Of Filk, Food, and Fabric

[mdlbear]

It's been a few days, so I guess I'll start with the Starport open house Wednesday evening. One of the two Dutch filkers staying with some friends of ours (they were out here mainly for Worldcon; no idea what their connection with Carole and Bill is) came over; between her, me, Heather Stern and Tom Digby there was a fair amount of filking going on. Not to mention the stack of CDs I bought at Worldcon.

Today the flower_cat and I went up to San Francisco, ostensibly to pick up the skull buttons she'd put on hold at Britex. (She'd found some black fabric with skulls and roses on it, which she wants to make into a shirt for me. But it needed buttons. One thing leads to another...) So at about 10am we left a note for the kids (I'd tried to tell them, but they were still unconscious) and headed up to Union Square.

Of course, one can't go into a fabric store and just buy a dozen buttons. The Cat was attacked by a 3-yard remnant of purple-and-black swimsuit material, which just barely fit inside her budget for the trip. At that point we were getting distinctly hungry, and Chinatown is only a couple of blocks away.

The place we found was the Cathay House, a mostly-Cantonese place with a great view at the corner of Grant and California. Had a pretty good hot-and-sour soup (not quite sour enough for the Cat, but there was vinegar at the table), three-mushroom scallops, and beef with satay sauce. The "satay" was mild and the peanuts barely detectable, but after all this is a Cantonese place, not Indonesian. Service a little slow, but on the whole tasty and very different from the places we usually eat at.

So now I'm back at home, about to get back to work on the recording I made of my Worldcon concert. It's split into .wav files at this point, so the current project is writing the Makefile template to generate the .oggs and push them up to the website. Which will make the next concert I record much easier to process.