in a row that hard-boiled eggs have not been happy after spending a day in the cooler. Figure out why or don't plan on hard-boiled eggs for future cons. (I use frozen ice packs, not actual ice cubes, in the cooler. Well, ice packs and a few pint bottles filled with water and frozen.)
I ran into the folks from that Trek con in Tennessee. They missed Darkover last year, so they hadn't seen us since we performed at their convention in 2002. It was nice to see them again, and they were just as friendly and cheeful as I remembered. They were disappointed to hear that On the Mark is taking a year off, but glad they made it up this year.
We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.
The CD did end up posing one Shabbat challenge for me, and 30 seconds too late I realized how I should have handled it. The background: I don't have anything to do with CD sales on Shabbat, and this project was really Robert's baby anyway. I don't worry about the trivial amounts of income that CD sales theoretically generate for me, because really, it all goes back into the group kitty to make the next CD anyway. So I'm ok with other group members selling our CDs at concerts on Shabbat; I'm not making money, and that's not why I'm doing those concerts anyway.
Fine so far. Now normally, I don't carry my wallet on Shabbat. At a convention, though, I leave it in my pocket (and then just don't reach into that pocket), because I'm not comfortable leaving it in an unattended hotel room. (I just realized that the hotel probably has secure storage available; I should check that out next time.) So I went to our 5pm concert with a wallet in my pocket. Shabbat ended during the concert, but of course I didn't make havdalah until after.
At the end of the show, while selling CDs, Robert needed to break a 20. So I looked at my watch (I knew, but to be obvious about it), then got my wallet and pulled out money for him. But, of course, I hadn't actually ended Shabbat yet, so I shouldn't have done that. And while I was standing there making change with Yaakov in the room, I realized that what I should have done was to tell him to take my wallet. I trust him more than I trust hotel staff. :-)
On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)
All in all, it was a fun weekend!
Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!