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Friday, September 5th, 2008
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9:17 am
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Hee hee hee, so my bus to work (well, one of the buses I take to work, it's a long commute) has a new driver this week! He's actually a driver I knew already, because he was a regular on the 99. I remembered him because he's incurably cheerful and will yell out "ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE!" and "YEEHAW!!!" at random while he's driving. He must be very senior in the company - drivers get to pick routes & shifts according to seniority, and the 99 is a popular one because the route is simple, the buses are new, and you don't have to check fares. But the REALLY senior drivers pick nice quiet suburban routes on daytime shifts where they pick up mainly old ladies, never have busy traffic, and never have to eject drunks. Hence this fellow's switch to my sleepy Burnaby route, I expect. Now there is one pitfall to these sleepy suburban routes. They do not go in a straight line. There are just a few routes to cover a large, diffuse suburban zone, so they weave and twist on a crazy drunkard's walk, taking 5 times as long to get anywhere as a car does but ensuring that everyone has a bus route within 6 or 8 blocks of their house.
SO ANYWAY, he has been getting lost on his new route in a different way every day so far! It's HILARIOUS. The first couple days he was missing turns, realizing his error when everyone on the bus goes "HEY!" and then taking 10 minutes to try to find his way back on to the route - there are lots of blocked intersections and traffic calming devices, so this is not a simple task. Today he has graduated to making gratuitous turns - he cheerfully turned on to a major road and pulled up to the bus stop, where the puzzled people waiting there said "Uh.. you don't stop here." We got an awesome scenic tour of queen's park while he wound around looking for the route again. I assume he's been getting lost in many more ways than I know about, because I only catch one ride a day on his shift, and if he's still getting lost on day 3, well, he just hasn't exhausted the possibilities yet. It makes me sort of sad to think that he'll get used to the route and stop getting us lost soon.
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It's FRIDAY! I'm all excited because tonight Dr. Filk is coming over and then we'll ride Marge the Barge down to Seattle-town for more recording at Monkey Brains Studios. Well hopefully tonight. Dr. Filk's job right now is Flag Sergeant McPylon (theme song: "Oh god, take me away from the land of the traffic cones") and when you show up for work you just don't know when they'll let you go. 3pm? 8pm? It's a MYSTERY! Normally I like mysteries, but this one is kind of boring and unpleasant. So we might be taking off Stupidly Early tomorrow morning instead, alas.
But YAY RECORDING! The tiny homunculus in my head is running around in circles and looking for good party hats, because recording is FUN.
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Today's ASL sign is SAFETY GLASSES, which I've been meaning to learn since I picked up DISSECTION last week. Well, GLASSES + PROTECTION. I need to learn some more verbs and well, some grammar period. I know enough words to put together sentences, at least, surreal sentences about mad science, but I suspect what I say looks like weird baby talk. Someone told me the grammar is basically like french, which helps me decide word order, but I miss all the little connecting words french has, so there has to be a lot more to it than that to make things clear. I wish there were casual courses around here; all the ASL courses seem to be either full-time career-track courses for people who want to be interpreters, or 2-hour workshops where you learn animal names and how to say please and thank you, which is fine but doesn't help my goal of being able to torment heroes with my EVIL PLANS while the buzzsaw hooked up to my laser-garlic canon creeps ever closer to split their head like a coconut. (The buzzsaw is very loud, so ASL is perfect!) Well, maybe one day I'll hire an interpreter for private lessons or something.
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| Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
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1:04 am
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| Sunday, August 31st, 2008
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1:57 pm
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So, the 2008 Pegasus Ballot is out. And I'm on it TWICE! HOLY CRAP! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
ENTERTAININGLY, I am up against my disturbing California clone sister ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cadhla in two categories! We will cover the earth in blood in our epic battle!!! Blood and gore sauce!!! Or, y'know, hugs or something.
Voting is open here, plus it has MP3 clips of all the nominees. There are some REALLY tough choices, oh man. It's a yummy ballot. Congratulations to everyone! Yay!
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For the non-filkers in the crowd, the Pegasus awards are sort of the Grammy awards of the filk community. Filkers all over the world nominate & vote on 'em, and the awards are given out in October at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, the biggest filk con of the year, and there's a big concert with all the nominees. I am so honoured to be nominated! So anyway: please please do not vote if I am the only filker you know! This one's for the filk community to pick. :)
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SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE!
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edited to add: They have about a minute of Wreck on the ballot site, but if you want to hear the whole thing, you can download it here. This is a track-in-progress from the recording John & I have been doing for our album at Tony's studio! It's not quite done, it doesn't have the mournful, tragical bass part yet, but I think it sounds pretty swank. :)
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| Thursday, August 28th, 2008
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1:22 pm
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| Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
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11:11 pm - What's! On! My! Camera!
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| Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
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5:28 pm - What's! On! My! Camera!
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Yay, I got a travel scrabble set today! I'm finally done grieving for the one I lost in Red Deer ten years ago.
I went back to physio today and wahh, I have lost range of motion in the last three weeks. I'm pretty bummed out about that, but more physio should help I hope.
To distract myself from my kneediness, I present: ( What's! On! My! Camera! )
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| Monday, August 25th, 2008
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7:32 pm
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Yay, it's the fake Brooke-weekend! I spent pretty much all day in bed; apparently my body is still trying to figure out what timezone this is.
My trip to Texas in September (for a 4-day specialty compounding course) has been changed to a trip to London, Ontario, ancestral homeland of Dr. Filk! (Who says it's a good place to be from, but doesn't visit much...) Less glamourous but probably less stinking hot too. I have a pretty dim grasp of where in Ontario all you FKO-sters live. Is anyone close to London who'd like to have dinner or something? I'll be there September 15, 16, 17, in case that's congenial for anyone. (That's a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; I get in late Sunday night and leave right after my course ends for the day on Thursday.) I'm really looking forward to the course! Compounding is the most mad-science-y part of my job.
New song on the website! Acacia. I'm very proud of the melody on this one. Actually the words too, but I expect they will sound somewhat nonsensical, 'cause they're about a book you haven't read. Yet.
Man, I was checking links for the website and had to fix up the link explaining what a banjola is, and ended up listening to sample recordings of the banjola on Gold Tone's website. I remember listening to these recordings over and over again in 2006, and falling in love with the sound and deciding to buy a banjola over the internet, never having seen one. Well I'm here to say that MY banjola sounds WAY BETTER than those recordings. Good ol' banjola, I love you so. You are one impulse internet purchase I have never, ever regretted.
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| Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
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4:59 pm
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I just bought a stuffed manatee. It's kind of ugly. Because it's a manatee. PEOPLE MAKE STUFFED MANATEES. In fact, stuffed manatees are so commonplace that I can buy one with an employee discount in my drug store. This... makes me happy. We also sell stuffed albino horses and stuffed goldfish. If we get any stuffed naked mole rats in stock I'm so buying one.
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12:36 pm
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Ohhh it's nice to be home, and even nice to be back at work. I missed my patients! It's very heartening to find out how many of my regulars noticed I was gone. A couple were worried that I had to have more surgery or something and have been relieved to find I was just lying around in Maui instead. I am SO SPOILED to get to work at this store. Our patients treat us like gold - it's like working in a small town, only I get to live in a big city too. The commute is SO worth it.
It's now, hmm, 3 and a half weeks since I stopped drinking coffee. I haven't slept well the last couple of days with all the travel, and I haven't had so much as a cup of tea, and I'm still REALLY PERKY all day at work. It's kind of creepy, actually. Well, if it wasn't actually giving me any energy then good riddance I suppose. It's funny - while I was a heavy coffee drinker I _loved_ the taste of coffee-flavoured chocolates. I hated them as a child. Now that I've stopped, they're gross again. I think there must still be a lot to learn about the effect of coffee in the body.
I took 300 photos while I was away! I'm still formatting them, and to relieve boredom I've been formatting them in random order (Whee! Crowjoy, why are you in Maui? Hey, look, WorldCon is full of rollercoasters!,) so I won't post any until I'm done with all of them. Maybe Sunday after work.
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| Friday, August 22nd, 2008
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7:24 am
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Back home! And on my way to work after a princely 4 hours of sleep, ugh. (WHY did I sign up for today's shift? I'm so stupid.) But in my own bed. In an unusual truce, the cats BOTH slept on my bed, staring at me suspiciously all night. Awww, they missed me.
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| Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
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12:14 pm
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No sunburn yet! I have been hiding out in the shade. I saw 2 geckos last night! Dad says they are everywhere and that he practically trips over them leaving the apartment, but I was pretty excited. Joe totally melted in to a puddle, only able to utter "Gecko! GECKO!" when we saw them. It's like when he sees tiny catfish.
So everyone with a mac can pick up a wifi signal no problem while my poor linux pc pouts and pouts and says DOES NOT COMPUTE and smoke comes out of its ears and Captain Kirk frees the people from their papier mache robot overlord. Alas! I have been borrowing one of the gleaming white macbooks everyone else in the family favours once a day so that I don't PERISH from internet withdrawal, a COMPLETELY REAL DANGER, but mostly I've been lying on the patio reading Charlie Stross (Saturn's Children; LOVE IT) and eating creamsicles.
Joe and I drove to Hana yesterday! Hahaha that was a disaster. The road to Hana is very pretty! It's also very, very twisty. We spent 7 hours in the car going 110 miles total roundtrip. I was so seasick from the drive. I had to close my eyes and lie down in the car on the way back to keep from emulating the Vomitron 3000. But it was very pretty. Blarfff!
Hee, oh man, so something like one car in 10 on the road here is a mustang convertible, because the rental car agencies are stuffed to the gills with them. That's what we're driving. WHY ARE THESE CARS POPULAR? There's no space inside (with my mum, 5'1" in the front and me, 5'3" in the back, we're squashed,) the trunk holds a postage stamp, there are only four seatbelts, they're bad on gas, they look kind of silly, and Joe says his 250cc clown-car motorcycle has more pickup. We found ourselves longing nostalgically for Marge the Barge, our faithful crapmotron car back home. Then we cracked up.
We celebrated mom's birthday yesterday, a day late. Happy birthday mumma! I remembered it was her birthday while I was waiting for my flight at Pearson, so I got her a $5 Dora the Explorer sticker activity book for her birthday. Oops. But it was a big hit, actually. We all have Dora the Explorer stickers on our computers now and Dad has been singing the Sac-a-dos, sac-a-dos! song.
The grocery stores here sell buckets of delicious marinated raw tuna and octopus! I have been stuffing my face with raw fish and american candy. I am considering eating a vegetable some time today. Hah! Okay no, but maybe another bowl of papaya with lime juice.
I'm watching my sister give everyone haircuts for the wedding. Except me, of course. I personally think my hair is getting unreasonably long and shaggy, like, it's almost a centimeter long, but she sneers at me. Aroo!
Tomorrow morning before the wedding we are going on a boat trip to Molokini for to snorkel our brains out. I am told that I might see a cuttlefish!!! I am trying not to get too excited in case I don't, but CUTTLEFISH!!!!!!!!! Even if I don't there should be lots of wiggly, garish fish. In any event this should assure me of getting my sunburn taken care of.
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| Sunday, August 17th, 2008
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7:51 pm
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In Maui! HAS A HUSBAND! Internet situation dire. (Jeez, no one leaves free wireless access points on the beach anymore?) Am tragically reduced to eating pineapples and lying in the sun instead of refreshing LJ. (I think you all know me well enough to know that this actually depresses me slightly...) If I don't find an internet cafe I might have to go snorkeling. Alas!
My banjola arrived here intact! This is noteworthy because they threw it on to the regular baggage carousel, first in line, so it went THUD! down the chute and then got schmucked by the heavy bags belonging to the other 339 passengers. I almost bowled over some poor little kid in my mad dash to haul it off the baggage carousel. Unbroken! It was MOIST inside, which made me VERY UNHAPPY, but now that it's dried out there is nothing obviously wrong. I owe my hard case a big kiss. A big dry kiss of moisture removal. My banjola wasn't that expensive and wouldn't be too hard to replace, but OOH IT'S MY BABY. It's funny how emotional you can get over a musical instrument. (absentmindedly strokes banjola tattoo.)
Okay I'm pushing my luck on this sketchy connection. Ta ta! I will report on my sunburn when I get home.
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| Saturday, August 16th, 2008
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7:00 pm
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I have landed in Toronto! I am in the FilKONtario hotel and man it's kind of weird being here without wearing a nametag. It's not weird at all to be lugging my banjola case through the halls, though. I had a wonderful train ride here. (Thanks for the ride to the station, miss Clare!) I sprung for business class and finally got a window seat (with no one next to me, which was good because oh man did I smell bad,) and the ride was all daylight. Going across the bridge to the Niagara station was just totally breathtaking. We waited quite a while at the border because someone had snuck a bag on to my car before I got on, apparently. The border guards exasperatedly quizzed everyone on the train about exactly which bags were theirs and then finally took the bag off to bag prison and let the train go an hour behind schedule. But we zipped along and made it across some canal just before it was going to... snap? raise? squirt? whatever canal locks do to trains, and got in to TO only about 45 minutes late. I was amused to find that the Amtrak staff were completely replaced with VIA staff as we crossed the border! The very chatty, very québecoise VIA conductor was a vast improvement over the Amtrak guy who took my tickets with earbuds in, talking loudly to his buddy on his cellphone. (Seriously, WHAT?) And hee, the main conductor's announcements in French were a lot longer than his announcements in English as he added a lot of humourous editorialization about the English script he was reading from. YOU FRISKY FRANCOPHONES YOU.
Today is my 5th wedding anniversary! I love you, my Joseph! To celebrate we are spending the night thousands of kilometers apart. Oops. But I will see him tomorrow. IN MAUI. WINNAR.
I finally opened my ASL dictionary yesterday, after lugging it across the continent. I learned to say dissect (very similar to autopsy,) whore (which sort of looks like wanker-woman,) and water. I also taught the 40-fest-izens how to say classy a few days ago: you hold an A-hand at your chin and then extend your index finger. Crowjoy promptly altered it to: hold an A-hand at your chin and then extend two fingers to make a K - this means KLASSY with a K. She had everyone there signing klassy at each other by the time I left. Bwahahaha.
Ooh, I totally have an icon specific to this hotel! That's me sound asleep on my banjola case at my first FKO 2 years ago.
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| Friday, August 15th, 2008
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6:50 pm
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It's Friday night and a bajillion digsters have shown up. Crowjoy whipped up an AMAZING feast and we are all sitting by candlelight stuffing our faces. Everyone has two nametags, one for each boob, one with their digs handle and one with their real name. The full moon shines on the flower arrangements we picked at a farm today. It's pretty sweet.
Last night I played a house concert here! The highlight for me was getting to sing my Dr. Breana song (Worm Herder) to Dr. Breana. Although playing Livejournal Shanty to an audience that had never heard it before (but are avid LJers) was pretty awesome too. I'm kind of bored of LJ shanty these days because I've played it SO MUCH and I had kind of forgotten how exciting it is to play it for a new crowd. Whee!
Tonight I am to sleep in the Zesterhorn Enterprises Van, which as of yesterday has a very comfortable couch bolted in to the back of it, lengthwise, instead of bench seats. Riding in the van on the couch, looking up at the circus paintjob and the neon pink fringe is like being in a hallucination of a limousine. Heart heart heart.
This is my last night here (one more campfire! I roasted strawberry marshmallows last night) and tomorrow I am off to Syracuse again, to catch the train to Toronto for a very brief Canadian booster shot. I get in to Toronto in the evening, stay over at the FKO hotel and then boot it to the airport early in the morning on Sunday to fly to Maui where I will at last get to see my sweetie. I am getting pretty homesick. I shouldn't go away from Joe for so long I think. But just 44 hours to go.
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| Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
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4:53 pm
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I am in Ithaca at Zesterhorn Enterprises! Dr. Breana just showed up and as the treasurer of the OMG DR. BREANA Fan Club I am INSIDE OUT WITH JOY. Currently a cockatoo is screaming at me while Sofia yells "Yee-haw!" and flips her pink cowboy hat in to the air. Ruby, excruciatingly polite, inquires if I have seen her hot pink parasol. A rooster walked over me earlier and I had a sudden craving for a chicken sandwich.
Oh man, when did I last post, Friday? Worldcon was fantabulous from start to finish. In the end I went to one (1) non-filk panel. So maybe I should just stick with filkcons, eh? But I met so many people who told me "that was my first exposure to filk! What else should I do?" and then I handed them a Conflikt flyer and a Concertino flyer. MUAHAHAHA YOU WILL ALL FALL UNDER OUR FILKLY DOMINION! Hmm, hmm, worldcon highlights:
- Seeing Andrew Ross do a concert! He is always so busy running things at Orycon that he never does a concert so it was such a treat to see him get the spotlight. Plus watching the faces of people who had never heard his Hamlet (by John Woo) song. Dang is that man a performer!
- The My Favourite Sings circle, in which Kathy Mar, temporarily appointed queen of the palace, commanded people to perform. She coaxed so many wonderful songs out of people, beautiful songs, funny songs, songs they hadn't played in 20 years, songs at all from People Who Don't Sing, oh, it was just a wonderful couple of hours.
- Meeting new people! I came to filk just a couple of years ago (but enthusiastically!) so I am still filling in the gaps as far as meeting people. I met Terence Chua and Paul... okay his last name can't be Snark. Estin? for the first time at Worldcon and was totally charmed by their songs. (And them!)
I have had very little sleep since I last posted. I stayed up through the all-night filksing on Saturday, of course. There were 17 people at breakfast! That's the most I've ever seen. I guess it was 15 if you don't count Char & Randy who cheated and had a nap. But still. Then we dashed off to the hotel to pack and then bused to the airport and very groggily checked in for our flights. Dr. Filk correctly checked in after only two tries; it took me three. BLeaugghhhgrghhhgh braiiinnnnssss. I got a sweet deal, though: they were going to charge me $40 for my "extra" bag, or I could upgrade to first class (including 2 free bags) for $50. I thought about that for, oh, 2 or 3 seconds.
OH MAN FIRST CLASS. They give you REAL FOOD. My salad had fresh blueberries and shaved parmesan. They gave me warm chocolate chip cookies from a cookie warmer. AIRPLANES HAVE COOKIE WARMERS AND THEY STILL SERVE YOU CARDBOARD IN COACH?! I am hoping I will forget about how nice first class was soon, otherwise my flights in coach are going to seem so awful from now on. Oops. I didn't really sleep on the plane at all, though, because they brought me a snack or a drink like every five minutes the whole way. Which I am not complaining about!
So I got in to chicago and took a cab to the train station. I wanted to take the public transit trains so hard! They come right to the airport and everything! But after worldcon my knee was cranky and I had my banjo case and a huge suitcase and alas, no. (Oh man, thank you Dr. Filk for carrying my banjola for me so much at Worldcon. I am such a bitch queen and I have no idea how I rate a wonderful friend like you. I assume you are being cosmically punished for your sins in the 70s or something.) I got a pretty nice view of the skyline and a lot of rusting industrial hulks from the cab, though. I like rusting industrial hulks. Train views have a lot of those too. The train station was kind of scary! I had lots of Helpful Gentlemen Without Red Caps offer to help me with my bags, but I fell for that in Vancouver once and once is my lifetime limit for baggage extortion, thank you. I got my ticket printed and tried to get my next two tickets printed too, only one of my reservations had disapppeared. Erk! I went to the ticket booth and they said "Oh, that's an illegal route! See, it only gives you 3 minutes to transfer trains." "But... the website suggested it!" "Uh." (pause for 5 minutes.) "Here, call our 1-800 number." So I did and they said "What? There's nothing wrong. Oh. Oops. Okay now try printing them." And then the tickets printed, so I can, in fact, get back to Canada. Yay! I have 3 minutes to transfer from the same train to itself, which I think I can manage.
Then Amy McFiddler showed up! Bearing a giant octopus and wearing robot trousers! Miss Amy is very excellent. We couldn't get on the same train so I waved goodbye and hopped on my train. No window seat, blast! But I was SO TRASHED that I spent most of the trip half-asleep in my seat. Although it took me two hours to figure out how to get the footrest up. But now I'm a pro. I got off at Sandusky at 2:00AM, and then got a taxi at 3 and took a nap until 5am when Amy showed up and then conked off until 9ish. Then we went to cedar point!!!!! We rode every spinning ride the joint had, fed cheese fries to seagulls, and played squee-ball. I took 85 pictures to induce jealousy in you all. Thank you for being a fantabulous tour guide, roller-coaster-girl!
I had a nap and then caught the 4:42 train out of town, which was actually the 5:32 train that day. (There is only one train a day out of Sandusky.) I was assigned a window seat, woohoo! But there was a woman already sitting in my seat, and she spent the whole ride softly swearing to herself so uh... I sat in the aisle seat and spent a lot of time in the dining car. I got in to Syracuse at about 13:00 and found Crowjoy and Chris waiting for me!!!!!! We toured Syracuse for a while with our native guide, Deadboy. We visited the Salt Museum! Friends, I am here to tell you that the life of the salt boiler is GRIM. Was grim. I don't think they have salt boilers anymore. Salt boilers that are humans anyway. I got my third wooden nickel of this trip so far: I have a gnome / buffalo nickel from denvention, and a dandelion/ship wooden token - Kathy gave out some of her beautiful specially made poker chip bardic chips to the folks who stayed up all night, a precious souvenir to be sure. And a salt museum nickel, although it doesn't say anything about salt on it. We went to get Sprout from the airport and then hit the road for Ithaca, home of Zesterhorn Enterprises!
So that was yesterday. I don't really remember anything that happened after I got here; I was SO tired. I slept 10 hours last night and have had 4 multi-hour naps (one in a hammock!) so far and now I feel sort of human-ish again. Yay!
Okay gotta go watch a toddler fashion show.
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