I wandered over to the studio computer while doing laundry to send kriel an MP3 that he'd asked for. Naturally, the computer refused to boot up.

I eventually reset it to boot to the last known good configuration and managed to get it up and running. And the MP3 is in the mail. :)

Rassen frassen hardware...

I was noodling around with a couple of chords, one of which I don't normally use, and tripped over a chord progression that led me to this song. And it probably doesn't sound anything like you think that it does.

I think. :) But it does have a beat.
( Lyrics inside... )

It's been more than a week since I came home from OVFF, so numerous details are starting to fade. In some cases, that may be good. :) But let's see what I do remember.
( Con report inside... )

I still owe pictures of the girls and an OVFF report. However, daisy_knotwise was out tonight visiting a friend who is recuperating from surgery, so those will be a bit more delayed.

On the other hand, I got a good bit of actual work done today. :)

daisy_knotwise and I continue to mull over going to GAFilk. The problem is that Gretchen doesn't get to see much of the evening activities if she's having to put Katie and Julie to bed. It would be possible to exchange names in that problem and have me put the girls to bed, but then I miss most of the evening activities, so either way, one or the other of us isn't where we'd like to be.

We were wondering if anyone knew of a responsible young person who would be interested in picking up some extra money by watching the girls in the late evening hours. They're pretty much night owls, so they aren't likely to go to bed before 10 PM in any case.

The existence of such a responsible young person wouldn't guarantee that I could lever Gretchen, Katie, and Julie into the van with me for a trip to Georgia this January, but it would help the odds. :)

We're home again after OVFF, finally having found the cold front just south of Merrillville. I suspect there will be a con report at some point, but right now, there's going to be pizza for dinner and a lot of sitting around being tired.

Of course, this plan has to accommodate the visit by the cleaning lady tomorrow morning...

The dead dog is looking deader, but not quite completely dead yet. I've said for a while that OVFF needed two dead dog filks and that's what happened this year.

And the con's going reasonably well. And I'm going to bed now. :)

The ClearCase check in is done. Our long national nightmare is over.

Thank you for observing all safety precautions. We now return me to our regularly scheduled OVFF. :)

Well, I had to hand merge four files, but I am now VPNed into my machine at home and busily checking in 1117 files. I figure this should finish sometime after noon tomorrow.

In the meantime, I can go to bed, get some sleep, and enjoy OVFF.

I've almost finished rearranging all of the files that I need to move around in our projects so that I can actually do the project that I set out to do. The compile is almost clean and I think all that I need to do is revert a file that inadvertently got the wrong contents in it and make a few changes to fix it up.

Then I can finish this when I get back from OVFF.

Update: It's 2 AM. Remote ClearCase is checking out the 1000+ files that I have hijacked. It's two percent complete. Maybe it'll finish by morning and I can start the check in.

Maybe.

I was up until 3:30 AM last night working on the project for work. Unfortunately, I'm still chunking through files that need one line changes due to my having moved header files between projects.

On the other hand, the fact that I was willing to be up until 3:30 AM working on the project has won me forgiveness for the fact that it's going to be late getting done.

And now daisy_knotwise and I have a few things to do before OVFF. :)

Here's the last entry for this batch, which I think finishes off everything that was already typed up and on the computer, but which had -- for some reason -- not managed to make it to the website.

It was 1981. Worldcon was returning to Chicago for the first time in a long time. And the overlapping committees had decided to hold WindyCon downtown as a trial run of the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Of course, the problem was that the hotel was booked in October when the con was normally held. But December! December was available. And so there we were.

There were problems. There were lots of problems. And Clif got caught by several of them, so his mood was foul. daisy_knotwise was running the Masquerade and had asked Clif and I to perform at halftime. And we decided to write a song. We played it for Gretchen and asked if it was ok with her. She said, "Sure!"

We went on stage at the Masquerade halftime. And they turned up the lights. And everyone started talking. We were undermiked and barely audible past the first row, which is where our friends came up to so they could hear us, along with some of the convention guests.

But mostly we were ignored. Until Gretchen signaled us to wrap it up and we launched into our new song.

And the room got really quiet all of a sudden.

And before we were done, the Fan GoH, Mike Glyer, fell off his chair laughing.

Later, Ross recruited me to help run cons up here in Chicago, so I guess he got even.

Did I mention that Chicago is bidding for 2012? :)

(Did I mention that I'm not on the committee? I've stopped trying to run Worldcons. Too much politics for my blood...)
( Lyrics inside... )

Suffice it to say that I've worked a lot more conventions now than I had then. And the hotels are still standing.

Mostly. And the ones that aren't, you can't pin on me.
( Lyrics inside... )

And another of the really old things in my filk book is this song. Jim Detry left the lyrics in the contribution drawer for the fanzine that I was editing for ChUSFA (the Champaign-Urbana Science Fiction Association) when I was down at the University of Illinois. They're essentially all his -- I tweaked them a hair. The tune is mine, save for the fact that the first line is essentially identical to Clif's "Mama Rosa's".

I blame the Melancholy Elephants.
( Lyrics inside... )

As I continue cleaning up missing items in my filk book and on the website, I've got this song. It was my second attempt at writing a song about a soldier far away from home. I never liked it as well as I do "One Last Battle", which probably has a lot to do with why it's been buried for a long time.
( Lyrics inside... )

And because I couldn't sleep, the website is now updated with the lyrics to everything except "Albuquerque". That one's not done because I need to get the chords from a songbook in Julie's room and I really am not going to chance waking her up.

Aside from everything else, daisy_knotwise would justifiably yell at me. :)

It's getting to be time for dinner, so this should be the last song that I type up today. (Is that cheering I hear in the distance?) But I actually had someone ask for this one, so for your filk historical pleasure, I bring you this -- God help us all! -- Pegasus-winning ditty from 1983.
( Lyrics inside... )

This is written on a flyer for Congenial, which was in March of 1989, so I'm guessing that I wrote this in 1988. I'm not sure what caused me to write it, but it comes in handy occasionally when min0taur is leading a jam and running the changes on "Johnny B. Goode".

I don't think I've ever actually seen all of a Godzilla movie. I suppose I should...
( Lyrics inside... )

As Operation: Total Recall continues, we find this little ditty, which daisy_knotwise and I wrote while sitting on the runway out in California waiting to fly back to Chicago. We'd just spent several days with Teri Lee in her studio, where she explained to us some of the entertainment involved in recording with an 8-track reel-to-reel machine. Although we bought a used machine out there (and took it back on the plane with us), we never actually did any recording on the machine. We did use it to transcribe a number of old projects to ADAT some years later.

We probably made the lady in front of us crazy as I tapped out the rhythm for the song on the tray table. Fortunately, we finished before the plane took off, so she didn't have to kill us.
( Lyrics inside... )

So when my good buddy, Clif, got married to Carol, they put little notes on the tables at the reception that said that they would not kiss when people clinked glasses. They would have to get up and sing a little song that included the word "love". And if that was too hard for us to do, we could do a song that contained "Albuquerque".

Needless to say, there were a lot of songs that contained "Albuquerque" that were sung, although many of them simply substituted that city for, say, Kansas City.

I think I wrote the words for this by myself. I know that MEW and Steve Simmons sang it with me, because everything's better with harmony.

So, with apologies to Clif, Carol, Billy Joel, and the Capitol Steps:
( Lyrics inside... )

And here's another song that Clif and I wrote back in 1981. If memory serves, it actually got into the second volume of the Westerfilk Collection. Can you tell that we were both trained as chemists?
( Lyrics inside... )

After I finished recording, I discovered that I still needed to put the filk book back together after the concert at FenCon. And then I decided that -- as long as Julie was asleep and Katie was watching Tarzan -- it might be a good time to type up some of the things that were stuffed in the front flap of my book.

So here's a song I wrote with my good buddy, Clif Flynt, back in 1981. We were asked to write a song about mad scientists. Instead, we ended up writing a song about scientists who were certainly annoyed. It was a wonderfully designed experiment. It just didn't measure what it set out to measure.
( Lyrics inside... )

After almost exactly a twelve hour drive, we got home about an hour ago. Now we're cleaning up the collateral cat damage, as the door to Katie's room that I carefully closed before leaving wasn't closed when we got back.

Bad kitty.

And now Gretchen is giving the girls a bath while I dig through a lifetime supply of work-related e-mail.

We're awake, mostly dressed, mostly packed, and about to hit the road again.

With any luck at all, we'll be home late today.

Yay! (A sentiment that I'm sure Katie fervently agrees with.)