Conflikt: Travel plans

Here's my itinerary for Conflikt:

    leave:  Alaska 339 SJC Thu 01-24 12:33 -> SEA 14:40	seat 23A
    return: Alaska 356 SEA Wed 01-30 17:45 -> SJC 19:54	seat 23A

... so I'll be getting in to Seattle at just before 3pm.

I'm going to be staying with cflute, et. al. in the Big Green Monster Thursday night, arriving at the hotel sometime Friday afternoon. I will also be there after the con, until sometime Wednesday afternoon.

Contact info in the next post upwhen, or see theStarport.org.

Grump

Nova (the fileserver) fell over on its nose while I was printing some business cards. No damned reason for it; top shows that the rasterizer hardly uses any resources at all. (That's no explanation for why it's so slow, especially when printing to the inkjet, but...) It handled backups just fine.

So it's either memory, or something weird on the MB (possibly involving writing the disk). In either case, I don't have time to track it down. Sometime between now and Wednesday I'll swap disks with Harmony (my workstation) and worry about building a new workstation when I get back from Conflikt. One more fscking expense I don't need...

In other news, my XO still hasn't arrived, and I got an email from them saying they didn't have my complete shipping address. More likely their cobbled-together software thinks that "suite 115" refers to a mailbox and not a connected set of offices. (I almost wrote "office suite", but that would be something else again.)

The Secret Garden

For, um, a very long time, we've had season tickets for the Lamplighters, a mostly Gilbert & Sullivan group in San Francisco. They're simply wonderful -- and they've won prizes. Today we went up to hear their production of The Secret Garden (book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, music by Lucy Simon, from the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett).

It was, quite simply, one of the top two or three pieces of musical theater I have ever seen. The music, in particular, was simply magical, and the singing and acting first-rate (as usual). The composer was in the audience; I was able to thank her personally after the performance.

There will be more performances, January 31 through February 3, at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. If you love musical theater and live within 150 miles or so of the Bay Area, you will regret it if you don't go see it.

 

I was simply blown away by this show. I came close to tears at a couple of points, especially the end of the second act; those of you who know this cynical old bear know how rare that is. I think a part of it was the way it touched themes of loss and grieving that I'm all too familiar with.

Did I mention that the chorus are all ghosts?

I found myself thinking of my own ghosts, a lot.

 

[You can read The Secret Garden on Project Gutenberg.]