FRIDAY 10:21

Slept till 8 or so; good enough.

Alan makes a bagel run and we all have breakfast. They have good
bagels here, unlike some places I've lived. Call me a bagel snob if
you want; I grew up in NYC and I know good bagels.

13:10

This line I have to write down! Alta to Alan: "Oh, and don't forget
your grass skirt, dear!" [Truth to tell, it's a piece of costume
material for "HMS Trek-a-Star".]

14:32

A beautiful warm day, especially heart-lifting to a Northeast-dweller
in early March (snow back East). Good for a stroll around the
neighborhood. I am very prone to getting lost, so I

 - put the Thiesens' phone number into my PDA & make sure I have my
   cell phone

 - check the compass direction at door. Yes, I carry a compass: I get
   lost so easily that it's helped me in an unfamiliar corner of my
   own neighborhood.

 - get their street number from the door, walk to corner for street
   name, and store the address.

I walk along at a slow comfortable pace, using my stick. I'm headed,
hmm... East. If I could keep going this way I'd be going back to Rene!
Say, why not call her now?... She's on-line; leave a message.

At the other end of the block there's a pleasant park. Well, how about
taiji (aka T'ai Chi Ch'uan)? I haven't done the form since the
operation. The grass is smooth and short &... yechh! It looks as if a
whole pack of dogs was let loose here and ... Oh, wait a minute; those
brown cylinders are plugs of dirt. They must have just been aerating
the soil; s'OK. -- It feels good to do the form again. Just as I'm
done Rene calls me back :-) and we talk across the continent as I walk
back to the Thiesens' & sit in the sun on the curb in front of their
house.

16:21

For the drive to the hotel, Alan, Eli Goldberg, & I jam into that
Honda Civic with my & Alan's luggage & guitars & Alan's stuff for the
con, + 3 bags of food Eli's bringing for the consuite. Eli holds the
guitars in his lap, sort of. He's another person for whom I've finally
got a face to put to the name. It's a pity my memory for these
matchups is so poor, but meeting him singleton at Alan's instead of in
a crowd helps me keep this one straight.

Registration. "You get one of the fancy ones!" Regular con attendees
get badges in pin-on holders with their names, often written on by
themselves, but guests' badges are printed on glittery silver paper,
in holders with lanyards to hang around the neck. I brought along a
MASSFILC ribbon, which I attach to the badge holder.

I hang out in the consuite for an hour or 2 & meet a lot of people. In
response to the line of conversation, I sing "Fen, Don't Let Your
Children Grow Up To Be Mundane". (I wind up doing a lot of impromptu
singing through the con.)

19:02

At some point I meet Bill Laubenheimer & Carole Parker. They know the
area, and they lead me and Jules Dickinson (who "just for the record"
[as Golias said of Lucius Gil Jones's middle name] is female), at a
really good halal Chinese restaurant. (Halal means 'in accordance with
Muslim dietary laws', as kosher does for Jewish ones. Chinese halal?
--- Hee, hee, I *love* diversity! And the Board of Health sticker in
the bathroom is in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese.)

I come into Talis & al.'s Alien Filk Music session in medias res
(having missed about half a dozen songs according to Harold Groot):

 Cindy McQuillin, "Sometimes After Dark", an alien vampire song based
on Tanith Lee's book _Sometimes After Sunset_
 Simon Fairbourn, Zander Nyrond's "Wassaliens"
 Ben Newman (another Philadelphia filker), The Metroid & the Mother
Brain. Ha! I've heard him sing this one, and I get to join in the
first chorus before anyone else has had a chance to learn it.
 Rika (the Bardling) Koerte, Merseburger Zauberspruch, an Old High
German spell to get some spirits to defend the land against the Roman
invaders
 Talis Kimberly, a Pernish filk of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"
 Heather Stern, The Question Song from _Dragonflight_ (words by Anne
McCaffrey; tune by Heather?)
 Cindy, The Chieri ['kjEri]*, a Darkover filk
   * Ah ha! Not a major Darkover fan, I'd wondered about this word. It
looks like Italian for 'learned ones', and that's how Cindy pronounced
it. The funny stuff in brackets is the pronunciation written in an
ASCII version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, for my own
notes.
 Ben, Hyperbolic Orbit
 Rika, Ich wollte wie Orpheus singen, Reinhard Mey
 me, a Klingon haiku
 Talis & Rika, (Xena theme in a Slavic language -- they're not sure
which [and neither am I] -- & Balkan close harmony)
 Cindy, Tomorrow's Promise
 Ben, (song for Underhill) -- a filk based on Vernor Vinge's _A
Deepness In the Sky_
 Heather Stern, (about a fallen space traveler)
 me, "Those are pearls that were his eyes" (ose sonnet)
 Cindy, Free Fall & Other Delights
 Joe Ficklin, Starstuff
 Rebecca Neuman, (planet bright, starry night)

 8pm 

Cindy starts the Darkness theme circle and I miss some as I go up to
my room for my music stuff.
 Heather Stern, (Janis Kelson song)
 Talis, Velvet (spooky as hell and one of my favorites of hers;
evidently other people's favorite too, being the Pegasus Best Song
winner last year)
 me, She Is Gone (Cat Faber)
 Ben, [The Watcher]
 a woman (Kathleen Sloane, I think) a cheeri-ose song [Time To Move
The Lab Again]
 another woman whose name I missed, [Talking Frankenstein Blues]
 Joey Shoji, Fallen Angel, Chris ("CJ") Ueberall's filk of Julia 
Ecklar's song of the same title
 Ben, [Going Through the Motions]
 Alison Stern, Questions (Janis Kelson)
 Brett Glass(?), There's a Line
 Lisa Rose, [We Are The Creatures Who Rule The Night Woods]
 Joey, Soulchild (Kelson)
 Cindy & Joey, Cindy's Shadow Harper
 me, Cut Velvet (Joel Polowin)
 Ben, Ladyhawke (Julia Ecklar)
 Cindy, Ruby Wine
 Cindy, Wolfling
 Robin Baylor (a woman), And He Built A Crooked House
 Lee & Barry Gold, Hiroshima no Tsuru (Cranes Over Hiroshima, Lee's
Japanese translation)
 Robin, Why Must I Be a Klingon In Love?
 Joe Ficklin, fresh insta: [Homeland Security]
 Golds, A Hundred Men (Alex Kissloff [spelling?])
 me, Chap Shtick (Joe Ficklin & Heather Rose Jones were noodling
Chopsticks on guitar and harp respectively, so I thought of this and
asked them to accompany me)
 Golds, Earthquake Weather (David Okamura & Lee)
 me, Billboards
 Golds, [big bad wolf]

22:17

Harmony Workshop with Simon Fairbourn: a pickup chorus that will
rehearse an arrangement in parts to perform on Sunday. The first sheet
music handed out (Fal Morgan) turns out to be missing half its pages,
so we go to Boy in a Room. I love choral singing and belonged to my
synagogue chorus while I lived in Massachusetts. (As things worked
out, the chorus needed extra time and had to schedule a second
rehearsal, which conflicted with the bawdy theme circle I was leading
Saturday night. Simon and I agreed that I wasn't needed -- there were
enough baritones -- and I was willing, though reluctant, to drop out
to avoid complicating the scheduling any further.)
 
23:59 
In the consuite
 Joe Ficklin, John the Balladeer (Cat Faber), then immediately into his
own funny filk of it, [Undead Fred]
 me, Play It Slow (Cat Faber, dedicated to Joe Bethancourt)
 Joe, My Grandmother's Cat (Garrison Keillor, ttto My Grandfather's
Clock)
 me, My Grandfathered Plot (same tune)
 me, Editors' Waltz ttto "Witnesses' Waltz" (Leslie Fish)
 
01:29 to bed at last!

Thursday < ------ > Saturday, part 1
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