Current mood:	tired
Current music:	"On the Road Again"

GaFilk


My carpool, Gerry and Sandy Tyra from Fort Worth, couldn't launch until
after Gerry got off work Thursday, so they knocked on my door around 1:30
a.m. Friday. I dozed on the recliner near the living room door from about 9
p.m., and had Sharon's room reconfigured into Guest Room status. With 10
hours of driving ahead of us on Friday, we hit our respective sacks
promptly.

With only three of us in the Expedition, there was a whole lot more footroom
than when there had been 6 on the OVFF trip a year ago. Sandy doesn't drive,
so Gerry and I traded off on that. Leaving Little Rock about 8 a.m., we got
to the hotel JUST in time to miss the obligatory singing of ALL the verses
of "Auld Lang Syne". Nobody lasted very late Friday, after the ConCom's Choice concert by Daniel & Melissa Glasser. We'd all been traveling too long.

GaFilk doesn't start anything on Saturday or Sunday before 11 a.m.
officially, but the dealer room manager, Michael Liebmann was letting
late-arriving dealers in to set up from 9 a.m. The Quilting Bee was to be
HQ'd IN the dealer room this year, which worked out MARVELOUSY. There was
plenty of table space, and I was able to set up a "production line" which
started at the fabric resources, moved to the cutting-out area, thence to
the ironing pad, and wound up at the sewing machines. Sally Kobee and I had
brought our BIG (zigzagging) machines and we would have had three, only
Brenda Sutton turned out to have left out the power cord from her machine
when she packed it. A wireless monitor piped the day's concerts in to us,
even.

Attendance was down significantly, including the absence of a six-pack of
hyperactive pre-teens who had run amok among the quilting supplies last
year. This was actually a good thing: I had time to assemble this year's
quilt much more fully, AND time to sign up for a slot in the "2x10"
concerts. Debbie-whose-last-name-i-can-never-remember was a HUGE help as
well, doing a majority of the blindstitching which is the choke-point in
this type of quilt assembly, since it has to be done by hand. Thanks to
last year's pre-teens, we started with 4 blocks left-out of last year's
quilt, so that made the top row of this year's.

I had cut batting for 20 blocks in addition to the 4 "seeds", so the design
target was a 4-wide/6 tall quilt. I had the last-minute brainstorm to bring
along a spare curtain made from a bedsheet, onto which the blocks could be
pinned as they were made, and the partially-complete quilt could be pinned
for display Saturday evening during the Interfilk auction. It also made it
very easy to bundle things up Sunday. There were a couple of blocks still
in-progress at the end of the convention; these folks have until the end of
January to get them to me for inclusion in THIS year's quilt. But I think we
will make the 24-block goal.

The "2x10" concerts are a series of slots for performers to sign up if they
have one or two songs that they want to particularly present, and I had a
couple: my "Great Speckled Bird" variant about the SpaceShipOne flight, and
"With His Sketchpad Underneath His Arm" by Bob Asprin, about the late Frank
Kelly Freas, the Grand Old Man of F&SF illustration, who had died just a few days earlier. I had also brought Kate Gladstone's "When Things Go Right" which she had posted on rec.music.filk just before the convention, but I'm not real practiced on Joe Haldeman's "The Ballad of Stan Long" which is the base-song, so I didn't risk it in the concerts. I DID do it a couple of times in the open filking, though.

The banquet at GaFilk has grown into a regular production number, beginning
at #4 with just Mary Crowell and the piano that came with the hotel
restaurant that year. The following year, she brought some backup
performers, and for the last couple of years there has been a proper jazz
combo serenading us. [ Mary, Jodi Krangle, Dave Rood, George and Theresa
Powell, and Brian Richardson] The food isn't too bad either. Besides jazz "standards" like "Stormy Weather" and "Fever", they have also worked up some filk songs just for a little variety. And Oh, are they dance-able! I even got out onto the floor a few times, with Sherman Dorn, Bill Sutton, and Joe Abbott (that I recall...). I wound up sitting next to Debbie Ohi, and got into a long explanatory
conversation about the Interfilk quilt and quilting in general. Debbie
claims no needlework skills, but she is an excellent cartoonist, and her
style would be very easy to translate into the 8" blocks we use. We traded
email addys.

After the banquet came the Interfilk auction and the drawing for the quilt.
The quilt raffle raised $198, and Kathleen Sloan won it (for the second
time: she won two years ago but gave it away to Jan DiMasi who was battling
cancer at the time). Kathleen says she's keeping this one, but that won't
stop her from buying tickets each year, and if she wins again she'll find
somebody deserving to give it away to.

After THAT, the filking went wide open again, and I wandered through a
couple of rooms during the course of the evening. Finally crashed about 3
a.m. (Atlanta time). Sunday contained a lot of setting-around-and-visiting.
Debbie Ohi came by and we paged through my quilting scrapbook, which I had
brought along because its got all the previous Interfilk quilts in it. A
couple more quilt blocks got finished and pinned into place, and the
quilting supplies got packed and loaded into the Expedition, and I bought
some "quilting bee" earring charms from Lee Billings, and some CD's from
Juanita Coulson and some books from Larry Smith. After supper (TexMex across
the street with Lee, Joe, and [okay; i've lost his name: ask Lee] from
Ohio, we set and visited and sang some more. Those of us with long drives
home bailed out around 11 p.m.

That TexMex supper I had turned into some overnight gastric upset which was
mega-sleep-disrupting, so we revised our original travel plans and Gerry
drove as far as Birmingham while I caught up on sleep. After that, though I
drove almost the whole way back to Little Rock. Gerry had to be at work on
Tuesday, so he was going to have to drive on to Fort Worth after unloading
me. There was a small adventure along the way: Gerry and Sandy detected some
dripping liquid underneath the Expedition when we stopped for gas at
Birmingham. It appeared to be engine coolant, so Gerry topped up that
reservoir and we drove on cautiously, watching the gauges and keeping an eye
out for a Ford dealership. We found one at Jasper, just north of Argo, and
pulled into the service bay. Gerry described the symptoms, and the
dispatcher warned us it might be as much as an hour before they could even
look at it.

We decided to sit and wait. I quilted on a small project, Sandy dozed, and
Gerry decided that since he was a captive audience he might as well go look
at what-all was New and Wonderful on the lot. Presently he came back and
announced that he had just tried on a small SUV that looked a lot like an
Expedition that had got shrunk in the wash: the Escape. This is the one
which will be offered in a hybrid-engine version by the end of the year, so
I trailed along for a look myself. Gerry is as tall as Morris, and he had
reported plenty of head-clearance, though just barely enough knee room when
he sat in the driver's seat. I didn't try the rear passenger seat, but
looked into the back end. From that angle, it resembles the Subaru Forester
rather strongly: almost back down to being a station wagon, but standing a
bit taller. The diagnosis on the Expedition came back: not engine coolant,
but transmission fluid was what had been leaking. They had the seals to stop
the leaking, and that would get the Expy home to Texas where Gerry's regular
mechanic could check it over.

We mused some about the tendency for the Expedition to get into expensive
adventures when I'm riding with them. This one had not been quite as radical
as meeting an 8-point buck nearly head-on at 1 a.m., though.

We wound up only being delayed at Jasper by a total of an hour and a half,
and Gerry wanted to take the wheel for a bit in the wake of the repairs
which had been done, so he drove on out of Alabama, until we spotted a
lunch-options display at Fulton MS. The Pizza Hut's lunch buffet was just
closing, and we made suitable inroads on it. Then we took off again, with me
driving. We got to Little Rock about 6:30, pumped gas, hit a bank ATM
machine followed by a Subway storefront, and finally wound up at the
apartment. We ate, we unloaded me, Gerry and Sandy availed themselves of the
plumbing, then hugs all around and they were on their way west-and-south.