The Mandelbear's Musings

WE GOT THE HOUSE! It was really down to the wire; I think the underwriter got the last little detail confirmed with my bank on Friday morning, then closed at 11am. The realtor came by to drop off the keys at about 2:30, and I left Disney at about 3:30, having gotten my last bit of work signed off and my timecards put in.

Big sigh of relief.

Backing up to the previous weekend, I spent a lot of time at Consonance catching up with friends, doing a very little singing, and showing off pictures of the house while continuing to worry about whether we'd actually get it.

At Saturday's open filk I sang "Middle-Aged Bear" (it was a good follower to something else with a bear in it), and swan-songed on QV. Quite a few people didn't seem to have heard it before. Some of them looked kind of stunned, and Colleen sent a box of tissue around.

We discovered Saturday that Colleen's scooter charger had a broken wire in the connector -- I went to Fry's Sunday morning to get a battery-powered soldering iron and some assorted tools, including a nice little Gerber multitool with pliers.

Spent a lot of time Monday doing laundry. I'm pretty sure I don't have the stamina -- or the budget -- for flying to more than one con/year with Colleen. It's a much bigger production than going solo.

Tuesday through Thursday passed in something of a blur. Friday Naomi picked me up after work, with her kids, and we spent some time in the house. Our house.

Saturday involved a lot of driving, between getting three loads of stuff down to the house, taking Emmy down to Seatac for a Norwescon staff meeting, picking up her and Chaos afterwards, driving Colleen down... Susan made dinner for us, all very improvised, and Colleen and I, our kids, and Naomi spent our first night at Rainbow's End.

Colleen declared afterward that she wasn't spending another night there until it's all accessible -- that won't be for another month at least, when the stairlift gets installed.

More in the notes, as usual.

So that would be... two weeks and a day. OK, I've been busy. Starting a new job will do that. This is going to be totally disjointed.

It was also a pretty eventful couple of weeks. I didn't do nearly as much practicing as I'd wanted to, nor advertise my concert at Orycon, which was last Saturday. But it came off fairly well, considering. As of Saturday morning all I had was a stack of lyrics in no particular order, but I manage to string them together into a sequence that, I think, made a certain amount of sense. You can see the results here, though I haven't uploaded the audio yet.

I performed at Westercon, too, and I haven't uploaded that either. Yeah, I've been busy. But that busy? Especially before I got a job...

A lot of things got done that had been waiting too long. Colleen started getting back into cooking, which was (and is) a Good Thing. Not so much because it takes some of the burden off me and the YD, but because it makes her feel good.

Saturday before last, we (me, Colleen, and the YD) went down to the Wayward Coffeehouse for Leannan Sidhe's concert. Sunday before last we (me, Colleen, and Naomi) went to our new-job-celebration dinner at the Herb Farm. This time it was the "Mycologist's Dream" -- fabulous, as usual. I spent much of the time in between reading about Maven, which is the build system we're using at work.

This weekend we went down to Orycon. Drove down Friday night after work, and headed back a little after 2pm on Sunday. So a rather hectic and very tiring weekend, but we enjoyed it.

VOTE TOMORROW!

... and, well, more details below in the notes. Sorry about that.

Back in the early days of 2012 we decided to skip Baycon this year and go to Clockwork Alchemy. Best-laid plans? That was before we decided to move to Washington. So we day-tripped the 30th anniversary Baycon instead, to have a better opportunity to say goodbye to people.

Baycon doesn't seem to be in the best of shape. It's gotten noticably smaller over the last few years (we can perhaps blame the other cons in the area for some of that, but I don't think for all of it). I dropped Colleen off in the morning, did some shopping on the way home, worked at home for a while, then left for the con myself in late afternoon. Little to no daytime programming I was interested in; the few concerts didn't start until night-time. I stayed for the open filking on Saturday, but was thoroughly wiped out by the time I got back home.

So I only sang three songs over the weekend, and don't remember most of them. Bigger On the Inside was the last one. Tiny circle.

Some good conversations, though.

I mentioned shopping. REI is having a sale; I picked up an Agility Sling Bag and a Hood River hoodie. The Agility bag, whose name appears to be Angelique, is apparently a redesign of the Mini that I've been using since last year; it's a little shorter and more rectangular rather than tapered. This makes it much easier to get my netbook in and out -- it has a padded sleeve that it fits perfectly into. There's also a nice organizer panel. And it's almost exactly the same size as the Belkin computer bag, and fits perfectly inside Chami. And there are several different ways of attaching it on the outside, as well.

I toyed with the idea of getting a rolling duffle (Ross has 'em for cheap) for gigs, but realized that it would be too narrow to hold the music stand desks. I'll probably get a smaller duffle for use as a carry-on or secondary bag, because the Hartmann and Colleen's SwissGear are already allocated. I used the Hartmann on my last trip North, but could only get away with that because Colleen wasn't going.

Did I mention that I'm a luggage addict?

In other news, I set up phone interviews with Zillow and Tableau, and paid the security deposit on the new apartment.

I am going to be in Seattle from Thursday, 4/5 through Wednesday, 4/11. I'll be arriving at my hotel, the Coast Gateway sometime after 9pm Thursday, and leaving on the 7:30pm flight Wednesday.

Friday through Sunday I'll be at Norwescon, but since I'm not scheduled for anything I'll be available for conversations or phone interviews on a few minutes' notice.

Monday noonish through Wednesday afternoon I'll be looking at apartments and, and hopefully, going to job interviews. You can get to all my relevant information, including my resume, at stephen.savitzky.net.

I'll be going up again in early July for Westercon; I'll take a trip up before that if there are interviews to be had.

We expect to be moving up permanently sometime between July and September, most likely sometime in August.

It was a good con. Thursday I packed. The netbook sleeve I'd ordered over the weekend had arrived; it takes up *much* less space than the Belkin bag.

Friday, we got to the con hotel about 12:30. I quickly found out that the hotel's WiFi was among the worst I'd ever seen. It worked pretty well, though slowly, in the room, but was flaky in the lobby and unusable in the function space. Bletch. At least, because I'm an AT&T subscriber, I didn't have to pay for it.

My concert was at 7:30 on Friday evening; it went surprisingly well, and I got quite a few favorable comments on it. Including some on the way it flowed together -- I'd taken a page from Naomi and done a fully-scripted theme concert, on the subject of places and journeys. You can find the script and all but one song in the expected place.

I've gotten used to thinking of myself as a good songwriter; it still feels weird that some people consider me a good performer as well. I think what made the difference this time was that I was able to actually put some emotion into the songs. The occasional trainwreck probably went mostly unnoticed. Well, except for the lights going out one verse into my last song. That was just funny -- three people with flashlights lept onto the stage, and I simply started over. It was good.

I left two music stands in the concert room; they saw a lot of use over the course of the con.

After Friday, we ate most of our lunches and dinners over at Nijo Castle. Cold, raw fish. Yum. Some of the best sashimi I've ever tasted.

The (other) concerts were uniformly excellent. Most of them had Amy McFiddler in them. Everything is better with Amy in it. The Three (4) Weird Sisters' GOH concert was particularly spectacular. All of them were just on.

I'm not going to go into much detail; if you want that you can read the notes, as usual. I didn't take many notes about the concerts I went to, and I did very little singing in open filk. But, yeah. Good weekend.

A reasonably productive day. I did a lot of work on some of my older concerts (and posted about it). And went out with Colleen and the YD to get the latter a new laptop (an Acer which she has named "Starlight"). Colleen fell in love with one of the new, ultrathin ASUS lappies. I must admit it looks particularly yummy; it's also nearly $1k for the i5 version. More for the i7.

Dinner was pan-fried rock cod (with butter, black pepper, garlic, capers, and a little sake), brown rice, and asparagus. I like to cook, when I have the energy, and about the only way I get fish at home is to cook it myself. Or not cook it, if I decide to go for sashimi.

I also made my flight reservations for Norwescon. We're still trying to decide whether to fly or drive to Westercon.

A reasonably productive couple of days. I mostly spent Sunday puttering about, but I also got the Conflikt concert split up, and ready to post when I get permissions.

Next time I have to tell the sound crew that the guitar has a built-in preamp and wants a line in rather than an instrument input; it came out sounding rather fuzzy and overdriven. That also suggests that Lookingglass Folk can get away with only two mic preamps at gigs.

The phone picture has gotten more complicated; I hadn't realized that there are actually two different versions of the Samsung Galaxy II S. The newer one is more expensive, larger, and heavier, but talks LTE. There's also the upcoming Galaxy Note, which is more of a tiny tablet. You'll find a handy table below near the end of the notes. At the moment I'm leaning toward the HTC again.

I may have to consider smaller, older phones as well, because I like the fact that I can easily pull a slider phone out of my pocket and answer it one-handed. Or wait several months to see if any new ones turn up with ITC. Growf!

I skipped my walk on Sunday, but took a shorter one -- about a mile and a half -- yesterday. Very little hip pain, but I'm rather glad I decided not to push it. My weight has been edging up again, too. Growf!

Quite a few interesting links in the notes; mostly entertaining for once.

I'm not sure batching my posts is significantly less work, but I seem to have fallen into that mode by default. We'll see how it goes; comments welcome.

It's been a rough month this last weekend. The back pain I felt yesterday was only part of it. Yeah, more exercise would probably help. Time? Ha!

Let's see... paid my sales tax, G&S (wonderful!), not as much practice as I wanted needed, helping friends (and trying to provide emotional support, which Middle-Sized Bears can apparently do, but don't really know how they do), making travel and other logistical arrangements, a couple of arguments with the YD, who seems to dig in her heels at every request or suggestion I or Colleen makes), ...

I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted needed to. I can haz xtra hrs plz? The trouble with this planet is that it spins just too damned fast.

Plenty of links down there in the notes, plus bonus haiku (Friday) and some dream notes (Saturday).