(no subject)
It's been a while since I wrote a general update. A long while, actually.
The spring weather is gorgeous this year. It's already been a shade warmer than I like a couple of times! Today is sunny and mild, with flowers blooming everywhere. Also trees, according to my allergies, but that's minor enough to ignore. Spring did bring the contractors out of hibernation briefly. Those familiar with the saga of our house know that they show up on their own mysterious schedule, do unexpected things, and disappear again for months on end. (Our landlord presumably knows what's going on. We just live here so we're clearly unimportant.) So far this year they've done a little more work on the porch (left skeletal all winter) and somewhat leveled the holes and pits they left when shoring it up, but not yet replaced the gutters they removed last fall. At least now it's just rain that gets dumped straight onto the front steps and not snow and ice. Workers also demolished the ratty old shed at last. Arborists told us they were removing a couple of trees - fortunately, the ones that had an alarming tendency to shed limbs on the power lines at the back of the house. "Removal" seems to have meant "hack off and dispose of all the limbs but leave the trunks in place." Go figure.
Our lawn, such as it is, looks horrible. We never put a lot of work into it, and it's hard to care when we never know what's going to be driven onto it next. SO far this year, it's suffered the contractors' van, a mini-bulldozer, and a small cherry-picker.The driveway gets worse every day. It badly needs more gravel. We've mentioned it to the landlord, but like everything else that he didn't think of himself it's clearly not a priority. At least our crocuses and hyacinths miraculously survived. The workers must have replanted them after digging all around the porch, which is more care than I'd given them credit for. We also have violets all through the lawn, a surprisingly vigorous clump of daffodils where the big barberry bush used to be at the corner of the yard, and the annual lost-looking clump of Dutchman's breeches in the tree lawn.
This time of year is busy for us. There are two more LARP sessions, which means that strephon and I, as Storytellers, have a lot of prep to do. As always, there are a whole bunch of storylines running at once. A couple of very longtime characters have recently left play, which changes a lot of the balance in the city. There have been at least four princes in the last three months, too - not that Metatropolis is ever politically stable, but this is exceptional.
Anime Central is coming up next month. Since unkajosh is Department Head for Video Programming, and strephon and chibirisu are his ADHs, they've been running around doing all the permissions-and-scheduling stuff. (I help some, but I'm less in the loop.) It's very gratifying to see all that work pay off at con time, and to be one of the few, the proud, the crazy. Last year, I think there were about 500 staffers and 17,000 congoers, so ACen isn't a small undertaking.
Amasong is going well. This semester, we don't have too many languages - just English, Spanish, Hebrew, Romanian, Georgian, Yoruba, and Scottish Gaelic. Piece of cake! The spring concerts actually fall after ACen for once. One of these years, my luck will run out and they'll be the same weekend. That's not going to be a fun decision. Amasong's twentieth anniversary season starts in the fall. I don't know what all the plans are, but I know there's a committee working away on a commemorative video and that we hope to have all our past directors come back. (They all want to; sadly, one is in poor health and may not be able to.)
The murder mystery dinners were slow last year. The theater company didn't spend anything to advertise us, so we couldn't have a public series. That's usually our best source of bookings for the rest of the year. Bookings have picked up this year even without one. There are at least nine mysteries on the schedule between late April and the end of June. Six of them are my Klondike Gold Rush script! (All booked through the same organization, for different groups.)
Still on the subject of mystery dinners, I finally broke through my much-too-long writer's block by setting aside the problem script and asking our organizer which of six concepts looked most worth developing. She liked them all and told me the first one to do was the one loosely based on WKRP in Cincinnati. I cranked it out in a couple of weeks (a very short time for me) and she loves it! It may be our public series this year. Since the theater company has some connections with actual local radio folks, we might be able to do some cross-promotion and even some stunt casting. I'm also working on a second Klondike script so the actors don't get too tired of the first one.
The only other news of note is the passing of unkajosh's stepfather's mother. She'd been frail for a long time, at least since her husband died more than ten years or so. The last few years she's had 'round-the-clock care at home. I don't know all the details of her health problems, but dementia was a big part of it. Those who've seen a loved one slip away like than know what I mean when I say "she" was gone a long time before her bodied died, and the end was almost a relief. I miss Grandma Foster; she and Granpa Foster were wonderfully welcoming to me from the moment Josh brought me home. But this is the beginning of the end of my mourning for her and not fresh grief.
The spring weather is gorgeous this year. It's already been a shade warmer than I like a couple of times! Today is sunny and mild, with flowers blooming everywhere. Also trees, according to my allergies, but that's minor enough to ignore. Spring did bring the contractors out of hibernation briefly. Those familiar with the saga of our house know that they show up on their own mysterious schedule, do unexpected things, and disappear again for months on end. (Our landlord presumably knows what's going on. We just live here so we're clearly unimportant.) So far this year they've done a little more work on the porch (left skeletal all winter) and somewhat leveled the holes and pits they left when shoring it up, but not yet replaced the gutters they removed last fall. At least now it's just rain that gets dumped straight onto the front steps and not snow and ice. Workers also demolished the ratty old shed at last. Arborists told us they were removing a couple of trees - fortunately, the ones that had an alarming tendency to shed limbs on the power lines at the back of the house. "Removal" seems to have meant "hack off and dispose of all the limbs but leave the trunks in place." Go figure.
Our lawn, such as it is, looks horrible. We never put a lot of work into it, and it's hard to care when we never know what's going to be driven onto it next. SO far this year, it's suffered the contractors' van, a mini-bulldozer, and a small cherry-picker.The driveway gets worse every day. It badly needs more gravel. We've mentioned it to the landlord, but like everything else that he didn't think of himself it's clearly not a priority. At least our crocuses and hyacinths miraculously survived. The workers must have replanted them after digging all around the porch, which is more care than I'd given them credit for. We also have violets all through the lawn, a surprisingly vigorous clump of daffodils where the big barberry bush used to be at the corner of the yard, and the annual lost-looking clump of Dutchman's breeches in the tree lawn.
This time of year is busy for us. There are two more LARP sessions, which means that strephon and I, as Storytellers, have a lot of prep to do. As always, there are a whole bunch of storylines running at once. A couple of very longtime characters have recently left play, which changes a lot of the balance in the city. There have been at least four princes in the last three months, too - not that Metatropolis is ever politically stable, but this is exceptional.
Anime Central is coming up next month. Since unkajosh is Department Head for Video Programming, and strephon and chibirisu are his ADHs, they've been running around doing all the permissions-and-scheduling stuff. (I help some, but I'm less in the loop.) It's very gratifying to see all that work pay off at con time, and to be one of the few, the proud, the crazy. Last year, I think there were about 500 staffers and 17,000 congoers, so ACen isn't a small undertaking.
Amasong is going well. This semester, we don't have too many languages - just English, Spanish, Hebrew, Romanian, Georgian, Yoruba, and Scottish Gaelic. Piece of cake! The spring concerts actually fall after ACen for once. One of these years, my luck will run out and they'll be the same weekend. That's not going to be a fun decision. Amasong's twentieth anniversary season starts in the fall. I don't know what all the plans are, but I know there's a committee working away on a commemorative video and that we hope to have all our past directors come back. (They all want to; sadly, one is in poor health and may not be able to.)
The murder mystery dinners were slow last year. The theater company didn't spend anything to advertise us, so we couldn't have a public series. That's usually our best source of bookings for the rest of the year. Bookings have picked up this year even without one. There are at least nine mysteries on the schedule between late April and the end of June. Six of them are my Klondike Gold Rush script! (All booked through the same organization, for different groups.)
Still on the subject of mystery dinners, I finally broke through my much-too-long writer's block by setting aside the problem script and asking our organizer which of six concepts looked most worth developing. She liked them all and told me the first one to do was the one loosely based on WKRP in Cincinnati. I cranked it out in a couple of weeks (a very short time for me) and she loves it! It may be our public series this year. Since the theater company has some connections with actual local radio folks, we might be able to do some cross-promotion and even some stunt casting. I'm also working on a second Klondike script so the actors don't get too tired of the first one.
The only other news of note is the passing of unkajosh's stepfather's mother. She'd been frail for a long time, at least since her husband died more than ten years or so. The last few years she's had 'round-the-clock care at home. I don't know all the details of her health problems, but dementia was a big part of it. Those who've seen a loved one slip away like than know what I mean when I say "she" was gone a long time before her bodied died, and the end was almost a relief. I miss Grandma Foster; she and Granpa Foster were wonderfully welcoming to me from the moment Josh brought me home. But this is the beginning of the end of my mourning for her and not fresh grief.