So this weekend I joined the ranks of the SMOFs at SMOFCon in Austin.
(For the uninitiated, a SMOF is a Secret Master of Fandom, also known as The People Who Run the Big International Conventions)
Lots of WorldCon people were there, including reps for all the current bids. Also got together with lots of Texas conrunners.

Austin was great - beautiful, and full of delicious food. Our hotel was right on Sixth Street downtown and we walked all over on our long meal breaks.  And there was plenty of socializing in the atrium, too.
I went to some great panels and a couple of moderated discussions, so it did feel like it was worth the price of admission.

The drive up to Austin was crazy but uneventful.  SUVs spent ridiculous amounts of time driving dangerously close together at speeds exceeding 70 MPH in snow flurries.  Gah! While I was gone the ancestral homestead got a couple of inches of actual snow - the banana tree was apparently totally blanketed in white. 
On the way home, I drove into a driving rainstorm, so it was actually worse than the snow. The visibility got so low I could barely make out the traffic. Thank goodness it didn't get that bad until I was in familiar surroundings.

It's me, doing things and having culture and stuff!
that is the entrance to Jones Hall from the underground parking garage that spans the underbelly of the entire Theater District. Cool art, for an underground lair. :D

Brahms was excellent. Mahler was odd. It was a great night.

Tonight I went to one of the many Amazing Faiths Dinner Dialogues around Houston, and it was actually pretty awesome. I was kind of conflicted about actually going, but it ended up being really powerful and lovely.

Perhaps this will be a catalyst to get me to be more active in spiritual life here.

This evening the lovely alisanne was in town, so we met up for dinner and tea and much chatter of fandom and other topics.  It was quite a nice time. 
Now I must prepare for my weekend adventure in Austin, plus try to make some progress on my art coming due.

Long day at the polls, but relatively easy, too. It was a lovely space this time, and fabulous weather, and I got to do some writing planning, plus watched some Merlin.

This is the piece I did in the studio art class that just finished up today. She's a new incarnation of Sofia the Clockwork Engineer, and I think that this version of her is a character in the story I'm writing.


This is the 2009 Heritage Society Quilt Committee offering, called "The View from My Hammock". My mom did five, count 'em, five of the squares. Mom is awesome. I got a credit because I did some drafting and designing. I did not sew any of this quilt, though!

Ok, I'm leaving for the polling place where I will be spending all day Election Clerking. With no internet.  Woe.
See you all late tonight.

It was a perfect day for an air show - cool, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. There were some great performances, some fun airplanes to ogle, and it was an opportunity to hang out with my dad and my brother.
Despite the increasing jingoism inherent in the relentless drumming of the military recruitment message, it was a very nice day. The flying was awesome, breeze was refreshing, and we had a pretty great place to sit.





Flickr Set - this year starts here.

More from the Quilt Show:


Special highlights of interest to vermilionsun and shogunsquirrel under the cut. Hee. :)

( photos )

International Quilt Festival, Day 1:

Totally awesome!
I blew half my festival budget on amber jewelry, but the highlight of the show was still the quilts.

This one is pieced, not painted - I swear.  It's huge, taller than I am, and gorgeous in person. "Medea Escaping". 
My flickr set for the show includes the card for this one, and some detail shots.

Mom and Dad and I went to this tonight:
The Jung Center of Houston: The Soul of Houston -- Blues Stories:

The Soul of Houston: Blues Stories

Following our successful spring conference, this free lecture series, hosted by Houston author Roger Wood, continues to explore the hidden, unexplored soul of our community by focusing on the music and fascinating life stories of three Houston blues legends.

... and it was awesome. 
Texas Johnny Brown was born in 1928 and is still going strong, playing blues and telling stories about his life inside the music. It was amazing.
And then afterwards Mom talked to him over coffee while he was signing CDs, and Dad regaled some of the Blues Society folks with a tale of the Beatles' visit to Houston, when they were mobbed by crazy fans. They never came back to Texas after that.  ;)
Anyway, it was a really nice time, and I just fell in love with the Jung Center. Why have I not been taking crazy amounts of classes there and hitting their lecture circuit since I moved back?  It makes me want to go back and re-examine Pacifica's graduate programs in Depth Psychology and Mythology, too. Mmm, myth.

There are two more Wednesdays of Blues programs, we're planning to go to those, too.

Friday night the parental units and I descended upon one of Houston's dens of indie rock, Fitzgerald's, to see the debut of Peter's new band, CommieHilfiger. Yes, it's satire. They were hilarious and loud and awesome. And they did a synchronized dance number. Win!

In case anybody didn't know, this weekend is Houston's awesome fantastic superriffic science fiction, fantasy, and horror convention -

ApolloCon!

Yay! It's a fun place to hang out!

And I really must remember to carry my camera around, and occasionally actually use it. :)

This week we started experimenting with the printing press at the Art League, using clear acetate and watercolor paper.


And after I did my run on the press, I didn't feel inspired to add watercolor to the pieces so I did a new one.

Two events today with my parents:

The 2009 Art Car Parade was wonderful, but very very hot.  There was a great little breeze that eased it occasionally, but it was really just hot. The cars were fantastic, our neighbors were great, and it was a fun time. Behold, the two bunny slipper cars:

See more (to the tune of almost 300 photos!) at my Flickr Set.

And Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul at the MFAH. This exhibit was so moving, I almost cried several times, and I definitely went into paroxysms of joy over several pieces.  Not just the photos and stories about the war-torn land full of archaeological excavations that have been abandoned (and the Bamiyan Buddhas, damn), but the glorious artifacts themselves - amazing and beautiful works the like of which I have very rarely seen.
One Roman medallion in particular made me go back for second and third looks, it was so delicately beautiful, a tiny infant Eros with the most beatific expression, embracing a butterfly Psyche.  And three ivory table legs in the shape of voluptuous and elaborately dressed Indian women. And the most amazing thing of all, a drinking vessel of Roman glass, painting with figures in inks that retained all the brightness and cartoon-vividness of a souvenir McDonald's glass, I swear. Unbelievable. Then came the room full of burial gold from nomads of the Steppes, and my art inspiration just went into overdrive. I may have to spend some quality time with some textile history books to envision the full beauty of the garb they must have worn.
It is incredible what was saved, and just imagining the scope of things that must have been lost, whether to looting or destruction, boggles the mind. The exhibit holds a tragedy and a miracle all in one, and I highly recommend that everyone who can get to it go see it. It'll be in Houston for another week, and opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June.

On the list for tomorrow: IKEA and Star Trek.

Home from InstaCon!
Technically programming ended at 2pm (my panel was one of the last of the day), but then the ApolloConCom meeting was at 3 and that always lasts a while when everybody shows up for break-outs. So we all were there until almost 6, and then several of us went for dinner (steak!) and some informal post-mortem on the event.
It was a really good day, on the whole.
My stomach behaved really well the whole weekend (we have an excellent, unbelievably wonderful Con Suite team, who keep us in healthy alternatives and had good protein. Yay.), right up until that dang chain steakhouse dinner.  Doh.  Wish I knew what had set it off exactly, and whether or not my leftovers will just engender a repeat performance.

But now I'm very tired, so I think I'll go read more of Graceling by Kristin Cashore, a fascinating fantasy novel that is really keeping my attention, until I collapse into the sleep of the cheerfully tired. :)

I think the Blog Every Day in April brigade probably had something more pithy in mind for entries, but I've got every day so far covered, I may as well go for the gold. Right? Here, have a funny family story.

So down by the grocery store my parents shop at is this gigantic cross looming over the freeway interchange.  Seriously, a gigantic cross. It lights up at night.  It is obnoxious.
And apparently it and some other megachurches and various schools do get some graffiti every so often. Apparently somebody spray-painted a Star of David on one of the big crosses as an act of protest.  I'm not sure what they were protesting, or what they wanted to accomplish, but nevertheless...
So as we were driving by the other day on our various errands, Mom wonders about the sort of graffiti an atheist might put on a big giant obnoxious light-up cross that suddenly sprouted across the freeway from the grocery store.
Naturally, I proposed that an atheist would post an equation.
That got us started on what sort of equation it should be.  Mom wanted to put a²+b²=c² but I objected that it didn't actually mean anything without an explanation of a, b, and c, so then we had a conversation about defined variables and constants and E=mc². And then Dad wanted something more interesting than E=mc² so I said, "Hey, I have a song with an equation in it!" and played Jonathan Coulton's Mandelbrot Set. Except they didn't realize that the equation was in the lyrics, so it was an exercise in hilarity. And that equation does have a heckuva lot of explanatory text.  Hard to spray-paint, you know, which was the (theoretical) point of the exercise. 
I think actually mom's idea would work perfectly well if she accompanied it with a labeled drawing of a triangle. 

(Disclaimer: This post not actually meant to encourage or condone graffiti on religious or other buildings. Can't we all just get along, and paint murals or something?)

Severe Thunderstorm Watch all morning today! (The kind that warns of hail!)
The movers are coming at 10:30! 
Whee! 

The kids are playing Rock Band in their room, the dog is stretched out at my feet, and I have had my morning tea.
I should go load my car.

Fun Fun Times!

Happy Pi Day!

Last night I went to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm, of whom I had never really heard before last summer, nor ever seen perform, whether on youtube or live.  It was a really fantastic performance with lots of humor and audience interaction. Paul and Storm's opening show had me falling over laughing. Jonathan broke a string on his guitar in the first song, then later discovered his mouth harp was in the frame backwards. It being Friday the 13th, he joked, of course things went a bit awry. But none of that really interfered with the show, or the music. I could have done without the hair-flinging, loud-singing guy sitting one row down from me, but every concert-goer has crosses to bear, and as concerts go a hair-flinging, loud-singing obnoxious dude is better than drunken groping or being fallen on.
At one point near the end the entire balcony was doing Thriller-type zombie gesturing from their seats while shouting "All we want to do is eat your brains." Yeah. Nerds in groups. I should have taken photos. (The few I did take will be posted later, mostly of House of Blues itself.)
I went out with a party of six folks from the Houston SFF community, all active con-goers or organizers. We had dinner first with a few of them, then met at House of Blues downtown, where there were a bunch of other local nerds that folks in my party knew.  We ended up with seating right near each other in the balcony, oddly enough.
After the concert, we all went to a diner/coffeehouse on Westheimer and had food and drink and conversation until after midnight.  I did not get back to my car (I'd been ridesharing to avoid the downtown/midtown parking crunch) until 1:30 am. 
I haven't had a night out like that in quite some time, so it was pretty awesome.

Today I woke up at an ungodly hour to take care of my unruly stomach (it's pretty much a clockwork alarm all on its own - 6:25 am it wakes me without fail, just before my alarm.  I nibbled on a rice cracker and some orange juice and chatted with mom for a few minutes, then crashed again. I got up for real at about 11, and looked soberly at the packing I should be doing...  and turned away.
Instead, I cut some batting and the backing fabric for the quilt in progress, pinned it all together and trimmed it, and now I'm working on attaching the border pieces to the front before getting in there with the machine quilting.
Ideally I would like to have this finished in time to take it to New York at the end of April and present it to the recipients in person. I may not finish it before I move, but I'll definitely try to get as much done as possible before then, and keep the pieces in a separate box so I can find them pronto in the new place.

I just finished giving the kitchen floor a sweep and clean and mop, so I'm taking a sit-down break in front of a fan to type this up. My only minor angst today is that I really wanted to watch Ghostbusters while I did my sewing but I couldn't find the DVD.  I am pretty sure that I actually bought my own copy, but I could be mistaken. (Sorting out my stuff from the family stuff will be such fun!)  I put on The Last Unicorn  with Real Genius in the bullpen instead. 

Ok, and Dad just told me a joke he heard on Prairie Home Companion and I didn't know enough about music to get the pun in the punchline without clarification. FAIL.  :P   He needs to tell it to Peter.

I just signed the lease on my new apartment.
Home, sweet home.
Move-in TBD, sometime later this month.

Hey, does anybody local want to try to get tickets for Jonathan Coulton in concert with me on Friday the 13th?  (Of March, so that's two weeks from now!)
It's at House of Blues, if that matters.

I'd really like to go, and I haven't been to a live show of anything in a while, but I'd rather go with people.
(And I am pretty sure that I can legitimately use my zombies! tag here.)