Kaymyth

Yeah, it was me that introduced it to the Shard. It's a common phrase used by my circle of friends, though, so I didn't invent it.

Whippersnapper!

The pill is a magic bit of wondrousness that fixes so many things. ...alas, I have gotten too old to be on it anymore.

These are habits and ways of thinking that have been drilled into you for almost your entire life. It's going to take some time to work them out of your system and rewrite your brain with healthy thoughts. Sanity will prevail!

I think you should sit back, relax, and re-corral the brain weasels. If there were problems with your performance, they would tell you. Setting aside the fact that Twimom is nuts and normal people do not think the way she does, remember that it takes rather a lot of investment on their part to hire and train a new person. Setting you up to fail the way you fear they might be is both malicious and stupid.

I borked up my knee something good last night. I'm not entirely sure how. All's I know is that I'm just fine walking, but if I put weight on it while it's bent (i.e. standing up from a chair or going up or down stairs) it hurts and buckles a bit. yay

Just wait till you see Doppelgangland...

ConQuesT Part 2: Yesterday was panels. Lots of panels. And minioning for Julie. And bidding on art. So much art. I, er, wound up winning most of what I bid on, too. I am taking home a metric crem-ton of art. (And not all of it is Julie's. But some of it is. Well, about half of it is. Yeah. She's really, really good.) For dinner last night I took Julie to a local sushi place where my husband joined us and we stuffed ourselves silly. Because sushi. And also bubble tea. We returned back to the con in time for me to meander down to the gaming hall and join the Texas Hold 'Em tournament. I was one of two women who decided to play. There was one guy who jokingly said something like, "Girls can't play poker!" He wound up coming in third. I won second place. The other lady won first place. (I originally thought his statement to be rather offensive, but I later found out the whole story. This guy was once beaten in a poker tournament by an 11-year-old girl, thus it was a joke at his expense. Still, dude, maybe that is context necessary for us to learn about when you make these jokes, so we don't wind up quite so satisfied when we destroy you at the table.) Today was more panels, paying for art (ouch, but really, it's all so good!), and closing ceremonies. I bought a couple of books from a local author I've seen around, and helped a bit with closing down the art show, popped down to gaming a bit and played a game of Pirate Flux, put in an appearance at the Dead Dog party, and am now ready to collapse. It's been a fantastic convention; not a huge one, but I kind of prefer it that way. I've been approached to possibly be the head liaison wrangler for next year, and I think I'll go ahead and do it. If I'm wrangling the wranglers and not a GoH myself, then I'll have a bit more time to pitch in with some more of the setup stuff. Tomorrow will be packing up, taking Julie to the airport for her journey home, and then going home myself. Where I will snuggle James and then we will FINALLY go see Civil War. And then I will sleep for a week. Wait, no, I have to be back at work on Tuesday. I really need to not ever try to do three conventions in five weeks again, because I am le tired.

(Full disclosure: I spent enough years as a music major to have gone through tech courses on every family of instrument. I know the basics on how to play just about anything. I'm not necessarily going to be good at every instrument, but I understand how they work. I have played the piano for nearly all of my rememberable life, and consider my skills to be excellent on flute and borderline-professional on oboe.) Eh. Of all of the woodwind instruments, oboe is actually the toughest one to play well and in tune. See, most instruments you can tune pretty easily by adjusting the mouthpiece/headjoint to the proper place, and then most of your notes will be on pitch. Not the oboe. First - the only mouthpiece is the reed. Two tiny, delicate bits of cane pressed together. And you can't pull the cork out any without messing with the tonal stability of the instrument. The end result is that you have to adjust your embouchure and the position of your lips on the reed in order to play in tune. Second - different notes require further adjustments of your lips in order to hit on pitch. This means that not only must you have some good muscle control of your lips, but you MUST have a good enough sense of pitch to be able to hear whether you are in tune and whether you need to adjust sharp or flat. And these adjustments are constant. So in reality the oboe requires every bit as much focus and concentration as the string family, if not more. And this is why the orchestra tunes to the first chair oboist.

ConQuesT 47: The Story So Far... Thursday: I got off work early to run up and check into my hotel room before running to pick my GoH (Julie) up from the airport. I'm a liaison this year, which basically means that I am her assistant/minion/buddy/guide while she is at the convention. I did all the stuff like booking her flights, making sure her art gets shipped, and making sure she is not lonely and has places to eat. (She is pescatarian, so I had to do some research.) Well, I don't know if any of y'all happened to see the weather radar over the Midwest last night, but that was some of the most impressively wide swaths of red I have ever seen. We've had flash flood warnings all over the place, and the airport actually had to evacuate to the tornado shelters for a while because yes, there was an actual tornado in the area. But, y'know, we're Midwesterners, so we just sorta shrug at the sirens and meander downstairs (possibly stopping at the window in the hopes of getting a peek at the funnel cloud). Fortunately, Julie's connecting flight was delayed enough for other reasons that I missed being at the airport during the tornado warning. But I still had to drive up there in some fun downpours and a little bit of light hail. So that was exciting. Then I got the airport, checked her flight on my phone, and noted that it was going to be landing soon. Hooray! Then the landing time rolled around, and no announcement of the flight arrival. Hm. So I wandered over to the board. About the same time as I saw what was going on, I got text from her that confirmed it. Julie had landed, all right. In Oklahoma City. See, her plane had circled a few times, trying to find a break in the storm to land, but couldn't. And they were running out of fuel, so they needed to land somewhere. They were first diverted to Tulsa, but then that airport was gridlocked with other flights that couldn't land places, so they moved on to Oklahoma City, where they landed just long enough to refuel and then hopped back up in the air again. Julie finally landed at about a quarter to nine. Between grabbing something to eat and getting the GPS to behave itself, we finally rolled into the convention hotel after 10PM, maybe somewhere closer to 10:30. Fortunately, we get along quite well, and were able to joke around about the madness and generally goof off at each other. Friday: Today started off much better. After breakfast, we headed down to the dealer room to get her art display set up. And once we'd done that, seeing that the art show team was terribly behind and shorthanded, we pitched in to help get all the other displays up and running, too. That took most of the afternoon. We tooled around the dealer tables for a while afterwards, and I randomly ran into some old college friends whom I hadn't seen in about 15 years, so that was kind of cool. I introduced Julie to Spin Pizza for dinner, we went to the opening ceremonies (where delightful shenanigans happened), and generally had a good time. Spin actually screwed up our order and somehow got "chicken" when I'd said "garlic cloves" (don't ask me how). They fixed it quickly, though, and we got food still faster than we'd expected. And then they gave me the mistake pizza anyway, so I've got it stuffed into my hotel fridge. I'm amazed that it fit. Bonus pizza yay! I am...tired. And having a pretty good time, even if the weather did try to eat me. Oh, but the hotel elevators scare me because they remind me of the elevators my dreams try to create that have way too many floors and just randomly lose walls and stuff and move way, way too fast. The hotel has way too many floors (40) and the elevators run fast enough to make my ears pop. While I am quite certain that the walls are not going to just disappear, it is rather disconcerting to think about how high I am when hurtling upwards at 15 feet per second. So I try not to. But it's hard.

Heh. No, Kansas City had that last night. Really, there were tornadoes and everything. I will tell you all the story of my convention so far in the Random Stuff thread. (Obviously I didn't blow away.)

Nope. The rights are currently owned by a studio, but that really means very little when it comes to actually developing anything. There could be an announcement in the next few months that something is going to start filming, or there could never be. That's the way these things go.

My husband is also not a reader*, so he really doesn't "get" the fandom. He knows I enjoy it, and he's supportive of it and my mad rushing around to various conventions, but it's just not his thing. And that's OK; it doesn't have to be his thing. He's gone to a couple of cons with me, and he didn't really like them. (And I've gone to a couple of Toastmasters things with him, and don't really have any interest in them.) I think there comes a point in a relationship where you don't really have to try and poke your nose into everything your partner does. It's nice that you try to grok his things that aren't yours, but it's not something that you are obligated to do past a certain point. In return, expecting him to put forth a lot of energy into grokking our fandom is maybe a bit overboard in the expectation department. Do your thing. Let him do his thing. You still have lots of things to do together, but remember that it's actually healthy for the two of you to have interests that you don't share. *He actually used to be a reader when he was younger. It's not that he lost interest in books; he has eye "floaters" that give him a lot of trouble when it comes to trying to focus on black text over a white background.

I don't think there's any reason to assume that any of them are perfectly simultaneous. Plus at this point, Sansa has been at the wall long enough to hand-sew herself a new dress AND make Jon a new cloak. There's definitely some time-skipping going well n here.

Creeping up towards convention time, kids! Off early today to check into the con hotel and then pick our artist Guest of Honor up from the airport. Then it's the pre-con dinner, then the pre-con party, and then tomorrow is con! ConQuesT 47 will soon be a go.

*whimper* No, do not crush my illusions! Direpuppy is safe....direpuppy is safe....direpuppy is safe...

I figure there's no solid reason why things in far-flung regions really have to be happening at exactly the same time. There could really be a lag time of weeks between Theon's bit and what's going on at Castle Black, but we have no point of reference between them. Just 'cause they're lining up in the same episodes doesn't mean they're really simultaneous. I...am not 100% convinced that Shaggydog is dead. That head seemed awfully small for a direwolf. After all, how long did the Umbers have Rickon? And they only pop over and declare an allegiance once Roose (the real brains of the operation) is dead and out of the picture? Ramsay may be a bloodthirsty crazy person, but he's also a dithering idiot. Could be that the Umbers are looking for a shot at breaking his army from within.

Bleh, sports. I decided to run track my senior year of high school. Twenty years later my knees still haven't forgiven me. See? This was never a normal thing! We still have some deprogramming work to do.

I believe I also remember something about your stormwitted parents throttling down the vent in your room because "your siblings' rooms don't need the AC full blast, so yours shouldn't either."

I know, right? Deadpool doesn't know how to be mildly anything.

*facepalm* Yeah, it's broken. You don't even have to ask people. Suddenly your AC unit isn't keeping it cool? Yeah, is broken. And, see, you're now in this situation where if there is a problem, you can fix it. You do not have to live your life suffering! In fact, because you are renting, your apartment complex is REQUIRED to keep your AC working.

Honestly, it sounds to me like your AC unit is having problems. You might want to compare notes with your neighbors and see if they're just as hot, 'cause there's a good possibility that you just need to contact maintenance.

See? He's good for something! Also: I am amused by the weather talk. Come to the lower Midwest! Here you can have broiling humidity in the summer AND snow in the winter! The worst of both worlds!

At least it's not wasps.

It has been a bit mad so far this year. I kicked off March by working Access Control at Naka-Con, then attended JordanCon in April. Two weeks after that one, I went to Costume-Con, and three weeks after that is ConQuesT. I'm going to at least have 2 1/2 months' break before WorldCon hits. ...I am le tired.