awesome saturday
Yesterday was the Pagan Unity Foundation Divination Fair. I had a blast. It seemed to be a smashing success for all involved. I understand from Alfred that PUF even made a small profit after the space rental, which is wonderful.
It really started Friday evening, I spent the early part of the evening housecleaning and putting together my handouts for my presentation. Then Alfred came over to my place to go over his presentation on reading Turkish Coffee Grounds and let me practice some of my presentation on Casting Lots on him. We had scheduled to meet at 7:30pm, but didn't actually meet till almost 10pm, and had dinner at Amigo's first and then back home to do the work. It was good we did the practice run, as we both had pointers for the other that helped out with the presentations.
Saturday morning, I slept in and then got up and started to be productive. I needed to run to Office Max and get some plain paper to print out the handouts on, as all I had on hand in letter size was expensive resume paper. I pulled up my business card file and set a few sheets to print while i went out and ran errands, came back and popped real paper in the printer and set Illustrator to print 20 copies of each of three handouts. It was taking literally forever to print and i couldn't for the life of me figure out why (yes, i was having an extremely blonde moment). So, i just thought, well i'll have to tough it out....
To make a long story short, I had the printing preferences set to "super intense publication quality massive art dots per inch intensity plus". Once I realized what my problem was, i was over an hour behind schedule and still hadn't even printed out 20 copies of the first sheet. So, I reconfigured my printing preferences, did 20 copies of the first sample reading I had come up with and flushed out the rest of the 20 copies of the explanation page and then headed out to this store in Bellflower (where the fuck????) called Practical Magicka for the event.
Have you ever been to a well-lit, bright white, gorgeous little boutique of an occult store before? It blew me away... What was even better was the space in the back where the event was held. Clean and beautiful covered patio area for the presentations and a nicely kept lawn outside of that for readings and refreshments. They even had a fire pit. The only downside was that the business their property backs up to is a batting cage, so there were sounds of baseballs being hit and striking the chain link fence that encompasses the batting cage all afternoon...sometimes ignorable, sometimes not.
Lots of people I love were there, including the wonderful, talented and Dirrtie hermes3x3 and the amazing Frankie and my incredibly funny friend (who I know through Dirrtie) James/Briar (who apparently is a sort of inactive/lurker LJ user named eeyoredung), the PUF gang, Pat and Collie from the Rainbow Warriors and the very talented Mr. Bill Gordon. It's nice to walk into a room filled with your friends, even if you're late...
Because I was behind schedule, i missed the entire hour of meet and greet and literally walked in as the first presentation had started. I was second on the schedule, so I felt a little bit frustrated. Turkish Coffee was the first presentation and then I was on. I had calculated my presentation on getting folks to actually do some of the reading themselves by using a "pre-cast" layout and applying it to a volunteer from the audience. It worked well and everyone seemed to get how the technique worked.
After my presentation, there was about an hour for open readings. A nice lady came up from the audience and asked me to read for her and most of that hour was taken up with her reading. I did get to do a bit of shopping at the store before the third and fourth workshops (Runes, presented by my friend Patrick from The Rainbow Warriors and Billet Reading, presented by my friend Rob from PUF)--purchasing (finally) a Non-Minoan Altar Pentacle for only $10.00. In the Billet Reading workshop, we all actually got into a circle, called in dead people and did readings. It was really cool how accurate they were. I had the distinction of getting the most humorous answer to my question; Rob, who led the event got my billet and when he was doing the reading, the spirits ended it by telling him "don't forget the pudding." Everyone cracked up. It was both humorous and deep, as I was answering about what type of future career path I should take. It struck me that I seem to always look at this kind of thing with gloom in it and maybe I should look more for the heights rather than glorified survival.
After the event ended, Chris, Frankie, James and I went to Long Beach for dinner. We had Indian food at a place called Kamal Palace. The food was good. Not great, but very good. We had a weird experience with one of the servers, who apparently only knew how to hear and say the phrase "Iced tea?" when refilling everyone's drinks, despite what beverage name they replied with. He seemed to get all the refills right until the last round when he filled Frankie's half-drunk Coke up with--you guessed it--Iced Tea.
After dinner, we were off to Hot Java and to hang out with my wonderful brother revhyperion. The handsome and hunky Eddy himself even was generous enough to provide me with a free copy of Uncle Bucky's Advanced Candle Magick book. They were having a live comedy event at the cafe, called Laugh-A-Latté. The entertainment was hosted by a Miss Carlease, a friend of James' (When asked, James told me her sister's name is Carrental). We sat outside and had our own event. While hanging out and chatting and such, Postulant Sister Rosario of the Los Angeles House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Inc. came down the street, with a couple of non-manifesting sisters (Unity Divine and Tragedy Ann) and a Papa Bear, dressed, of course, in leather and Levi's. They came up, we chatted, we joked, we hung out and apparently, we were so loud that the audience inside the coffee shop couldn't hear the amplified comedians over our laughter. Carlease came out and chastised us. We kept hanging out, but did it quiet-er after that.
Then, the night came to an end. I drove James back to his car by the store in Bellflower and then came on home. I hadn't had any Turkish Coffee, but i was wired on happiness, Reiki and Queer Pagan Wonderfulness and ended up staying up till after 3:00 am last night. I had to be up, functioning and coherent at 8:00am my time for a Georgian lesson with moongladewoman. I managed to do it and then went back to bed for a little nap before an intense coffee session with a friend in need that was scheduled for 11:00am. I was coffee'ed out after Friday evening's Turkish Coffee and a Latté with a lot of laughs (but not a Laugh-A-Latté) at Hot Java, so I opted for a juice drink and a croissant. It was an intense couple of hours of chat. I ran some errands after that and then took a nap. So, I'm awake now and feeling drug out because the sleep schedule is off. But that's what weekends are for, no? The important thing is that now I'm both awake and human again. I still need to run another errand, walk the dog again and take pills before going to bed for the evening.
It really started Friday evening, I spent the early part of the evening housecleaning and putting together my handouts for my presentation. Then Alfred came over to my place to go over his presentation on reading Turkish Coffee Grounds and let me practice some of my presentation on Casting Lots on him. We had scheduled to meet at 7:30pm, but didn't actually meet till almost 10pm, and had dinner at Amigo's first and then back home to do the work. It was good we did the practice run, as we both had pointers for the other that helped out with the presentations.
Saturday morning, I slept in and then got up and started to be productive. I needed to run to Office Max and get some plain paper to print out the handouts on, as all I had on hand in letter size was expensive resume paper. I pulled up my business card file and set a few sheets to print while i went out and ran errands, came back and popped real paper in the printer and set Illustrator to print 20 copies of each of three handouts. It was taking literally forever to print and i couldn't for the life of me figure out why (yes, i was having an extremely blonde moment). So, i just thought, well i'll have to tough it out....
To make a long story short, I had the printing preferences set to "super intense publication quality massive art dots per inch intensity plus". Once I realized what my problem was, i was over an hour behind schedule and still hadn't even printed out 20 copies of the first sheet. So, I reconfigured my printing preferences, did 20 copies of the first sample reading I had come up with and flushed out the rest of the 20 copies of the explanation page and then headed out to this store in Bellflower (where the fuck????) called Practical Magicka for the event.
Have you ever been to a well-lit, bright white, gorgeous little boutique of an occult store before? It blew me away... What was even better was the space in the back where the event was held. Clean and beautiful covered patio area for the presentations and a nicely kept lawn outside of that for readings and refreshments. They even had a fire pit. The only downside was that the business their property backs up to is a batting cage, so there were sounds of baseballs being hit and striking the chain link fence that encompasses the batting cage all afternoon...sometimes ignorable, sometimes not.
Lots of people I love were there, including the wonderful, talented and Dirrtie hermes3x3 and the amazing Frankie and my incredibly funny friend (who I know through Dirrtie) James/Briar (who apparently is a sort of inactive/lurker LJ user named eeyoredung), the PUF gang, Pat and Collie from the Rainbow Warriors and the very talented Mr. Bill Gordon. It's nice to walk into a room filled with your friends, even if you're late...
Because I was behind schedule, i missed the entire hour of meet and greet and literally walked in as the first presentation had started. I was second on the schedule, so I felt a little bit frustrated. Turkish Coffee was the first presentation and then I was on. I had calculated my presentation on getting folks to actually do some of the reading themselves by using a "pre-cast" layout and applying it to a volunteer from the audience. It worked well and everyone seemed to get how the technique worked.
After my presentation, there was about an hour for open readings. A nice lady came up from the audience and asked me to read for her and most of that hour was taken up with her reading. I did get to do a bit of shopping at the store before the third and fourth workshops (Runes, presented by my friend Patrick from The Rainbow Warriors and Billet Reading, presented by my friend Rob from PUF)--purchasing (finally) a Non-Minoan Altar Pentacle for only $10.00. In the Billet Reading workshop, we all actually got into a circle, called in dead people and did readings. It was really cool how accurate they were. I had the distinction of getting the most humorous answer to my question; Rob, who led the event got my billet and when he was doing the reading, the spirits ended it by telling him "don't forget the pudding." Everyone cracked up. It was both humorous and deep, as I was answering about what type of future career path I should take. It struck me that I seem to always look at this kind of thing with gloom in it and maybe I should look more for the heights rather than glorified survival.
After the event ended, Chris, Frankie, James and I went to Long Beach for dinner. We had Indian food at a place called Kamal Palace. The food was good. Not great, but very good. We had a weird experience with one of the servers, who apparently only knew how to hear and say the phrase "Iced tea?" when refilling everyone's drinks, despite what beverage name they replied with. He seemed to get all the refills right until the last round when he filled Frankie's half-drunk Coke up with--you guessed it--Iced Tea.
After dinner, we were off to Hot Java and to hang out with my wonderful brother revhyperion. The handsome and hunky Eddy himself even was generous enough to provide me with a free copy of Uncle Bucky's Advanced Candle Magick book. They were having a live comedy event at the cafe, called Laugh-A-Latté. The entertainment was hosted by a Miss Carlease, a friend of James' (When asked, James told me her sister's name is Carrental). We sat outside and had our own event. While hanging out and chatting and such, Postulant Sister Rosario of the Los Angeles House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Inc. came down the street, with a couple of non-manifesting sisters (Unity Divine and Tragedy Ann) and a Papa Bear, dressed, of course, in leather and Levi's. They came up, we chatted, we joked, we hung out and apparently, we were so loud that the audience inside the coffee shop couldn't hear the amplified comedians over our laughter. Carlease came out and chastised us. We kept hanging out, but did it quiet-er after that.
Then, the night came to an end. I drove James back to his car by the store in Bellflower and then came on home. I hadn't had any Turkish Coffee, but i was wired on happiness, Reiki and Queer Pagan Wonderfulness and ended up staying up till after 3:00 am last night. I had to be up, functioning and coherent at 8:00am my time for a Georgian lesson with moongladewoman. I managed to do it and then went back to bed for a little nap before an intense coffee session with a friend in need that was scheduled for 11:00am. I was coffee'ed out after Friday evening's Turkish Coffee and a Latté with a lot of laughs (but not a Laugh-A-Latté) at Hot Java, so I opted for a juice drink and a croissant. It was an intense couple of hours of chat. I ran some errands after that and then took a nap. So, I'm awake now and feeling drug out because the sleep schedule is off. But that's what weekends are for, no? The important thing is that now I'm both awake and human again. I still need to run another errand, walk the dog again and take pills before going to bed for the evening.