Well.

Tim and Becca are on their way to Ashland to see plays and visit with his folks and sister. They'll be back sometime Tuesday afternoon/evening.

I'm on my own! And no work tonight or tomorrow either!

Chores are done. Tuna noodle casserole is in the oven. I bought triple-caramel-chunk ice cream.

If anybody wants me for something, I'll be in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles for the next few days :)

Viking Days wasn't a very big festival. But there were some booths with crafts, an encampment of Viking re-enactors, a replica longship, some food. We had a good time.

Even if, or especially because, Becca went all history snob on us because some of the ladies selling æbleskiver were wearing colorful aprons with cartoon frogs on them, and one of the booths was selling those toy plastic helmets with horns.

History snob! Yes! I said it!

Just like her father :)

The first thing we sold at the garage sale was a sword. That pretty well sums us up. Not a huge success of a day, but Becca unloaded a lot of her stuff -- the old X-Box, the old GameBoy, her electronic keyboard, assorted books and toys. Damn kid walked away with something like ninety bucks in her pocket.

Weather was nice, sunny and warm but pleasantly breezy. The back of the Sabledrakemobile is now packed with the computers that didn't sell, off to a place that accepts them. Everything else will be headed for the thrift stores.

Later, we watched PUSH at Becca's recommendation. It was better than many of our recent Family Movie Night choices, though Tim and I didn't find it had quite the level of awesomeness that Becca insisted. Some neat ideas, but muddled by a general lack of coherence as if it never could decide quite whose story it was telling. I later defined it as as being "one dog away from a Dean Koontz novel."

Then we watched FANBOYS. And oh-em-gee the hilarity! Every geek reading this (which, let's be fair, is probably most of you!) needs to see that movie. We were howling. If you liked GALAXY QUEST and GEORGE LUCAS IN LOVE, this is for you.

Today dawned cool and grey and cloudy. Then rumbling rolls of thunder and some big fat raindrops. Ahhh. Nice! In a while here, we're going to Viking Days at the Nordic Heritage Museum. More on that later!

Tim and I both come from what's probably quite a long line of packrats, and we passed the gene on to our daughter. As a result, we have a hard time throwing ANYTHING away. Ever. Even if we know full well we do not need it, will never have use of it.

We resolve now and again to try and do something about this. The occasional toy-purges of Becca's room, for instance. Clothes that no longer fit. Hauls of books dragged to the used bookstores. Yet the attic in particular has become more and more crammed with stuff. To the point that I at least have wondered on a few occasions how sturdy the living room ceiling is, and whether we'll just be sitting here some night and CRASH down it all comes.

For the past several years, we've intended to do something a bit larger-scale about that. There's an annual community garage sale in our neighborhood. Fairly massive and well-publicized. Thing is, the previous years it has always ended up scheduled some weekend when we already had other plans, big out-of-town type plans.

FINALLY. This year, it landed on the weekend before the out-of-town plans. Tim and Becca are driving down to Ashland NEXT week. So, tomorrow, we will be taking part in the community garage sale!

What this means is at the moment, our dining room is full of all the stuff hauled down from Becca's room and the attic. Good LORD!!!

So, if anybody's gonna be around the Everett area tomorrow and looking for old electronics, toys, books, and assorted I-don't-know-whatall, hey, drop on by. Say howdy. Take some of it off our hands.

Play your cards right, I may even throw in a grumpy old entitlement-brat of a grey tabby cat who has gotten so bold about taking what he wants that he yesterday filched a slice of bread RIGHT OUT OF THE TOASTER. The bastard.

Gamer geeks + booze and food + "Rapture's Voyage" = some party strangeness captured on video!

What, you might wonder, is "Rapture's Voyage"? As well you might ask! A bodice ripper game, a romance novel / choose your own adventure / RPG kind of thing.

No, really!



Here's a link!

And here's what went on:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Also, one of the guys, on a bet, stuck his face in the chocolate fountain:
See?

No video of the cleavage fondue, sorry.

The setting here, btw, is our dining room. Which is really a library and gaming room that happens to have a table in the middle where we sometimes gather for actual meals.

Converted over from dish to cable or something at home (tech-unsavvy Christine isn't clear on the details). So things were a little wonky there until Tim and Becca went out and got a new ... router?

Then, last night at work, the internet here conked out on me at 11:30 for no apparent reason. I don't THINK it was my fault, since I didn't do anything different, but I won't rule it out as a possibility. I could just be jinxed.

At any rate, all seems to be back in order now. Knock on wood!

Flag's out, house is clean, food is prepped, "fireworks" are bought (the dorky snappers and poppers, not the real goodies, which are illegal hereabouts!), people will begin arriving in a couple hours. And, I don't even have to work tonight! Whee!

Mollie Sugden, Mrs. Slocombe on Are You Being Served?, has passed away.

She was 86, and hardly an American icon, yet of the recent celebrity deaths in the news, this is the one that affected me the most.

Article here.

And it wasn't until reading it that I learned Wendy Richards (Miss Brahams) died earlier this year as well. I posted about John Inman a while back, but I missed that one.

Their table at that big canteen in the sky is filling up. :(

Well, as expected, The Mummy 3 basically sucked.

Fraser and the-guy-who-plays-Johnathan tried, but without hot-mostly-naked-Imhotep-guy and hot-tattooed-Bedouin-type-guy, with a Darren-on-Bewitched-esque substitute Evie who SOUNDED like Rachel Weiss but looked like Sara from CSI ... with the additional cast having only one character who was even halfway interesting ... pppllbbttt. Dud.

This is without even getting into the debacle that was the plot, story, script and effects. *eyeroll*

Not AS bad as some of our recent loser-doozies, granted. But nowhere near good, either.

Today's plan is to do some heavy cleaning around this place, bring in pizza for lunch, and then settle down to watch more of the second disc of Cranford. Which Becca finds dull, but Tim and I are really enjoying.

So, this year's Gathering is to be the last. Unless someone, someday, decides to revive the con and give it another whirl.

It's a sorrowful state of affairs. The end of an era that's spanned a lot of our lives. Brought people together. Seen some drift apart. An era that's watched a generation of kids grow from toddlers to teens. There've been marriages. There've been babies. There've been loves and fights and friendships.

I'm as much to blame as any for succumbing to the apathy that pervades the fandom, as well as the sense of disenheartenment among those who've been involved with organizing and putting on this thing year after year. I've been on con staff a few times and associated with it a few more. I have a pretty good idea of the stress, the struggle. The toll it can take, not just mentally and emotionally but physically, financially, and in every possible other way.

And I've seen the response. Sure, there are those out in the fandom who don't deserve to be tarred with this brush, but FFS the bellyachers and whiners tend to overshadow everyone else. I got fed up dealing with that long ago. Just not worth the effort of arguing with.

The dwindling of submissions and interest for the anthology was probably a key factor for me. Maybe I tried to stretch out too long. Maybe we should have ended it after the first three, maybe the fourth was a desperate grasp and this fifth, with its even narrower subject, was doomed from the get-go. It was always a labor of love. But at some point, the scales tipped more toward labor and less toward love.

We Morgans decided, some months ago, that we wouldn't be attending the Gathering this year. We'd been several times, occasionally just me, occasionally all three of us. It represented a big chunk of our vacation budget, both in terms of money and in terms of time off from work. A budget that we selfishly chose to put toward other things.

Toward saving up for our next cruise, and sending Becca to be an exchange student in Germany, and giving Tim a chance to attend that medieval conference (something HE wanted to do instead of it always being about ME for a change; he'll deny it but we all know it's true! :D).

The reasons for going really had little enough to do with the con itself. We wouldn't be going to attend panels, or try to make connections to break into the animation biz. We'd be going to spend time with friends ... but the friends we'd be wanting to spend time with would be the ones so busy with the con itself, for the most part, that we wouldn't be ABLE to.

Do we want to be there? Of course. Do we have a DUTY to be there? Maybe. But I wonder. A duty to what? To our friends? To the con? To the fandom itself?

I don't know. Ever since the disastrous collapse of my last game, I've been thinking a lot about reciprocity, about endeavors being worth the effort, about what I'm getting back from doing the things I do.

I'm a lazy, selfish bitch. When I reach a point of diminishing returns, when I'm not finding sufficient satisfaction, happiness, or enjoyment from something ... I start to wonder why I'm going to all the trouble.

Anyway. That's the haps. To my friends on the con staff, I love you wacky wonderful people. I'm sorry for not being more there for you. I drifted. And I understand completely if/why you're upset with me.

Middle school is over. They had an end-of-year assembly today and invited the parents of students who were being given awards. Which included Becca, for outstanding achievement in science. The bridging/graduation ceremony was Wednesday night and we went to that; she was among the nominees for (but didn't win) the citizenship and student of the year awards. In the yearbook, she was voted most likely to become a best-selling author. She had a great time at the dance, everyone loved her dress. Her yearbook is full of messages that attest to her rep as the local zombie expert.

After school today -- half-day, too -- she and I went out to the mall. Got her a graduation gift of some cool Hot Topic shades, and ice cream. Promised her an online budget for some other stuff since the store didn't have the shirt she was wanting. Then, tonight, we have a plan to combine her going to high school with Father's Day and use the gift card Tim's folks got us as an anniversary present, and have a celebratory dinner at Outback.

My baby's all growed up!

Here's Becca in the dress Lizzie made her for the middle school bridging dance, which will be this Wednesday. Then Friday's the last day ... next stop, high school!

These past few months I've been writing City of Heroes/Villains fics that involve a detective from the 1930s who's currently hanging his fedora in a version of Hell shamelessly pilfered from Edward Lee's Infernal trilogy.

It's been loads of fun, though it's also required a bit of research to get the lingo and style. The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life: Prohibition to WWII or whatever the exact title is (the book's not at hand at the moment). Stuff like that.

So, needless to say, this is the movie I'VE been looking forward to:



Depp as Dillinger.

Oh baby.

*swoon*

Yesterday, she got her contributor's copy of Dead Science, the anthology including her first sold (and first submitted, too, the precocious brat!) short story, "Better Living Through Chemistry." Just in time for her to take it to school and gloat over during the last week before summer break!

And her dress for the middle school graduation / dance is done! Tim's friend Lizzie made it for her. It is gothy, black and red, and fantastic! Pics will be posted soon. This afternoon, in an errand that the mere prospect thereof gives Tim a tic in his left eye, she and I will be going out shopping for stockings and a strapless bra! OMG!

Our girl. All grown up!

I guess since it was by executive order, I can't complain too much ... but oh his hair, his lovely thick black hair!



Now, are they going to be saving the shorn locks in little ziploc baggies and selling them on eBay or through the Colbert Nation store? That's what I want to know!

One of the drunks downstairs at detox got the bright idea to pull their fire alarm "to see if it really worked." Which, of course, set off everything up here too. WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP all the automatic doors close, and of course it took the folks downstairs forever to figure out how to shut it off. Impromptu fire drill. So then I had residents up, and annoyed, most of the night. But at least it wasn't one of ours who did it. And the headache eventually did go away ...

So, recently, Becca got interested in refitting her Nerf guns to make steampunky-style weapons. She's been sanding and painting, and planned to adorn them with gears and such. She and Tim had been on the lookout for old clocks they could dismantle, etc.

This weekend, I saw a thing in the paper for an "Artist's Garage Sale" that advertised supplies as well as finished art. And figured hey, it would be something to do, and maybe, who knows, maybe there'd be some gears or good stuff.

First booth we came to, guy had a whole box of assorted gears and springs, plus some other pocketwatches and funky old winders and metal bits. He sold us the lot for 12 bucks.

Can you say JACKPOT?

Check it out, folks, first look at the cover art for the upcoming zombieriffic anthology, The World is Dead!



Shambling your way soon from Permuted Press!

Having read the galley proofs, I can say with confidence that this one will be chock full o' post-zombie-apocalypse goodness.

And my story in it ain't bad either :)

But dang, all three of us get such a huge kick out of the summer show Wipeout! Had to download it since there's a dispute between our dish service provider and the network, so last night when Tim got home we had dinner and watched the two newest episodes.

It's just so hilariously badwrongfun! And we all laugh SO much. Family togetherness. That, and naughty British programming (So Graham Norton, Coupling), and of course our tradition of Cheesy Movie Night.

This poor kid. What are we doing to her? Yet yesterday, as she and I drove past one of the local churches with its little motivational/preachy/guilt-pitch signboard out front, it read DO YOU WANT YOUR CHILDREAN TO TURN OUT JUST LIKE YOU? (yes, it said "childrean" with an 'a') ... well, actually, kind of, yeah. Yeah, we do.

Good thing, because she's already on the way!

Early June and upper 80's ... here???

I know, I know.

Some of you live where it's been that since March and it's into the triple-digits by now, and dipping to under 80 has you scrambling for sweaters.

But we're not used to it. We whine. It's sunny. It's hot. Most of the folks around here have pasty translucent skin that bubbles and smokes upon direct exposure ... or at least glares blinding pale.

I also had a dentist appointment after work this morning. I could whine about that instead, except for a change my gums weren't as bad as they usually are.