Saturday, June 26, 2004: a housefilk at our house in Philadelphia.

When I moved to Philadelphia almost two years ago there was no filk activity here. I was working at the University of Pennsylvania and living by myself in an unpleasant little apartment while my family was still in Massachusetts. It was depressing.

Then Matt Leger and Mary Mulholland held a housefilk at their home in Germantown, just on the northern edge of the city. It was great. People came down from the New York area and in from all directions.

Then they held another. Fantastic!

Then Mary got a promotion and transfer to Atlanta. And I said, "Bummer! Once I get my family down here with me and a place to do it, I'm going to hold housefilks."

At the end of last summer we bought a house and moved down here. It has been a lot of work to bring it into shape, and is continuing to be so. But when Chris Malme announced his plan to travel around the eastern part of the US while going to some cons, and I saw that his itinerary passed through Philadelphia, I hollered out for him to come and stay with us for a bit and give me an excuse to host a housefilk in Philadelphia, while also giving me and my family a target date for making the house presentable.

I kept a log on my PDA of the songs that people were singing. By fleshing it out with some more description, I hope I have produced something a little more interesting than just that.

4:10 pm. Jeremy and I return from an ice run and find a passel of filkers just arrived.

Shmoozing, setting up, settling in. Setting out the food. Rene has been planning and shopping and cooking for days. We have tea sandwiches: sandwiches made on thin 3-inch-square slices of bread and cut in half diagonally, lots of them, so people can take a little or a lot and vary their intake (butter, cream cheese with veggies, cream cheese with smoked salmon, tuna salad, egg salad ...); these are mostly for dinner, but people may be hungry so we bring them out now. We have iced tea. We have lemonade. We have hot tea.

Rachel has brought a large tray of a killer combination of... let's see, was it toffee and chocolate and... oh, well, it was tough to get out of the tray but it sure was worth it! Someone else (sorry!) has brought some very fine chocolate bars. Merav has brought a large bundle of her own eats because she has a bunch of food sensitivities and also keeps kosher, more strictly than we do. She says, apologetically, "I have to ask if any of the food contains tomatoes or potatoes." ("You say...") I refer her to Rene, who says, "I got confused and left out a couple of the ingredients that we can add later, including the tomato for the soup. If Merav is okay with bean soup I'll hold some out for her without tomato." Merav is indeed okay with bean soup. That's lucky.

IOU //// [That's a tally of puns I made after I ran out of change for my Interfilk pun fine can.]

In Attendance, Entering And Leaving At Various Times

Notes

The singing

[As singing starts I am restringing Lady Epiphany, my Epiphone guitar, which I meant to do last night. I have promised to lend her to Chris for the evening].

Cat Songs and Otherwise

=== === Supper === ===

We bring out the rest of the sandwiches. And in addition... We have bean soup made from scratch, with cilantro and sour cream to add to taste. We have cheese tortellini. We have green salad. We have scones. We have cakes and cookies, including some that Chris bought for the event when we went shopping. Fruit, berries...

Self-Referential Songs

Drinking Songs, Mostly

Dune

Child Ballad Filks

(Some time around here Rene's cousin, who lives nearby in Upper Darby, comes in the door, gawks, and exclaims "There are twelve people here who are just like Mark!" [Ten, but who's counting?] She and Rene go upstairs and chat.)

(puchpa'Daq chachHey. -- That's Klingon for "an apparent emergency in the bathroom". I'm called away from the singing by what sounds like a desperate cry from Rene upstairs. But what threatened to be a plumbing emergency turns out all right; she got it reconnected.)

As the light in the attic fades we talk for a while. Then:

Aftermath (or, Miscalculations)

Jon and Merav are staying overnight. We set up the queen-size sofa-bed. Frantic last-minute search for linens:

"The box labeled Linens doesn't have the right size!"
"Try Jeremy's room."
"Where did you say the pillows were?"
"In the guest room."
"That's what I was afraid of. I didn't think of it before, and Chris has gone to sleep.... Oh, there's an extra in Jeremy's room."
"I must have miscounted."
"That's lucky."

In the morning, breakfast. Eyal, who stayed at a hotel, comes back to pick up Jon and Merav and drive them home to Jersey City on his way home to Westchester.

And it's all done but the cleaning up. That was GOOOOOOD!

Now, the next one.... won't be for a while. There's Confluence and there's Worldcon. Maybe in the Fall. Yeah.

2004-07-12; last revised 2007-05-05