Cold gray Tuesday, Minicon

Determined, I pulled the heavy winter coat out of the closet and biked all the way into work today. I may regret doing so this afternoon: we are supposed to get two to five inches of rain/snow. Urgh. I feel that I am dwindling into a pale, pasty potato sprout, languishing in a dark kitchen cupboard. When are we going to get some sunlight again, for heavens sake?

I will be at Minicon (minicon42_2007) this weekend. I am looking forward to it--it'll be great to see Charles DeLint, among other things--but for the first time in I don't know how many years, I will not be on any panels or doing a reading. My apologies to the nice and polite people who sent me the programming e-mail. They certainly contacted me in plenty of time for me to volunteer, but when I received it, I was sort of being hammered with a number of life-things (the layoff being the chief one) and so I never responded. (Forgive me my discourtesy, people.) Oh, well. I am sure that you will all manage to limp along for one year without my scathingly brilliant comments on one panel or another [/sarcasm]. This just leaves more time for me to sit in the corner and have quiet, pleasant conversations. And I do look forward to seeing many of you there.

The girls are very eager to go to Minicon and particularly, they are pining to stay at the hotel. Rob wants to stay, too, whereas I am saying, "And why are we even thinking of spending the money on that if Rob doesn't have a job in three weeks?" We do have the money, and yes, I'd love to stay at the hotel; I just am balking at spending the money on that with this layoff looming over our heads. (You know, it gets mighty tiresome always being the practical one. So much of the time I feel like I'm just spoiling everyone else's fun.) The girls are even begging to be allowed to pony up some of their allowance to make it possible, which makes me feel like even more of a skinflint/spoilsport.

Anyway, we'll be there, although I don't know if we'll be staying at the hotel. I won't be on programming, but I hope to see a lot of you there.

Fiona is now reading nocturne_alley

For those of you with too much time on your hands and who have not yet experienced the delights of nocturne_alley, this post at their fan community, nraged, gives the order of the posts to read. It'll take awhile for you to read it all: the game ran for several years, from February 2002 until June, 2004. If you want to do it right, read the posts and ALL the comments.

Have fun, and don't snorffle too much coffee up your nose from laughing too hard.

(Click on the "nocturne alley" tag if you want to read my earlier entries about my involvement with the game). Oh, and if you read nothing else, get an idea of the quality of the the roleplayers in that game by reading this, which was the time that the player who wrote Severus Snape was interviewed by nraged. It. Is. Absolutely. Hilarious.

Welcome to LiveJournal to pazlazuli

At the belt tests last Saturday, I was wearing my Quidditch T-shirt, and one of the girls' sensei's eyes lit up when she saw it. We quickly dove into a delighted conversation in which we discovered that we shared a mutual passion for J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Jane Austen, Ursula LeGuin and other feminist sf and fantasy writers, as well as a shared conviction that Snape is absolutely not evil. I told her about my Livejournal and sent her some links, and she set up her own LJ last night. Hurrah!

pazlazuli is a third degree black belt. She and her husband are the parents of three boys. I am delighted to have the opportunity to get to know better someone who shares so many of my interests, and I hope she posts often.

Argh

Snow. In April.

This is so not on.