raw day
Well, I stayed up too damn late again last night, so I didn't have a very productive morning before the conference. But I got some essentials done - some last minute details for the reading of our webseries on Saturday and getting the room reserved for the other webseries I am producing to hold casting sessions this Sunday. Now I need to get the role descriptions up there and all that jazz. I also posted on my old class email loop to see if I could get some free labor, and I may have a person who isn't a complete flake. We're still looking for sound, however. Of course. That is the big one! Sound is always in demand. That's why I'm learning how to do it. It can be a powerful bartering chip!
Then I hightailed it down to Santa Monica, but didn't get my hiney out of the house in time, so I was a bit late to the first presentation. She was talking about the media coverage of the Rhianna / Chris Brown saga, and the presenter had put together a monologue of the details of the night of his attack on her. It was incredibly powerful and moving. And also incredibly disheartening, because she is learning herself (she's still practically a kid!) and the world is learning through her, that there are no consequences for beating the shit out of a woman. Not even a famous one. Pretty awful.
I'm not sure how much I actually learned from the five hours of presentations, but it was nonetheless an incredible comfort and re-charge to be in a room of like-minded women and men who *got* it. Who spoke my language. Yes, they were preaching to the choir, but darnnit, the choir needs some preaching sometimes too!
I reconnected with a gal that I had met and spent pretty much the entire night chatting with at the one WAM event I had gone to last December. It was good to see a familiar face.
The only drawback was that they had a spoken word poet who came in between the early presentations and did a couple of gorgeous poems that cracked me open. My tears are still so close to the surface it doesn't take much. And once that lid had been peeled back, I couldn't get a hold of myself for a couple hours. For the next two presentations, any time the woman said anything even remotely truthful or profound or whatever, I was fighting to keep from sobbing openly. I went and looked in the mirror in the women's room at a break and I was not a pretty sight! Ah well, what can you do.
I came home to some items in my inbox, but I'm not sure how much more steam I have today - it's already after midnight. I think I will get into a hot tub to soak away some sore muscles, and then climb into bed. I'll set the alarm for a decent hour in the morning, so I can get up and hit the laptop and get this stuff done first thing tomorrow.
Oh, and on a quick crafting note - part of the reason I was up so damn late last night was because I discovered a template on my Excel that creates graph paper. I had picked up work on the bow pillow that I am making for my Mom's friend Dietra while I was at the Crafting night last night, but the pattern for it is so damn small that I wound up counting a whole section wrong and having to pull it all out again. So I used this graph paper template and transcribed the pattern Mom had into it last night. I finished up tonight right before walking the dog and printed it out nice and big. I still have to hand transcribe the half-square sections of the pattern, but despite how much work it is to do this, it is going to be so much easier to use this much larger pattern. I can actually see the damn squared without a magnifying glass! And I can do what I am doing on my Renoir pattern, which is using a highlighter to mark off the squares that I have done. That is an enormous aid to keeping me from miscounting squares and making mistakes.
Unfortunately I really don't have the time right now to finish getting this pattern transcribed with everything else I have going on. Which doesn't mean I might not say "Feck it!" and do it anyway. But I really, really should wait at least until my taxes are done and the reading this Saturday is over.
We'll see if I can hold out. :)
Then I hightailed it down to Santa Monica, but didn't get my hiney out of the house in time, so I was a bit late to the first presentation. She was talking about the media coverage of the Rhianna / Chris Brown saga, and the presenter had put together a monologue of the details of the night of his attack on her. It was incredibly powerful and moving. And also incredibly disheartening, because she is learning herself (she's still practically a kid!) and the world is learning through her, that there are no consequences for beating the shit out of a woman. Not even a famous one. Pretty awful.
I'm not sure how much I actually learned from the five hours of presentations, but it was nonetheless an incredible comfort and re-charge to be in a room of like-minded women and men who *got* it. Who spoke my language. Yes, they were preaching to the choir, but darnnit, the choir needs some preaching sometimes too!
I reconnected with a gal that I had met and spent pretty much the entire night chatting with at the one WAM event I had gone to last December. It was good to see a familiar face.
The only drawback was that they had a spoken word poet who came in between the early presentations and did a couple of gorgeous poems that cracked me open. My tears are still so close to the surface it doesn't take much. And once that lid had been peeled back, I couldn't get a hold of myself for a couple hours. For the next two presentations, any time the woman said anything even remotely truthful or profound or whatever, I was fighting to keep from sobbing openly. I went and looked in the mirror in the women's room at a break and I was not a pretty sight! Ah well, what can you do.
I came home to some items in my inbox, but I'm not sure how much more steam I have today - it's already after midnight. I think I will get into a hot tub to soak away some sore muscles, and then climb into bed. I'll set the alarm for a decent hour in the morning, so I can get up and hit the laptop and get this stuff done first thing tomorrow.
Oh, and on a quick crafting note - part of the reason I was up so damn late last night was because I discovered a template on my Excel that creates graph paper. I had picked up work on the bow pillow that I am making for my Mom's friend Dietra while I was at the Crafting night last night, but the pattern for it is so damn small that I wound up counting a whole section wrong and having to pull it all out again. So I used this graph paper template and transcribed the pattern Mom had into it last night. I finished up tonight right before walking the dog and printed it out nice and big. I still have to hand transcribe the half-square sections of the pattern, but despite how much work it is to do this, it is going to be so much easier to use this much larger pattern. I can actually see the damn squared without a magnifying glass! And I can do what I am doing on my Renoir pattern, which is using a highlighter to mark off the squares that I have done. That is an enormous aid to keeping me from miscounting squares and making mistakes.
Unfortunately I really don't have the time right now to finish getting this pattern transcribed with everything else I have going on. Which doesn't mean I might not say "Feck it!" and do it anyway. But I really, really should wait at least until my taxes are done and the reading this Saturday is over.
We'll see if I can hold out. :)