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! :)