Bill Roper's Journal

Counting Down

2009-07-10T19:59:43Z

It's now one week until my office closes and I start working from home. I'd already packed two boxes of seldom-used references, but there's a lot of stuff that just can't be broken down until the last minute.

Today, I ceremonially packed up all the personal stuff from my desk, the breakable items not so much wrapped as enmeshed in bubble wrap. That box will spend some time in storage in the basement, at least until I find out whether I'll eventually find a place where I can work from that isn't home that's closer than a 90 minute commute from my house.

To the first approximation, that's being voted on next Thursday, when the Sun shareholders vote on whether not to accept Oracle's offer. After that, if the acquisition goes through, there's some possibility of jumping to Sun's Itasca office.

We'll see how it goes.

To Concertino and Back Again (Part Four)

2009-07-09T23:07:21Z

It's been a while since the last entry in this series, so let's see what my work-fogged brain remembers at this point. :) As you may recall, we'd just gone to bed on Saturday night, so next up must be Sunday morning.

This was the day when Gretchen was giving her workshop on performance skills, so she got up early and got out of the room. Apparently she even got breakfast. :) I woke up when she left and dove through the shower, getting out and mostly dressed before Katie and then Julie woke up. I changed the necessary diapers and decided that they could wear what they were wearing and let Gretchen sort it out later, because I had no clue as to what the girls were supposed to be wearing today.

In the interest of peace in our time, we went downstairs to the kids programming room. Since this was across the hall from the room where Gretchen was giving her workshop, Katie and Julie naturally noticed that Mommy was right there. Fortunately, they didn't intrude too much and I managed to get them into the play room without destroying the workshop.

Gretchen and I compared notes. Since she'd gotten breakfast before the big brunch started, she was fine as far as food was concerned and there was food enough to feed the girls. I didn't want to deal with the brunch; I just wanted a sandwich. The hotel had thoughtfully slipped a note under the door warning about the brunch and telling us that there would be a limited menu in the bar starting at noon. This sounded good to me, so I stalled and went to the bar at noon, taking a tiny table in the corner. I then had to patiently explain to the waiter that no, I did not want the brunch, that the hotel had sent us a note under the door saying that there would be a limited menu in the bar starting at noon, and that that was what I wanted. I explained this several times before he finally got the clue, conferred with the hostess, and brought me a menu. Having gotten past our concert, I decided to chance the Reuben -- did you know that sauerkraut sometimes contains sulfites? -- and it didn't give me any problems, which was a Good Thing^TM. Larry and Deborah were also trying to avoid the brunch and joined me, so the conversation was good. (And they now had a much easier time getting menus. :) )

I hurried off after lunch, because I wanted to catch the Sassafrass concert, having heard bits of what they did in the open filk. It was a lot of fun, punctuated by occasional forays out of the room to get Katie out of the line of fire. Later, I got to speak to Ada and her partner -- two of the principals of the group who I'd seen in the filk room -- who are moving to Texas, as it turns out. This will only make rehearsals more entertaining. But I got CDs from them to sell (as I later did from Brooke) and I plugged FenCon, since we're planning to be there this year and I am always in favor of better filking. :)

I got to wrangle the girls while Gretchen listened to and judged the song-writing contest, so I don't know too much about what went on there, but the conversations in the lobby continued to be fun. Then came Closing Ceremonies, where Gary kindly presented me with a teddy bear in a Red Sox jacket that I immediately handed off to Katie, who is not yet old enough to know of the train wreck that the Cardinals suffered in the 2004 World Series :), while Gretchen received a songbook which we'll be sharing with the girls in the near future, I suspect.

Next, it was off to the jam session, where Ben had set up chord charts for some tackling dummies, including "Just Play". The chord charts idea worked pretty well, but it takes enough time that we all agreed that everything would have to be prepared in advance rather than trying to collect any songs at con. And with that many guitars going at once, whoever is leading definitely needs a microphone if they have any respect for their voice and hope of being heard. :)

I left my guitar in the room after the jam and went to get dinner, when it became apparent that enough people were staying there for that course of action to be safe. At some point during this, I found that the girls' toy bag was missing from the play room, which became an immediate emergency -- with apologies to the women who had been in my workshop who stopped me in the hall to ask about a particular song that I'd used as an example there ("Mother and Daughter", as it turns out and I couldn't remember at the time). I found MEW and discovered that she'd put the bag back in the filk room, next to my guitar. *sigh*

I ran out and picked up dinner from Tortilla Sam's. This was another dietary crap shoot, as mass-market tortillas almost all contain sulfites, but I was greatly reassured when I walked in the restaurant and saw the fellow making tortillas in the front window. And the food was quite good.

After that, I went back to the dead dog filk and Gretchen headed off to the room with the girls, as she had a full-blown case of draining sinuses that were going to make singing unlikely at best. I sang a bunch of songs, including an impromptu performance of "Domino Death" when the pizza arrived. I must find my copy of the lyrics and chords before the next attempt at it. (When in doubt, sing loud and keep going. :) )

And we all had a good time, it seemed. I headed off to bed before the last dog was hung, because I knew we'd be getting up early the next day. After all, we had to drive home.

Gretchen and I compared notes when I got up to the room. And I set a wake-up call for oh-dark AM.

Change of Plans

2009-07-08T06:11:45Z

Originally, we'd planned to have pork stir fry tonight, but after daisy_knotwise had to get up extremely early this morning to beat the house into submission before the cleaning lady arrived, and got to wrangle the girls down to meet me for lunch and a trip to see Dr. Bob (hers and mine, not the girls), I suggested that I could take her over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner. Gretchen agreed that this sounded reasonable, so when I got home (late already), we mustered the troops, got everyone into the van, and headed out for the restaurant.

Katie ran ahead of me into the restaurant's vestibule and tripped just before she got to the inner door. She lay there crying, so I picked her up and carried her in. It was then that I realized that she had blood running all down one side of her face. She'd managed to plant the corner of her right eyebrow directly into the corner of the frame that held the glass into the door and had a nasty L-shaped cut.

Gretchen still was getting Julie into the restaurant. I grabbed Katie and took her back to the men's room, sat her on the sink, and started wiping down the cut with some napkins that I'd been given. It looked ugly. The owner came in and told me that I'd need to take her to the hospital. Of course, I was already clear on that. I went out, fetched Gretchen and Julie, and we went back to the van.

We decided to go to Holy Family, which was an urgent care center that had formerly been a full-service hospital. This would have been a fine plan had we not arrived at 8:13 and they closed at 8 PM. Katie had fallen asleep in the back seat -- not uncommon since she stopped taking naps. But I got out and shook her to wake her to make sure she was ok, which she was. So on to Lutheran General's emergency room we went. I carried Katie in while Gretchen parked the car. They ran her through triage, cleaned up the blood, applied some anesthetic and a bandage, and sent us to wait.

By this time, I was in fine shape, having taken my Byetta shot before leaving for dinner and having had lunch very early. So I had a Pay Day bar and a Diet Pepsi from the vending machine, which improved my mood considerably. Katie's mood was also good, having found the paper and crayons. Before too long, they called us to go back to one of the rooms, so I took Katie back there and left Gretchen with Julie.

A med student came by and checked on us, explaining that things were delayed due to another procedure that had backed everything up. A bit later, a nurse applied some more anesthetic. And we waited some more. Katie found the control and turned on the TV. I found the Cubs game. (They lost.) Later, I tried Cartoon Network, just in time for Family Guy on Adult Swim. Fortunately, Katie likes Family Guy. (I need to do something about that, as she's old enough to start wondering what's actually going on there.)

One nurse kindly pulled some bubble toys out of a drawer. Katie was delighted with blowing bubbles and -- now that she knew the location of the drawer -- kept going back to get more bubbles. I think we had ten or so at one point, not all of which she managed to open.

Then she wanted Mommy. So I retrieved Gretchen and Julie from the waiting room and they came back about 10:30 PM, shortly before the doctor freed up. At that point, Gretchen and Julie waited outside, because things were getting crowded.

It turns out that they have a velcro wrap for small children to keep their arms and legs immobilized for procedures like this, and that's what Katie got. The doctor asked me to sing to Katie to keep her distracted, so I started with "The House on Pooh Corner", which seemed to keep her quiet, so the doctor said, "Keep going."

I did. I sang "Crystal Dance", and "Midnight Girl", and "Dreams of Distant Lights", and "St. Judy's Comet", and "Close To You", all songs that I sang to her when she was younger and I was holding her waiting for her to fall asleep (save "Crystal Dance", which Katie asks for as "Mommy's Song"). And Katie was very well behaved, and only had just a little bit of tear coming out of her eyes as the doctor finished the ninth and final stitch.

We still had to wait to get the discharge instructions. We finally left around 11:30 PM, about three hours after we'd arrived. We pulled through the drive-through at the Wendy's up the street to pick up dinner, then had to wait as I walked back up to the window to get the chicken nuggets that we'd ordered for the girls that hadn't actually gotten into the bags.

Julie's in bed now. Katie is too, although she's stubbornly refused to wear a band-aid over her stitches, which should come out next Monday.

And now we're going to bed.

Moving Season

2009-07-07T03:55:07Z

I've got less than ten business days left before they close my office, so I'm busily trying to get all of the things done that need to be done before the move. Today, I put some books in a box (wow!), signed up for a VOIP account so that I can test the hardware that I bought (which I won't be able to do until they actually disgorge the account number, which may take five business days), checked into upgrading my home DSL (stupidly expensive), and tried to make sure that my desktop had the necessary software on it (a big mess that required crawling through the registry to expunge the Cisco VPN software so that I could reinstall it successfully).

Oh, and the folks who run our support website finally confessed that the information on it has nothing to do with current reality. Updating it would be useful.

Mostly, I dogpaddled in place.

This isn't encouraging.

Count On It

2009-07-06T03:14:15Z

On Friday, I took Katie over to Sam's Club while Gretchen tried to beat the house into submission. Naturally, Katie headed over to the kids books where she found a Curious George PBS Kids omnibus collection. The challenge then was keeping her moving, as she first was reading it while walking into other shoppers, then reading it while sitting in the middle of the aisle, then reading it while sitting on a couch that was convenient to nothing that I actually needed to pick up. I tried putting her in the seat in the cart, but that was apparently not a good place to read.

But eventually I managed to find everything that I thought we needed and got us through the checkout lane and back to the car. I fastened Katie into her car seat, the Curious George book still firmly in her grip. She opened the book to one of the counting lesson pages full of hats and pointed as she counted. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." And I think I heard eleven and twelve as she continued.

daisy_knotwise isn't sure that she actually knows what the numbers mean. I'm not so sure.

Calibrated Eyeball

2009-07-04T16:46:08Z

Yesterday, I went to put the rolling trash cans away after the garbage and recycling was picked up. The cans sit just to the right of my car in the garage, so I have to take my car out before the cans can be put away. Normally, daisy_knotwise would do this during the day while I was at work, but there were two problems.

It was a holiday, so I was at home.

My car hasn't been in the space recently, because we're garaging catalana's car while she's visiting her parents in Las Vegas.

I'd taken both sets of keys with me so I could back my car down the driveway, then back out Erica's car, then move the cans into position, and then put the cars back. And I looked at Erica's car. And the blue rolling cart that was in front of the ladder that was between the driveway and the spot where the cans go.

So I picked up the cart, moved it out of the way, and rolled the cans into their accustomed spot in the garage without having to do the automotive shuffle.

Erica's car is a Ford Fusion. Mine is a Ford Five Hundred. That apparently makes all the difference.

Maybe I should get a smaller car. :)

In the Swim

2009-07-04T02:51:52Z

We took Katie and Julie to the water park today, joined by our friends, samwinolj, Bonnie, and Jerry. Katie was much happier with the pool today than she was last year. In fact, we couldn't keep her off the kiddie slide. Julie is still skeptical about this whole water thing, although she did walk off the edge of the pool into about two feet of water as Daddy was paying too much attention to Katie and not enough to her. (This is not to say that no one was watching her, but rather than Julie wanted Daddy's attention.)

Katie, meanwhile, wants to go into the deep end of the pool. I towed her out near there and let her float around attached to me, but solo expeditions to the deep end will have to wait until she's a bit older and gets swimming lessons. Right now, she's limited to the depth where I can conveniently walk.

KVVM Wars

2009-07-02T22:52:19Z

I got the new dual monitor KVM switch yesterday and brought it into work to try it out. It seems to work, mostly, although I'm having trouble getting the hotkey switching to work at all.

But it will make things much better when I have to take all this home.

To Concertino and Back Again (Part 3)

2009-07-01T05:32:24Z

So Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed while daisy_knotwise, Katie, and Julie were still sleeping, because I had a workshop scheduled for 10 AM.

The workshop was called "Writing a Song From the Chords Up". I'd taken the two different songwriting workshops that I'd done in the past, grabbed the handouts, and merged it together into one hour that was supposed to cover everything. And happily, it seemed to work. We started from the circle of keys, worked through the standard major and minor chords in a key, headed off to tag major and minor seventh chords, and went over how they form a basic vocabulary for songwriting. Then we got into building chord progressions and how the chord progressions will suggest a melody and even what the song you're writing is about. (Or conversely, how the song that you're writing will determine the chords that you want to use.)

I used several of my own songs as tackling dummies. And in answer to the question that I was asked in the hall on Sunday -- and which I completely spaced as I was worried that the girls' toys might have gotten packed into a car that was about to leave -- the song that I used with the interesting modal chords was "Mother and Daughter". I also used "Just Play", "Change Winds", and "Genie in a Bottle" as examples, the last to show how the newer song was having to dodge the older one's melody.

But we had a good attendance at the workshop -- improving as we went along -- and I managed to give away all of the handouts. Afterwards, Ed Stauff, who had wandered in during the middle of the session, mentioned how he had to avoid waving his hand and saying "That's not how it works", because his approach to songwriting is completely different from mine. He suggested that it might be interesting to put several songwriters with different approaches on a single panel and letting them discuss it, which strikes me as a good thought too. (Hey, OVFF concom! I think Ed and I will both be there...)

After the workshop, I went back to the room and helped Gretchen finish rousting out the girls. We went down to the kids' room and I left to go pick up lunch from Dragon Dynasty, one of the suggestions in the restaurant guide that Robin had helpfully e-mailed to us. And I was reminded that I was not in Illinois any more. In order to get to the restaurant, you first walked up the moderately steep hill and then down the hill on the other side. Repeat in reverse to return to the hotel. Fortunately, my walking credentials are still in good shape. :) And the food was excellent! Even if Katie and Julie refused to eat the pot stickers. Oh, well. I guess Gretchen and I will just have to eat them...

I thought that Kathleen's concert was later in the day, so we managed to miss it completely in the general confusion. I did some final revisions to the set list for our concert and got it copied at the front desk so Gretchen would have a copy that she could read. Then we caught the last of the 2 x 8s and started our concert.

Folks seemed to enjoy it. They also seemed to enjoy it when Katie and Julie briefly escaped from Rachel and crawled up on the stage. We knew that dinner was on a tight schedule, so we'd planned to make sure that we finished on time -- and we did! The whole thing wrapped up at 5:59 PM vs. the planned 6 PM end time. Pretty good timing. :)

We assembled in the lobby and rode over to the very nice Italian restaurant with Spencer. I did damage to some wonderful fried mozzarella, some nice salads, and some excellent chicken parmesan, having checked with the waitress to make sure that the red sauces didn't contain wine. Wine, you see, contains sulfites, and I really wasn't interested in having an allergy attack in mid-con. Then it was back to the hotel to catch Brooke's concert, which I got to hear most of, around child wrangling across the hall. And Brooke (no surprise) acquitted herself admirably.

The Interfilk auction was next. Gretchen and I both started out as auctioneers, but Katie escaped about halfway through the auction, so she went to field the girls and take them to bed while I finished up, aided and abetted by a whole bunch of Interfilk wenches and the assorted Interfilk directors present. I don't know how much we raised, but given the state of the economy, it was certainly a respectable amount.

Gretchen had planned to go to bed early since her workshop was scheduled for first thing Sunday morning, so I headed off to the open filk by myself. I got to hear a lot of interesting things and took note of a couple of women who were singing in tight harmony. Rubbing my cluesticks together, I concluded that this must be some subset of Sassafrass, who I'd heard of and who had a scheduled concert the next day. Cool!

I went off to bed somewhere in the 2 - 3 AM range, because sleep is not optional when you have toddlers. :)

And tomorrow would be another day.

Early to Bed

2009-07-01T03:18:04Z

When Katie persisted on throwing things around the living room on dangerous trajectories -- including her blocks -- we told her she was going to bed. And she has.

Although she has popped out to get a second bottle. But she's back in bed again.

Lather, rinse, repeat, as required. :)

Back On Line

2009-06-30T03:24:59Z

Well, I figured out how to get my computer back on the network at work. That was about 4 hours before the support guys finally called.

Now, I just need to fix up the remaining collateral damage.

Pickup and Delivery

2009-06-28T13:41:46Z

I've just picked up Dorotha from the El station after she worked crew for the suicide prevention walk here in Chicago. We've had breakfast and now she's cleaning up before catching her flight back to DC.

Small Victories

2009-06-27T19:19:44Z

We've been pretty much unable to fly the flag on holidays since the late Bilbo peed on the previous flag that fit on the flagpole that we had. (That one was properly disposed of in fire, but that's a longer story.) The new flag and the old pole didn't get along.

Today at Wal-Mart, I found a suitable flag pole and bracket. The old bracket has been replaced and disposed of and the flag is now waving in the very small breeze that we have today.

I'm now hiding inside underneath a ceiling fan on high.

Gleep

2009-06-26T22:47:49Z

When the DHCP service says "Access is denied", you start to get the impression that you won't be getting online from the work computer. I've filed a support ticket. We'll see how long this takes to get resolved.

To Concertino and Back Again (Part Two)

2009-06-25T21:27:53Z

On Friday, you will hardly be surprised to hear, we slept in and finally staggered out of the room a bit past noon. We ran into various folks in the lobby, including Gary, Robin, Kathy, and Dean, who we chatted with both before and after grabbing lunch at the hotel restaurant.

Later, Brooke arrived with a stack of her and John's new CDs to be inserted into sleeves and a mound of pharmacy warning stickers to seal them with. My particular favorite was "May reduce the effectiveness of your birth control", which I made sure to use all of, as we formed an assembly line to make the work easier. Brooke stuffed, I sealed, and Katie played with the stickers. Fortunately, there were spare stickers.

Rachel arrived in mid-afternoon. She had volunteered to babysit Katie and Julie so that we could manage to get to some of our scheduled events with minimum interference. Along with her were her two kids, Joshua and Eva, who come equipped with the most amazing curly red hair. :) We eventually decided to decamp back to the hotel restaurant where Gretchen and I had the prime rib buffet -- in series, as it turned out, because Katie decided to reprise her earlier efforts at running around the restaurant, but had now added the new trick of raiding the sugar packets from other tables. Since I'd nearly finished my meal, I wolfed down the last few bites and took her back to the lobby, leaving Gretchen with Julie, Rachel, Joshua, and Eva.

I'm looking for a good way to keep Katie in her seat at dinner. One that does not involve neutronium boots. *sigh* And I will figure something out eventually.

After that, it was off to Opening Ceremonies. Each of the guests (save Harold) sang a song (Gretchen and I did "Request"), the last of which was Paul Mangan singing "Surprise", which allowed us to segue off neatly into the memorial sing-along. Ben had been good enough to give me "The Phoenix", "Hope Eyrie", and the "Green Hills of Earth" to sing, while Gretchen handled "Julian of Norwich" with me playing backup guitar. We then adjourned from the auditorium for the memorial circle, while Gretchen and I went to catch up with Katie and Julie in the kids room.

By the time that we got to the filk room, they'd moved into open filking. This was the only night that Gretchen was able to join me there, as Saturday night she crashed out after the auction so she'd be coherent for her workshop the next morning, while on Sunday night she had both congestion and two little girls to deal with and decided just to head upstairs and work on breathing.

But on Friday, we had a good time at the open filk, even singing "Stuff" at France's request. We planned to sing that song in our concert too, but I never argue with a woman who is going to have sharp objects near my head, and since I expected to get a Haircut for Interfilk at some point during the con, I was happy to comply. :)

Gretchen crashed out, as I recall, not too long before I did, as I had the early workshop on Saturday morning.

And everyone seemed to be having a good time. Even Katie and Julie! :)

To Concertino and Back Again (Part One)

2009-06-24T19:11:21Z

So now let's talk about the con in perhaps a bit more detail than my quick posts on the way to, at, and from the con. :)

When Gary originally asked us (much to our surprise and delight) to be guests at Concertino, he also asked if we'd mind missing Duckon, one of our local SF cons. It turned out that wasn't necessary, as Duckon was a week earlier than Concertino. It did add to the general entertainment of the situation though, as we did cons two weekends in a row, which kept us hopping.

Gretchen had long wanted to prepare an album and songbook of our music for the Interfilk auction at Concertino. As usually happens, these things keep sliding toward the last minute. The last minute in this case meant adjusting the final levels and burning the CD Tuesday night as I finished the editing on the songbook, not aided by our laser printer apparently needing to have its pickup roller cleaned. That will be a project for later. :)

I'd planned to work from home on Wednesday and take off a few minutes early so we could beat the traffic on the way out of town. "A few minutes early" eventually morphed into about 4:30 PM, which was a good bit later than I'd had in mind. It would have been good had we remembered everything that we'd intended to pack -- we forgot the Pegasus-related items, Wing Words and the printout of the brainstorming poll, and Julie's favorite blanket (Ack!), and probably some other things that I'm blanking on now, but we did manage to get most of the important items, us, and the kids into the car and get on the road. And mail packages. And pick up lunch at Wendy's.

Yeah, it was being that sort of day.

The good news was that we got into Ohio without too much trouble. We even had a nice dinner at a Texas Roadhouse, although keeping Katie in her seat was a challenge. (All weekend.) I'd hoped to get at least as far as Toledo, which was what we managed, and a coupon book from the rest stop led us to a brand-new Country Inn and Suites which had a very attractive room rate and a manager who was delighted by the girls bouncing across his lobby at some late hour of the night.

We fell into bed and slept until everyone woke up. While this seemed wise, it did mean that we got a late start. I used my awesome Google-fu and located a nearby Target where a close match to Julie's favorite blanket was found, along with a wrist brace for Gretchen (another forgotten item), more aspirin, and a children's percussion set that mysteriously came out of the store with Gretchen. (I do not recall saying "Pick up anything you think we need". I could be wrong, of course...) Shortly thereafter, we grabbed lunch at an Ohio Turnpike food court and pushed on east.

We had bought new movies for Katie to watch on the backseat DVD player. Sadly, all she wanted to watch was the Heffalump movie. Over, and over, and over again. The in-flight entertainment for the front seat was my MP3 player, switched from random shuffle into album mode.

We got badly lost in Cleveland. I suggested taking the truck route rather than staying on I-90. It was only a short detour on two interstates. However, when the truck we were following zigged to get on I-90 eastbound again, Gretchen zagged back onto I-90 westbound. The navigator will take his share of the blame here for not giving directions earlier.

Ok, no problem. We'll get off at the next exit and turn around.

Except that the ramp to get back on I-90 eastbound at the next exit was closed. But there was a detour sign! So we followed the detour.

To the point where someone had removed the arrow from one of the detour signs. We went straight. This was apparently the wrong answer. We eventually arrived back at I-90, where there was only an entrance to go west again. I applied dead reckoning and sent us back to the east.

Into a maze of twisty passages, all alike. At one point, we arrived at a dead-end in front of us and a dead-end on the right.

"Should I turn left?" Gretchen asked.

Probably not the best question to ask the navigator at that point. :) "Yes!"

We eventually wound through the industrial district along the canal and popped up next to the Cleveland Indians' ballpark, which is right next to where we'd made our original wrong turn. There had to be a way to get on I-90 eastbound here, or else the Indians had no fans who lived east of the stadium. And some careful parsing of the signage led us back to I-90 eastbound.

And there was much rejoicing.

We celebrated our passage through Erie, PA by playing "That Thing You Do".

And then we arrived in New York. There is a lot of New York, a fact which becomes apparent when you see mile marker 495 staring you in the face.

It could be worse. It could be Texas.

Our late start and Cleveland misadventure had us running later than we'd hoped. We decided to grab a late dinner in Rochester before everything closed. We cruised up the central Rochester interstate exit, checking for food, then turned around (without incident this time) and went back to the exit where I'd seen a Perkins, figuring we'd check in the opposite direction, then head back to the Perkins if we found nothing better.

Gretchen started calling out the names of things she saw in the mall on the right. "What's Five Guys?"

I swerved into the right lane.

I only know about Five Guys because they're just starting to move into the Chicago area, so I'd seen the reviews. And what I knew was "Good burgers, good fries, fast". Which was just what we needed now.

Katie, of course, fell in love with the ketchup dispenser. And was eating ketchup with a straw. And occasionally some french fries. Julie also made french fries disappear, while Gretchen and I demolished a couple of very nice burgers.

There were fries left over. Not that they were bad, just that we were full. And the large fries are very large.

And we were ready to get back on the road.

It misted all of the way across New York. By the time that Gretchen took over driving in Massachusetts, it had worked up to rain. And construction, which added to the fun.

On the other hand, our I-Pass from Illinois worked for tolls everywhere except in Ohio, so that sped things up a lot on the trip. And eventually, we pulled into Worcester.

Where we missed the turn onto Main St. for the hotel. *sigh*

More dead reckoning ensued and we finally pulled into the hotel parking lot at about 3 AM local time. Badger met us there (which was above and beyond the call of duty) and helped us get checked in. I grabbed a luggage cart, hauled everything up to the room, and parked the car.

And we all gratefully fell into bed.

Home Safe

2009-06-23T06:48:20Z

We're home after an 18.5 hour trip back from Concertino. Mapquest rates this as a 16 hour drive of 975 miles, so I think we did pretty well, given that we actually stopped for two meals and several fill ups. And diaper changes. :)

More later, but right now, we're thinking seriously about going to bed.

After the Con Is Over

2009-06-22T02:27:14Z

We had a wonderful time here at Concertino. Everyone has been really nice -- especially Rachel, who handled our official babysitting, along with MEW and Sarah, who served as unofficial child wranglers from time to time. Our concert yesterday went well, the committee dinner was great fun, and we enjoyed listening to the various concerts that we managed to catch during the course of the con. daisy_knotwise had to vanish upstairs with the girls between their being restless and her having some substantial congestion, so she missed the dead dog filking tonight, but that was also a nice circle of reasonable size.

It's still going now, but we need to get to bed so we can start back to Chicago tomorrow.

Thanks, everyone!

Concertino

2009-06-20T15:18:14Z

We're having a wonderful time here at Concertino. Rachel has been immensely helpful with wrangling the girls, which meant Gretchen was able to spend a bit of time in the open filk before collapsing last night. Opening Ceremonies and the following memorial sing-along went really well, and the open filk was just fine. I would have stayed later, but I had a 10 AM workshop this morning.

Against all odds, I managed to get dressed and out of the room without waking anyone. The workshop went well too, as more people filtered in during the hour.

Now, I'm back to the room to collect Gretchen, Katie, and Julie and figure out what to do about lunch. :)

Good Morning, Worcester!

2009-06-19T07:48:19Z

Thanks to a late start (prompted by one of the things that we forgot being Julie's favorite blankie, a suitable replacement obtained at Target), getting lost in Cleveland due to a wrong turn and a missing detour sign, rain, and construction, and a wrong turn in Worcester, we finally got to the hotel about 3 AM local.

Bed is looking very good. :)

That's Better

2009-06-18T14:25:38Z

We picked out this motel by stopping at the first rest area in Ohio and picking up the motel coupon book there. Not only did we get an extremely favorable rate, but it's one of the nicer rooms we've stayed in. The motel has a continental breakfast (which we slept through) and a pool (which we enjoyed looking at), but the most important things were the large comfortable beds, the working air conditioner, and the really nice bathroom.

Now we just have to get things packed up and get back on the road. Right after I find the nearest Target so we can find a blanket for Julie to substitute for her favorite blanket that's still at home.

Well, you know you're going to forget something.

Touchdown

2009-06-18T04:32:18Z

We've landed south of Toledo in a very nice motel at a very reasonable price. We got off way later than we intended, but we made good time once we did.

Now, if we can just get the girls to go to sleep, we'll be ahead of the game.

Rolling, Rolling...

2009-06-17T19:27:55Z

Well, we should be rolling soon. The one-hour demo that I was giving this morning blossomed into a 2.5 hour long demo, but it's done, my bags are packed -- except for the laptop which is busy updating itself and is going in a bag just as soon as that'd done -- and all I have to do is get everyone into the van, stow catalana's car in the vacated spot in the garage, and then we can get lunch.

After that -- and a stop at the Post Office and bank -- we'll be on the road. :)

See some of you at Concertino!

There Are Limits

2009-06-17T03:47:58Z

So as I was standing on the concourse eating my dinner at one of the condiment stands -- dinner consisting of a foot-long hot dog with everything except peppers and a pepperoni calzone, the dinner that nutrition forgot! -- I was more than a bit surprised to see someone walk up to the dispenser and squirt ketchup onto his Connie's deep-dish pizza.

I don't eat ketchup on pizza. Katie -- who eats ketchup on Katie -- doesn't eat ketchup on pizza.

This guy, well...

Glub

2009-06-17T02:32:52Z

Well, just as I picked up the phone to call daisy_knotwise at abour 7:15 to tell her that I was just about to give up and come home, because there was no way they were going to start this game before 9 PM, they announced that the game had been called on account of rain.

Up until then, I was dry. After standing in the rain for half an hour waiting for a bus, not so much.

*sigh*