At ConClave last weekend, we performed one of my favorite SpaceTime Theater bits, Time Cop. In it, I play the beleaguered Lieutenant Stockwell of the Time Patrol whose mission is to keep Sam's character -- aided and abetted by Nikola Tesla -- from destroying the time stream.

It looks like Tesla may have gotten his fingers into the Large Hadron Collider over at CERN, or so I hear via Instapundit.

But that's ok. Lieutenant Stockwell is busy keeping the time stream safe from the Higgs Boson.

We all headed down to Dawn's place for the last SpaceTime Theater rehearsal before the ConClave show. Everything went pretty well -- now we just need to get the show to do the same! :)

We're winding down the rehearsal schedule for the SpaceTime Theater show at ConClave. This was our next-to-last Saturday rehearsal, which was a scheduled day off for Dawn (who had her kids) and an unavoidable day off for Greg (who needed to cover for Cary who was required at the Capricon meeting, because having your hotel liaison there is a lot more important than having the guy who is running your filk program). So we spent the time running through the bits that didn't include them, pulling out and practicing with the sound system (which we haven't done in a while), and -- after a late lunch! -- coming back and going through the prop boxes. Sam and I left Bonnie, Steve, and Gretchen to do that while we kept Katie occupied outside and safely away from the assorted attractive nuisances inside.

Overall, a successful session. And I need to remind Sam that he needs to make lemon squares for next week's rehearsal.

Maybe this post will work. If not, I'll try something less subtle.

We've survived the last SpaceTime rehearsal prior to our WindyCon show, despite some of the cast being sick and a lot of the cast being tired. The show should be good. Of course, we do have to make it so. :)

Katie, meanwhile, decided to do the stupid last night. She climbed onto the couch with Julie, which was just fine. Subsequently pushing her sister off onto the floor and smiling about it was not.

I checked to make sure that Julie was ok -- she was, babies are pretty resilient that way and she'd hit flat from a short fall. Then I grabbed Katie, tossed her over my shoulder, yelled at her, and spanked her on the way upstairs to dumping her unceremoniously in her crib. No real damage was done to her bottom through the diaper, but she was very upset by the indignity of the whole process. And the fact that her favorite blanket was still downstairs.

We will manage to teach Katie to be civilized before we are done.

Sooner will be better than later.

We're coming up on the WindyCon show and had a SpaceTime rehearsal scheduled for this morning. daddy_guido had warned us two weeks ago that his MBA class work might keep him away and confirmed that earlier this week. dek9 e-mailed yesterday to let me know that she might have to take delivery of her repaired TV this morning. And she called this morning to say that not only was that true, but she also felt crappy and didn't want to bring the cold up our way. (Given that I'm finally getting over my post-ConClave cold, I fully appreciate that sentiment.)

Then Jerry arrived. Then Bonnie and Steve arrived. After a few minutes, I asked, "Where is samwinolj?"

"He's home sick. He can't keep anything down."

We sorted props and went over some procedural stuff.

I'm hoping everyone is healthy next week.

We're back from ConClave where we had a fine time. We actually made good time on the drive home, arriving about five hours after finishing dinner with catalana, despite a few of Katie's best efforts.

Julie is now getting a bottle and Katie is calmly watching her Pooh DVD.

Before the next trip, there is going to be a rear-seat DVD system of some sort. And there will be peace in our time. :)

Today's SpaceTime Theater rehearsal was called on account of rain. samwinolj, Bonnie, Steve, and Jerry did manage to get here before the streets surrounding us were flooded, but daddy_guido and dek9 were coming from the south and found that they couldn't get across Oakton St. without a canoe. daisy_knotwise took most of the cast to the basement to sort out props while Sam and I kept the kids entertained and watched the water rise in the field behind our house.

After we called rehearsal, we tried going north to Photo's for lunch, since Sam had decided that the best way for them to get back home was to go south on the Tri-State, given the reports from Greg and Dawn. Unfortunately, the parking lot there was flooded and the restaurant closed, so they all just gave up and went home. Gretchen, Katie, Julie, and I proceeded east to Randhurst, grabbed lunch at Steak & Shake, and then I ran into the Home Depot to pick up the lithium grease to lubricate our shower door when I repair it later this afternoon.

In the meantime, I just replaced the keyboard on my HP laptop in about half an hour, which was substantially better than I'd feared. (I'm typing on it now.)

And now to make sure Katie never gets to touch this keyboard again. :)

We got up early for the SpaceTime Theater rehearsal this morning which went quite well, then grabbed lunch with the cast. This evening, daisy_knotwise wanted to grab a decent burger, so we went down to Fuddrucker's and thence to the Fry's across the street where we bought a Winnie the Pooh book and DVD for Katie and an SD card on an opportunistic basis. (That is to say, it was on sale.)

And at this point, Katie is in bed and we are really tired.

We were up and about relatively early today for a SpaceTime Theater rehearsal. After that, we grabbed lunch, then came home and put Katie in bed for a nap. While she slept, we took Julie down to the basement and tried to clean up some of the boxes that still haven't made it back onto the shelves since the great basement reshelving and carpeting project was mostly completed.

daisy_knotwise went out to dinner with dek9 and Kay, leaving me with the girls. I took them over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner, because the waitstaff there really likes the kids and will drop by to play with Katie when she gets too restless.

Katie got a bit too restless to get to split a Key Lime pie with me at the restaurant though, so Gretchen and I will be splitting that in a few minutes. :)

daisy_knotwise suggested that samwinolj and I catch The Dark Knight since she didn't really want to see it. She was right. She didn't want to see it. Sam and I, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely.

After the film, Sam and I picked up some L-brackets at Home Depot and returned back here for a quick bit of fence repair. The three of us sat around outside talking and supervising kids until dek9 arrived with Aidan and Tatum, after which we did more of the same.

Eventually, I grilled some burgers, Gretchen made strawberry shortcake, and we ate around continued conversation.

A good time was had by all.

And tomorrow, I'll e-mail the rest of SpaceTime to discuss the upcoming shows.

A familiar face to friends of SpaceTime Theater and General Technics, samwinolj is now aboard the time sink. He hasn't actually posted anything yet, but that'll probably change.

By request of ladyrutile, the silly bios for SpaceTime Theater's ConClave 2007 show:
( Cut tagged for your protection... )

daisy_knotwise, Katie, and I had fun this weekend at ConClave. The SpaceTime Theater show went well on Saturday night, despite a couple of minor setup glitches. I got to see most of the Wild Mercy concert ahead of the show as we handed Katie (who spent the weekend being quite suitably cute) off for babysitting. Later in the evening, we got to share a filk circle with min0taur, Sally, tollers, harperjen, filkertom, peteralway and others, which was great fun, although we were all a bit tired and broke up relatively early.

Sales were so-so with the emphasis on the "so", but that's likely a result of the bad Michigan economy. With luck it didn't hurt the con too badly.

And soon we're going to get some sleep. :)

daisy_knotwise is putting Katie to bed while I assemble the final program for SpaceTime Theater's ConClave show this weekend. Interestingly, only the folks with LJ accounts managed to actually get their silly bios to us, so I've had to make up the others.

Hey, you snooze...

(And you end up with whatever I write for you.)

Time sort of slipped away from us this weekend. Between SpaceTime Theater rehearsal yesterday, a visit from Sam, Bonnie, and Steve this afternoon, and having jeff_duntemann and Carol over for dinner tonight, we got less accomplished than we might have hoped.

On the other hand, I've made some progress on the ISFiC Press books (and must make more tomorrow!), jeff_duntemann pressed buttons on the recording gear so I could record a scratch track of Crosstime Bus and send it off to quadrivium for the GAFilk Songbook, daisy_knotwise counted the Fencon cash box and gave Katie a much-needed bath, and I've got the reorders for ConClave written out and ready to go into various e-mails.

So it's not that we didn't get that much accomplished -- it's just that we have high standards! :) (We often fail to meet them...)

I dug through old e-mails and pulled out a bunch of ISFiC Press info so that I can try to get the books caught up to date. This resulted in my deleting a thousand or so old e-mails, which has greatly improved the condition of my inbox.

Later, we had a SpaceTime rehearsal, which went pretty well. Most of us then adjourned for dinner; daddy_guido and dek9 had to take care of family obligations.

Tomorrow, I'll try to get a bit further on the books.

Spacetime Theater's ConClave show is approaching and with Sam and Bonnie off to the Worldcon in Japan and daisy_knotwise and I off to Fencon the moment they return, it was time for some serious advance planning. So that's how we spent the afternoon, along with the rest of the cast, save daddy_guido who was waylaid by an unavoidable and sad family emergency. Much good progress was made; now we just need to practice. :)

Things went well at Duckon. We had a couple of minor glitches getting ready for the SpaceTime Theater show on Friday night, but we had a great audience and got a lot of laughs. I was trying to get the show to fit in an hour -- we actually ran about 1:11 according to the tape. Pretty close. spiritdance was good enough to sit for Katie during the show, which made things much more possible.
( More inside... )

dek9 will be by shortly to pick up the props. daisy_knotwise has made dinner for the crew.

In a little bit, I'll head upstairs with some variable amount of help to put together the program for the show and the inventory list for the dealer table. And -- if everything goes according to plan -- we'll get to the con in reasonable time tomorrow.

We'll see how the plan goes.

We had our final dress rehearsal for the Duckon show today. It went well, save for the fact that daddy_guido was unable to make it due to a conflict with a group meeting for his business school class. But we rehearsed around him and life was, in general, good.

After rehearsal, daisy_knotwise, Katie, Jerry, and I adjourned to Max & Erma's, where we found that we had a server who was having, well, a bad day. He was making a lot of mistakes, not just at our table, but at the neighboring table, which was much less charitable than we were. On the other hand, he did take the value of my delayed meal off the bill (he'd put in for the wrong size of burger) and we did eventually get the chocolate chip cookies that he'd forgotten to put in, which was just as well, since I'd still have been eating the delayed burger if the cookies had shown up on time.

The moral of our story is, "Son, if you're having a bad day, consider writing down the orders instead of trying to remember them. Not writing them down and messing them up isn't going to impress anyone."

We had a good SpaceTime Theater rehearsal today, despite the absence of daddy_guido due to a conflict. dek9 had to duck out to pick up her kids after rehearsal, but the rest of us adjourned over to Sweet Baby Ray's where we met beamjockey for a whole bunch of barbeque and good conversation.

Urp.

And, as usual, the waitresses clustered around Katie, who was being quite sufficiently cute.

SpaceTime Theater is rehearsing this afternoon in my absence, so I've now typed up the changes that we're making to one of the sketches so that the rest of the group can have them.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

We're pulling the SpaceTime Theater cast together for our DucKon show and getting (excuse the expression) all our ducks in a row.

Unfortunately, Sam and Bonnie have come down with a stomach bug and won't be here. Steve's here, having managed to survive the closing of the Dempster exit on the Tri-State. Jerry got here late, because it seems I told him 2 PM instead of 1 PM. dek9 just called and will be here as soon as her new Internet connection is installed.

daddy_guido is still among the missing. But maybe someone told him 2 PM... :)

The above was the title of last night's SpaceTime Theater show, despite the absence of Sam, who was at home being really sick. (We missed you, Sam!) Because Opening Ceremonies broke early, we weren't able to keep as much of the audience around as we might have hoped, but the still-fairly-substantial group of folks there laughed early and often. Fortunately, we were doing an all-improv show, so we were able to more easily work around Sam's absence.

In an unusual move, I subbed for Sam in the second half of Who Am I?, a bit where the victim is supposed to guess what person he is based on clues provided by the rest of the cast. For a change, I was pretty befuddled, guessing people such as Lou Piniella, George Bush, Ken Skilling, and Johnny Depp before finally settling on the correct choice of Michael Jackson.

At least I didn't have to moonwalk. :)

We had a great time at ConClave.
( Which you can find out about here... )
All in all, a fun weekend. But, boy, am I tired!