Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Last week I was up in Connecticut for work. It was a pretty good week despite a general lack of sleep, a pesky sinus badness and the craziness that comes from being around my coworkers. Well, the craziness isn’t exactly a drawback - that part is kind of fun. My boss was in town too and it was good to see her for a change. Things around/above me have just become rather fraught with politics, intrigue and all that lovely BS. Maybe I’m just noticing it now because I was onsite. I got back the first week of October to play more in the dark waters. For some reason, while I usually hate this, I’m vaguely amused and actually contemplating which cards to play when and to whom. This scares me.

I got home Thursday night. The flight actually arrived in PHL early. Freaky, I know! Friday I drove to an appointment and discovered that my car has completely lost all engine power and has become very very loud. I’ll be calling my mechanic back, haggling a bit probably, and also getting another quote on the repair. I also have a friend who could conceivably do the replacement for me, but if I can get it done nearby for cheaper, I don’t have to have him go out of his way. And if there’s something else wrong… well, I can re-evalute. For a while it looks like I am going to be without a vehicle. Handily, I don’t use my car much anyway so it’s only a minor pain.

I should go test drive new Subarus and Minis.

tags: car, connecticut, mini, subaru, travel, work, work politics

Driving back from a Dar Williams concert in Phoenixville we ended up going through Valley Forge.

We counted 42 deer hanging out near the road.

It’s good to be deer in Valley Forge. Not only do people not get to shoot at these deer, but the deer appear to be somewhat clueful enough not to jump out in front of a large vehicle. Or perhaps the smart deer were out feeding tonight…

I have the feeling 42 might be a low number of sightings too…

Dar did indeed rock, of course. I love her rambling.

tags: deer

There is a short set of photos from the Rapier Champions battle up on Flickr. By short I mean 59 photos. For those of you interested in paging through bout after bout, I exported a much larger set (259) and put it up on its own pages for your view pleasure. These photos haven’t been cropped or edited at all - something I will eventually get to with the shots I really like. But not now.

I want to thank everyone who wore sashes, capes, ribbons and other swooshy things - the photos are much more interesting when you can see that there was movement going on. Next tournament can I tie ribbons to all the fencers to make the photos even more fun? Pretty please?

Duncan’s bouts with Falling Down Woman start here. She drops her first sword here. Her dagger starts to fly here. If you start from the beginning and step through the whole set of bouts, it’s pretty entertaining. To me it looks like she’s always got her weight on the wrong foot (hence spending so much time on the ground). She does get one good shot in, but ultimately Duncan is victorious.

• Rapier Champions - full set
• Rapier champions - short set
• Other Pennsic XXXVI shots




• Ducan’s expressive fencing eyebrows
• Griffith chases that cute butt around the field - they were totally flirting…
• The Queen smooches Andre
• Um… are they dancing? - Pascual and Connor

tags: fencing, pennsic, pennsic xxxvi, photographs, photography, rapier champions, sca

It’s a gorgeous day outside - below 75 degrees, breezy, clear, and no significant humidity. Today is the kind of day I’d like to see be more the norm in the summer months. I slept a little better last night either due to the changing weather or the drink before bedtime. I still slept fitfully and woke up often, but I felt more rested when I woke up, so that’s something.

I am in the process of sorting through my Rapier Champions photos. I am trying to pare down a bit… I’ll put the highlights on Flickr and the full (but pared down) set somewhere else for you fencer types. Trust me, paring down this set is a good thing. I’ll work on it again tonight… hopefully it’ll be up by the weekend.

And now, back to work.

In case you missed this elsewhere: Librophiliac Love Letter: A compendium of beautiful libraries - almost too many beautiful photos of libraries in one place. (snagged from cat9)

tags: libraries, photography, sleep, weather

Happy birthday to my brother, Jon, who turns a remarkable age today! No more remarkable, perhaps, than any other year, but easier to remember.

tags: birthday, random

Labor Day Weekend was productive. I participated in the Sweat Shop of Dags and Red Fabric run by ownedbytwins Saturday and Sunday. Too many dags! It was a great time and many muffins were eaten! (And wine and mead and various other tasty things!) By the time we closed up shop, very early Monday morning, some of the guard uniforms were together and awaiting some finishing touches… er… re-engineering. Labor Day itself was spent recovering from the previous two long days of craziness.

Tuesday I turned off my IM software. It was awesome. It’s back on today, but a week without most of my personal IM stuff up and running was a great thing. (No offense to those of you who thought I’d died because I wasn’t on IM. You’ll have to figure out what my secret back-up IM account is.) The week was productive enough at work despite a large dose of stress and anxiety. I would rather get work done than deal with politics but sometimes the politics have other ideas. I survived, and the last punch of politics for the week was actually kind of polite so I was relieved going into the weekend.

Movies

Friday night we went to see Balls of Fury. We saw about 20 minutes of it before the film ate itself. The movie was actually kind of promising - silly but promising. We hung out another 20 minutes until the projectionist determined there was no fixing the film. We were sent across the hall to see 3:10 to Yuma which was just starting (and given free passes to boot).

3:10 to Yuma was great despite the fact that I was really in the mood for a silly movie. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are a great combination. Crowe, as the confident and carefree outlaw Ben Wade, never doubts that his gang will show up, free him, and kill everything standing around him in the process. Bale is a desperate rancher, Dan Evans, who’s agreed to escort Wade to the train station to put him on the prison train to Yuma. This is Evans’ last chance to save his farm, his family and rescue himself from the way his sons look at him. Wade spends most of the trip trying to convince Evans to give up and go home while he still can.

It’s a bleak movie. Evans is up against horrible odds only made worse by Wade’s casual disregard for the security escort he’s been provided. Wade is the most interesting character in the movie. Where Evans is honest and driven, Wade is calculating but laid back. He’s not an enigma - his motivations are always on the surface whether he’s trying to bribe or sweet talk. The true, chaotically evil, bad guy of this film is Charlie Prince, played by Ben Foster (whom you might recognize as Angel from the last X-men movie). With a blind devotion to Wade that borders on fanaticism, Charlie Prince hunts down and kills people throughout the movie. Charlie gets most of the great lines in the movie making for a remarkably quippy bleak movie.

Other movies from the past month:

• The Bourne Ultimatum - more action, less plot than the previous Bourne movies, but still a fun ride
• Hairspray - cute, fun, energetic and a total hoot (who can resist a dance number between John Travolta and Christopher Walken?)
• Stardust - a beautiful fairy tale that plunges us into a wonderful world and we will never look at Robert De Niro quite the same again

Other stuff
The rest of this weekend was an adventure in trying to sleep and trying to win the battle of the laundry. I have been rather insomniac this month so far despite eating properly and exercising more routinely. Laundry is on-going, as usual, but at least it’s mundane clothing now rather than Pennsic stuff. I made a lot of progress this weekend… I hope. For my next trick I’ll survive work this week. I’ve got a lot to get done and I’m relying on very busy people to get me what I need to succeed.

tags: 3:10 to yuma, balls of fury, bourne ultimatum, dags, entertainment, hairspray, im, laundry, movies, sca, sewing, sleep, stardust, weekend