Blink...

... so instead of taking the flower_cat's sensible advice around 4am, rolling over, putting on my facehugger, and going back to sleep, I decided to go for the snuggle. Seemed like a good idea at the time. So here I am reading LJ at some ridiculous hour in the morning after altogether too little sleep the first night of Baycon. Clever bear!

The Tres Gique concert last night went very well -- a couple of glitches, but I don't think the audience heard many of them. More on that later.

Baycon 2008: Tres Gique concert setlist

Rather than give this stupid Mac laptop a chance to eat my post again, I'm just going to post the songs with quick notes, and and post the "oficial" notes later when I have it uploaded and have some time on a machine I can actually type on.

1	Rocket Rider's Prayer
2	High Barratry I've taken to putting the explanation of Barratry after the first verse as a voiceover.
3	The World Inside the Crystal
4	The River
5	The Merry Man and his Maid
6	The Toolmakers We've added an instrumental verse. Bass flute love.
7	Ferret Went A-Courtin' Two-voice arrangement worked up by me and Joyce.
8	The Owl and the Pussycat This really sounds good with three voices.
9	Cryptographer's Anthem (Callie solo - whee!)
10	The Little Computing Machine
11	The Programmer's Alphabet
12	The Rambling Silver Rose
13	The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
14	Keep the Dream Alive
15	Ship of Stone

State of the Bear

No walkies today: grumble.

I should definitely have watered my nose sometime around lunchtime. I was in a hurry and didn't. Was very congested by the tine I finally did it, sometime around 7:30. Slight headache.

I do appear to still have my voice, and my throat isn't deteriorating; only very slight post-nasal drip.

Baycon: Friday

Friday of Baycon began with eggs and large quantities of excellent bacon for breakfast -- cflute seemed impressed that I remembered her preference for skillet over microwave. I explained that, while I don't have the flower_cat's memory for tastes, allergies, and ingredients, I do pretty well on processes.

We loaded up the Cat's van, and she and the Younger Daughter (home early from school) shipped out to the hotel. The chaoswolf and selkit headed off the bus stop at about the same time.

There followed a late morning and early afternoon of delightful catch-up conversation with cflute, punctuated by a trip out to Michael's and CommuKnity in an unsuccessful search for what turned out to be a Japanese braiding device. Many thanks to the woman at CommuKnity who positively ID'ed the device from the description, though I'd been pretty sure that's what it had to be based on descriptions I'd seen.

It seems Callie and I had a lot of catching up to do. Probably still do -- we really haven't had an extended conversation since, what? OSCon nearly two years ago? About right. My recent changes may have had something to do with it.

We'd planned on meeting the Ugglas for a rehearsal at 4pm, but they hadn't arrived by then, and cflute was tired, so she had a nap instead. We finally got it together around 7pm IIRC, and ran through most of the set -- at least enough on the older ones to make sure we were still solid and make last-minute adjustments.

We followed the Bohnhoffs (with vixyish), who set the bar pretty high, but I don't recall a mass exodus, so it must have gone OK. That's a bit of an understatement, actually -- we got some positive feedback from a few people in the audience, and I don't think the audience noticed the flubs. Probably wouldn't have noticed the biggest one at all if Callie hadn't called their attention to the fact that I'd left the capo off on "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of". But if that was the worst flub, we did pretty well.

Set list here

A little open filking, and turned in around 1:30.

What's that you're smoking? Incense is psychoactive

Incense is psychoactive: Scientists identify the biology behind the ceremony

Bethesda, MD—Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

(from this post by gmcdavid.)

Nomenclature

Note: (before I forget) The flower_cat's wheelchair has been officially named "Igor". The walker, when it arrives sometime next week, will be named "Johnny".