Update from the con
but john had to pay for a day's internet access so he could put his hours in for work, so it's here :P
we had a smooth run over to Tampa. for wonder of wonders, we left when we planned, and Alligator Alley was so quick that when we came to the tollbooth at the far end John said 'what's that doing out here?!' The rest of the run wasn't nearly so quick - the traffic was backed up solid almost all the way, but we still managed to get here in four hours.
the hotel is comfortable, if expensive... they want three dollars for a bottle of water (ack!) and they hit us up for ten dollars a day for the internet... at first i thought we may have made a big mistake coming to the con because there was hardly anyone here yesterday afternoon - when i went to the filkroom at three for the first session the room was empty! We ended up going up to the room and watching Pirates of the Carribbean II and ordering chinese food for dinner because we were too tired to even go downstairs to the (expensive) restuarant! After our rest we both felt recharged and we wandered down to the convention for the ice cream social and a kind-of-interesting panel on anime/animation 'guilty pleasures'. I know buggerall about the subject, but when he started talking about cartoons from childhood it brought back vague memories of the things i used to love! At least the ones that actually made it to Australia - i saw most of them a decade after he said they were screened in the US, because we only had three tv channels when I was a kid and program propogation was incredibly slow.
After the anime panel we went to the filking and this time there were people there... not a lot, but enough for a good evening's entertainment. There were only about ten people who sang, and three who sang a LOT... I would have liked to do more myself but I guess I wasn't pushy enough - half the time by the time I'd waited for people to quiet down after the last song, someone else had started already! I got to hear/see a bunch of the old standards from the Westercon songbooks, so that satisfied my curiosity there. And we sang some songs from the con's fundraising filkbook so that everyone could join in. I only did four songs in the three hours we were there - I sang somebody's filk to Waltzing Matilda first (because it looked amusing and I have the tune down pat so it was easy to sing cold)... later I sang 'The Question Song' from Dragonflight, which is the first and by far the best of the few I've written... then I did Eric Bogle's 'Little Gomez'. I'm not sure if people had ever heard it before but they laughed in the appropriate places :) And later on I sang my Buffy filk to All Through The Night.
I would have liked to sing a bunch of other songs but I didn't get the chance... I hope I can get more goes tonight!
We called it a night at 1.30 because John was exhausted and I was pretty darned tired too... but when we got up to the room my brain wouldn't shut down to let me sleep. I ended up getting up and working on some christmas cards for about half an hour, and then I got sleepy enough that I could lie down and listen to a filk CD and drift off to sleep pretty quickly.
This morning we both woke up and thought it was really early because it was so dark, but it was actually 8.30 already - the windows are tinted and the curtains are VERY good at blocking the light.
Want to see my stuff online (both sites updated regularly):
*Kajikit's Scrapjazz Album (scrapbook pages and cards I've made)
*Kajikit's Photoblog - photos of my travels and my daily life
And my website Kajikit's Corner
Our Second Anniversary
we had a smooth run over to Tampa. for wonder of wonders, we left when we planned, and Alligator Alley was so quick that when we came to the tollbooth at the far end John said 'what's that doing out here?!' The rest of the run wasn't nearly so quick - the traffic was backed up solid almost all the way, but we still managed to get here in four hours.
the hotel is comfortable, if expensive... they want three dollars for a bottle of water (ack!) and they hit us up for ten dollars a day for the internet... at first i thought we may have made a big mistake coming to the con because there was hardly anyone here yesterday afternoon - when i went to the filkroom at three for the first session the room was empty! We ended up going up to the room and watching Pirates of the Carribbean II and ordering chinese food for dinner because we were too tired to even go downstairs to the (expensive) restuarant! After our rest we both felt recharged and we wandered down to the convention for the ice cream social and a kind-of-interesting panel on anime/animation 'guilty pleasures'. I know buggerall about the subject, but when he started talking about cartoons from childhood it brought back vague memories of the things i used to love! At least the ones that actually made it to Australia - i saw most of them a decade after he said they were screened in the US, because we only had three tv channels when I was a kid and program propogation was incredibly slow.
After the anime panel we went to the filking and this time there were people there... not a lot, but enough for a good evening's entertainment. There were only about ten people who sang, and three who sang a LOT... I would have liked to do more myself but I guess I wasn't pushy enough - half the time by the time I'd waited for people to quiet down after the last song, someone else had started already! I got to hear/see a bunch of the old standards from the Westercon songbooks, so that satisfied my curiosity there. And we sang some songs from the con's fundraising filkbook so that everyone could join in. I only did four songs in the three hours we were there - I sang somebody's filk to Waltzing Matilda first (because it looked amusing and I have the tune down pat so it was easy to sing cold)... later I sang 'The Question Song' from Dragonflight, which is the first and by far the best of the few I've written... then I did Eric Bogle's 'Little Gomez'. I'm not sure if people had ever heard it before but they laughed in the appropriate places :) And later on I sang my Buffy filk to All Through The Night.
I would have liked to sing a bunch of other songs but I didn't get the chance... I hope I can get more goes tonight!
We called it a night at 1.30 because John was exhausted and I was pretty darned tired too... but when we got up to the room my brain wouldn't shut down to let me sleep. I ended up getting up and working on some christmas cards for about half an hour, and then I got sleepy enough that I could lie down and listen to a filk CD and drift off to sleep pretty quickly.
This morning we both woke up and thought it was really early because it was so dark, but it was actually 8.30 already - the windows are tinted and the curtains are VERY good at blocking the light.
Want to see my stuff online (both sites updated regularly):
*Kajikit's Scrapjazz Album (scrapbook pages and cards I've made)
*Kajikit's Photoblog - photos of my travels and my daily life
And my website Kajikit's Corner
Our Second Anniversary