The Mandelbear's Musings

Home Depot was supposed to have delivered the washer and dryer yesterday. They claim that the truck broke down, and that they will be delivering this morning. We'll see.

OVFF was wonderful, as usual. I even went to the closing jam, and had a great time, mainly because it was loud enough to cover up my many chord flubs. Also of note was Kristoph's guitar workshop, which was mostly about moving chord patterns up and down the neck. He told me that he'd learned about finding the melody in the chords from me, which left me slightly boggled. But... ok. Maybe I am pretty good.

Lots of fun with git yesterday and Friday, splitting up my Lyrics directory to leave only my own songs (plus a couple of PD arrangements) in it. In the process I wrote a Useful Script for making it look like files in subdirectories have always been there, so that their history is complete when you use git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter to make them into their own repositories.

The goal, of course, is to put my lyrics up on GitHub, the way several authors already do with books. It'll be fun.

Moderately productive at work. In part thanks to a nice new set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which they're paying for. (Wish I could afford my own set; they're pretty amazing. Though the noise isolating phones I have at home work pretty well, and are better for recording and mixing.)

More links in the notes.

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I'd originally wanted to clear this out a week ago, and do a separate post for OVFF. Well, ... not so much, I guess.

OVFF was very good. I went into it very concerned over leaving Colleen with Emmy for the weekend -- if I'd known when I made the reservations just where she was in her recovery, I wouldn't have. But she had a good time without me anyway, and the YD really outdid herself taking care of her and keeping her company. So I was able to relax and enjoy the con after all.

And it was a good con; I'd missed it a lot. As usual, I spent most of my time either in concerts, or talking to people. Met a couple of new ones, which is always nice.

Also as usual, I didn't have time to do nearly as much catching up and song-swapping as I wanted to. Not sure what can be done about that, except maybe trying to keep up my blogging.

We got a reasonable number of Trick or Treaters for Halloween, but still had a lot of candy left over for the party.

Quote of the week:

Colleen, as I was getting comfortable in bed beside her: Now you have your pussy.
Me: I'd rather have your pussy.
Curio: picked exactly that moment to pounce in between us. Perfect timing.

A few good links in the notes.

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Eeep!! A week is way too long to be playing catch-up. I haven't fallen behind on my reading, so my pants aren't bankrupt; I wonder what item of clothing corresponds to posting. Shirt, maybe.

I think that if you want the details, you'll have to slog through the notes. (Ugh!)

Most of the week was, of course, taken up by OVFF, which was wonderful even if I didn't win a Pegasus -- there are people I only see once or twice a year, and I did a lot of catching up. I even met a few new people. I only sang a handful of songs. That's ok.

MEW's concert was magical, with a stage full of backup musicians. Wow. And it was especially good to hear Duane Elms in concert after all the years he's been away from filk.

The netbook worked out OK; I only felt a need for more battery life a couple of times. The biggest problem was not having set up synchronization via git before I left. Next time.

I didn't end up paying up as much attention to my emotions as I intended to, but I don't think I noticed much anxiety interacting with people. The major insight is that most, if not all, of my problems in that area are due to low self-esteem, not social anxiety. It's not that I expect to be rejected; I expect to be ignored. Or perhaps that I set things up so that I'm more likely to be ignored, because that's easier to handle than rejection. Yeah. That.

I have a really hard time imagining that somebody might prefer talking to me to whatever they're doing at the moment.

The next week is likely to be busy. My boss cornered me late yesterday afternoon and said something like "You know that server project you've been working on that's due to be finished at the end of December? How about getting a simplified version going by the end of next week?" Right. Oddly enough, that's going to be pretty easy. But still...

I indeed missed my connecting flight; I'm stuck in Denver until 7:15, and will be arriving at OVFF sometime well after midnight.

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The day was mostly taken up with two shopping trips. The first was Fry's, where I found that, not surprisingly, the $89 1.5TB drive advertised in their flier had sold out by 11am on Friday. Got a couple of other useful items, made one more stop on the way home, and got home very low on blood sugar. It was, evidently, a good thing I hadn't gone for walkies first.

The YD wanted to bake; we sent her across the street for eggs. She came back with 5 dozen.

After lunch Colleen suggested a Costco run -- her first with the scooter. That was fun. I never did get a walk in, but we probably did a mile or so in the store. Go Rocket-Snail!

By the time we got back, the YD had made two dozen yummy, if slightly small, gluten-free cupcakes. I win. She also offered to make devilled eggs for dinner, if I boiled them. Colleen suggested making 2 dozen, which was probably excessive for three people. But pretty tasty.

I probably don't need to wonder why my triglycerides are too high.

We went for a drive in the evening; very pleasant. More conversation than usual.

An IM from pocketnaomi telling me that she simply can't make it to OVFF this year. She was afraid I'd be upset over losing my backup singer; I was much more concerned about how disappointed she is. She charged me with running the "Just Plain Folk" circle. Must remember to pack a copy of Rise Up Singing.

I am so ready for this last year to be over. Going by the Jewish calendar it already is; by the usual pagan one we'll be sending it out the door at out Halloween party. I'll take one of those, thanks.

This year's OVFF marked the first anniversary of the late-night conversation and song-swapping session with pocketnaomi (briefly mentioned here) that I think of as the first sign of the changes that eventually led to the River posts.

It was particularly appropriate, then, that she spent the con crashing in my room. It was something of an experiment, and a very successful one: I experienced much the same level of casual friendliness that's become familiar from years of sharing hotel rooms with my daughters. (Without arguments over who sleeps in which bed or what time curfew is -- a definite plus.)

The con was a good opportunity to re-connect with many of the friends I made last year, and to try to make a few new ones (though not as many as I would have liked). Few of my conversations got as deep as I would have liked them to, and there wasn't nearly enough time for all the conversations I wanted to have. *sigh*

I found it a little easier to start conversations with strangers, including three of my four airplane seatmates. Part of the trick, I think, is simply using my time better: I used to hang out on the edge of a conversation waiting for someone to notice me or for an opening to appear; it never worked and left me feeling left out. Now I try to stand or sit next to someone who isn't in a conversation. I'm still not very good at getting things started, but improving. Sharing a table at breakfast or dinner is always a good strategy.

 

On the negative side, just because I'm increasingly aware of things like body language, subtext, and tacit messages doesn't mean that I'm any damned good at either sending or interpreting them. In fact, it's probably worse: if I recognize but totally misread a message that I would have ignored a year ago, the results are at best highly embarassing. And in my little bear-like brain there's nothing worse than being embarassed. Similarly if I notice that I'd sent a totally unintended tacit message to someone I had no wish to offend. I spent quite a bit of time Sunday evening wondering whether I'd ever be any good at this whole "being human" thing.

I had one of each; no need to go into details on the first one. In the second case, yes, I really did want to finish a LJ post, which I was working on through an ssh connection, without having to worry about the battery dying and the connection dropping. It wasn't a rejection. There are lots of reasons why I'll leave a conversation: I might think it's over, I might have something that needs doing, or I might be feeling left out. I might even be bored, but that's rare, and never happened at OVFF. I'm afraid the person I'd been talking to thought I was rejecting her. Or something.

 

Public Service Announcements:

• You can't count on me to interpret your body language, tone of voice, or implied messages correctly, even if I sort-of notice that they're there. Use words, if at all possible.
• There's rarely, if ever, an unspoken subtext to anything I do. What you see me doing is what I'm doing, and I'll tell you why if you ask.

Many hugs and goodbyes this morning. Didn't sing even once in the Dead Dog, but there was a little hallway filk on the way back to the room at midnight, where I sang The River for quadrivium (who I particularly wanted to hear it because it's just crying out for a piano arrangement), weirdsister, sweetmusic_27, and others I've forgotten. Also had my hair and beard trimmed by the marvelous museinred.

All-in-all a very good convention: not much singing, but lots of great conversation and catching-up, and meeting a few new people (though I'm still not nearly as good at that as I'd like to be)

Met a fellow OVFF attendee in the Columbus airport, and had a great talk on the plane with Paul (last name forgotten, of course), an old folk music fan who'd spotted Plink in the airport.

Time to go, I think.

I think I'm going to do this in reverse chronological order:

Just got back from the Sunday evening expedition to BD's Mongolian Barbecue. Only had one serving, though I opted for the 2-bowl "unlimited" variety. Asked for tea and got iced with some kind of fruit mixed in. Sigh. OTOH, it has a huge variety of fixin's, and the conversation was fantastic.

Rode to BD's with joecoustic, continuing a conversation we'd started earlier in the con suite. We were joined by Kanef and Ben Newman, continuing a conversation on the computational linguistics of songwriting. Notable quote (about a bit of Smalltalk trivia I tossed into the mix) "You mean they implemented Boolean as a union of two unit classes? Cool." They did, and it is.

I'd found myself in the con suite because I'd been sent to deliver a message to Peter Alway; ended up in a good discussion on dulcimer. It's been like that all weekend -- the main reason I haven't been blogging much is that I've been spending most of my time (outside of concerts) talking to people.

Won a handsome gourd/guiro/rainstick in the Interfilk auction; it'll be interesting seeing how it fits into my luggage. I didn't mind bidding it up to $30 because I'd been lazy and hadn't brought anything to donate.

Caught the song contest and a couple of the morning two-fers.

Breakfast was interesting -- Came in by myself (through not immediately asking the two young ladies ahead of me in line if I could join them), but another table had already mentioned to the greeter that they were looking for more. They were all locals; the woman next to me was a children's librarian named Lin -- short for Linea. The series of coincidences was impressive: Mom is Lynn, short for Evelyn, and a (retired) librarian; the young lady whose wedding we attended last weekend was named Linea. Fun.

Table-hopped after breakfast, with conversations with musicahumana and Barry and Sally Childs-Helton, and the GOHs, stevieannie and micktim.

Saturday to follow, to prevent this from getting too long.

One place where location-aware computing would be really useful would be for setting the timezone on a laptop. Of course, in the absence of a GPS in the laptop, you'd need something like location passed in by DHCP.

And I wonder whether ssh passes timezone in the environment. Worth checking.

In other notes, ssh bandwidth between here and home sucks rocks. Seems OK to dreamhost.com; probably a routing problem.

Colleen's CAT scan (seems appropriate for a Cheshire Cat, doesn't it) a couple of weeks ago showed what appear to be cysts on her ovaries and kidneys. She's going in for an ultrasound this morning; it's being done by the oncologist herself, so she'll probably have preliminary results by the time I get to Dallas.

Wish her luck, please.

Once again it's way too close to a con, and I've done way too little to get ready. I can, at least, post my itinerary.

AA 1588 SJC Oct 23 10:10am -> DFW 03:30pm  27B
AA 3597 DFW Oct 23 05:30pm -> CMH 09:00pm  14B

AA 2249 CMH Oct 27 12:50pm -> DFW 02:25pm  26D
AA 1355 DFW Oct 27 05:30pm -> SJC 07:10pm  27B

You can find my cell phone number on the contact page at Grand Central Starport.