lizvogel

Cookies have been made. And believe me, coming up with cookies that fit the theme of "a dark and stormy night" that aren't all gray-to-black was an interesting challenge.

For my future reference:

3 batches of dough: 2 hours
making all of it* into cookies: ~5 hours
  plus about half an hour of setup
decorating: 5.5+3.0+4.0+6.0+8.0+5.5 = 32 hours
photographing & packing: ~1.5 hours

So about 41 hours total.

I only ended up decorating about half the cookies; fortunately, largely by chance, I started with the most thematic ones, so when I ran out of me, I could stop without much loss of effect. The rest will wait until I get back, and get done for the household. (These cookies last just short of forever.) Since membership's low this year, I'm hoping:

44 lightning bolts (3 sizes)
~60 clouds (3 sizes)
12 moons
39 candles
15 creepy houses
23 ravens

will prove to be plenty.

*I always make more dough than I need, because when I first started doing these, I would invariably burn several trays, and depending on the shapes, also break quite a few. But I've been getting better; this time I didn't burn a single one, and broke very very few. So there's an awful damn lot of cookies around here.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shout rang out.

"Registration is open!"

"Finally!" chorused the crowd of writers, musicians, and other story geeks, as they charged off to www.narrativity.fun to get their 2025 memberships!


Yes, reg is finally open. We're trying some fun new stuff for Thursday this year, plus the usual awesome people and intriguing panels. You know you want to....

Sweet Steam Confectionery Consortium Spicy Chocolate Hindenburn

It's a silver-gilt little dirigible. Made of chocolate. Who needs a Hugo award, I'll take this.

Where Bought: A gift at Narrativity. (Amusingly, I got it from someone who lives in Arizona, at a con in Minnesota; the company appears to be based in Dearborn.)

Aroma: Warm, cozy sweetness

Texture: Solid but soft. Bites easily, chews smoothly, melts nicely

Taste: Surprisingly sweet, more of a high-end milk chocolate than the dark I anticipated. Very nice. There's a gentle nudge of cinnamon/cayenne, but it's a pleasing accent to a very enjoyable general chocolate. The afterburn gets a bit intense, but not to the point of slowing me down.

Overall: I'm not normally a fan of spicy chocolate, but this one works for me. Also, silver-gilted chocolate dirigible. You bet I would try this again, or more likely some of their other delightful bad puns at sweetsteam.com.

Ran across this via network. The context is entirely unrelated to why I'm posting it, but it struck me strongly enough that I wanted to immortalize it here.

"If one wants to be treated as a community member rather than as a customer, one must put in work that will be hard and often unpleasant. It is not actually unethical to ask people to do this work."
     -chestnut_pod, 20 May 2023

They're talking about the OTW mess, but I found the sentiment remarkably applicable (again, with very different context) to a certain convention I may or may not be running. No, it's not unethical to ask people to do the work for the thing they want to have -- and people who act like it is probably aren't trying to build the same thing.

I'll have a green Christmas, without snow
I'll have a green Christmas, I know so
The sun's shining bright, not a hint left of white
So I'll have a green, green Christmas

Not there yet -- we got a lot of snow a few days ago, which is why Saturday started with a marathon shoveling session -- but I can see it coming.

It's been an "interesting" little while. We've been playing Roofer Roulette for months now: Will they come today? Will they come tomorrow? ....will they ever come? The housemate is moved out of her bedroom with most of her stuff in storage, because the ceiling's so damaged the room's not fit to live in. We've got the pictures off the walls and the breakables off the high shelves; the bathroom exhaust fan is installed and poised ready to cut the hole in the roof and have the roofers do the final, outside bits; we scrambled madly to get a home equity line of credit set up, with contingency plans if the roofers showed up before the loan was ready. That last was in October; still no roofers. They just told me maybe Wednesday, but they've told me so many maybes before that it's almost more of a no than a yes at this point.

We were really poised for roofers last week, which is when we also got to play Furnace Follies. It'd been blowing cold air intermittently, maybe once or twice a day; cutting the power usually sorted it for a while. The furnace guy finally came to inspect it (they're swamped like everybody else) and determined it needed a new gas valve. Which he ordered, and brought out a couple days later. Meanwhile we'd gone from occasional cold air to cold air four tries out of five. He then discovered they hadn't given him a propane conversion kit for gas valve, which is basically a tiny spring, but necessary. So he had to go get that. Then he discovered that the flame sensor, which had been showing its age anyway, was corroded to the point of failure; possibly all the restarts had finished it off. So he had to get that, which meant coming back the next morning. New flame sensor installed, the furnace still wasn't starting properly; he spent several hours testing every single component that can be tested before determining we needed a new control board. Which, yes, was another trip out for parts and another return visit. In all he had to go get parts and come back four times in two days, during which time we had no furnace at all. But he stuck with it, and now we have half a new furnace and the house is toasty warm (knock enough wood for a small deciduous forest).

(All that said, I love our furnace company. They call before they come, and they show up when they say they will. They wrangled one of their service contract options to cut us a break on the parts. And they treat a dodgy furnace like the urgent issue it is. The contrast to the roofers is particularly dramatic.)

Speaking of houses, a friend of mine just bought her first one. So I've been helping her play Keep-Toss-Donate, and giving Homeowner 101 tips. I believe we have an appointment with a caulk gun some time this week. (Brainstorming ideas for her house is also giving the housemate & I a fresh perspective on our house; it means more projects, of course, but there's some interesting new solutions to some ongoing problems bubbling up.)

Meanwhile, the housemate's dad, whose health has been not great for a while now, took a fall last week and ended up first in the hospital and then in a rehab facility. He's doing all right atm, but she's been running back and forth between that and massive overtime at the job along with all the house stuff, and trying to have That Conversation with her aging parents. So here, have a big pile of stress.

Meanwhile meanwhile, I have found a replacement webmail provider. Runbox is not perfect, I have to jump through some hoops for some of the non-standard stuff I do, but I can function with it. I'm still open to suggestions for other providers; I really don't like being dependent on the whims of one service, and I'd like to go back to having two viable email accounts. I still have a massive amount of email to archive off the old provider before it croaks in a week and a half; I'm not going to make it, and emergency measures will have to be taken.

Oh, yeah, and my author's copies of Analog's Jan/Feb issue arrived, with "Dix Dayton and the Miner from Mars" happily ensconced within. I keep forgetting about it, what with prepping for roofers and all. It's in stores now.

Other news that I realize I've neglected to put here:

Narrativity 2021 went extremely well! We had an awesome little con over Labor Day weekend. (And registration is now open for next year, which will be Memorial Day weekend.) Attendance was down a smidge due to Covid and such, but we still had a bunch of really cool people (some old, some new), a ton of great panels, and an all-around fun time. I came home more exhausted than I've ever been in my life, and...

...five days later, I started a new job! I'm working part-time at one of the local libraries, and loving it. The learning curve was insanely steep, which was particularly vertiginous since I was a post-con vegetable, but I'm finally starting to get my feet under me. I basically get paid to geek out about books. This is awesome.

So that's roughly the state of the me these days. I'm feeling smeared to a grease spot by the stress, but if we can just get the roofers to come and do their thing, a lot of the other pieces will start falling into place. Or at least I can start pushing them, instead of balancing them all precariously and making contingency plans if they fall.

In the press of other events, I think I've totally neglected to mention here that registration is open for Narrativity 2020! Theme this time is They'll Never See It Coming. ;-) Oh, and the dates are September 5-7, the Saturday through Monday of Labor Day weekend. Should be another great time, with lots of writing talk and general fannish partying. You can be part of it!

There's nothing like cats to bring you back to normal after a convention. They don't care that you had a fantastic time and your brain is stuffed full of new thoughts; they also don't care that you're exhausted because you were basically having too much fun to sleep for five days. "You! Human! Get up and be interesting! Pet us, feed us, let us outside. What do you think we keep you for?"

Narrativity was terrific. More on that later.

So, MediaWest*Con was this past weekend, and I've finally recovered enough to type up a post about it.

As that implies, it was a good weekend. Attendance was down again, but the attendees seemed to make up in quality what they lacked in quantity. And the con scaled back the function space to match, so it felt more intimate and less echoey.

We had a dealer's table this year, which was a new thing for us. The "Deaccumulation Station" (i.e., fannish yard sale) went over pretty well; a lot of stuff went on to new homes, which was the point of the exercise. It was weird, being on that side of the table; even though we'd run the Dealers Room in past years, it was still a learning curve actually doing the thing. Things like "bring your own table coverings" we knew from our organizing days, but things like "bring change for the table" (which you'd think would be obvious) snuck up on us. But it all worked out in the end. I don't think we'll do it again; it was surprisingly restrictive being tied to the table (even though we usually spend half the con hanging out with the dealers anyway), and hopefully we won't have another table's worth of stuff we want to get rid of. But it was worth the doing this once.

In line with my new motto of "Be the con you want to see in the world", I did two panels. "Old School Spies" had a lot of people who expressed interest, but very few who showed up, and it faltered a bit because of that. Still, worth a try; I'm contemplating variations for next year -- and will do a better job of guilt-tripping more people into coming. ;-) I also did a juggling workshop, which went quite well; a decent number of people came, including several beginners, all of whom were making respectable progress by the end of the hour. Requests were made for a repeat next year, possibly even two sessions, which sounds fine to me.

The juggling panel did have one unexpected consequence. I've messed up my right shoulder a few times lately (mostly by sleeping on it wrong). It was fine during the panel, I didn't even think about it, but when I got back to the table five minutes after, I couldn't even raise my arm! I spent the next couple of days eating left-handed, and finding one-handed work-arounds to two-handed tasks. It's nothing that rest and Icy Hot won't cure, and it's improved significantly already, but today is the first time I've felt up to extended typing.

Between being tied to the table and my time-sense apparently being scrambled, I only made it to a couple other panels. The Pros panels were good, well-run and in-depth, as usual. The Endgame panel went off into people's personal issues, and my opinion of the movie was basically "meh" anyway, so I bailed early. There were several promising-sounding ones, especially on the space program and classic SF, that I didn't make because they were half over by the time I looked at my watch properly. Oh well.

It was a little schizophrenic riding herd on Narrativity whilst attending another con, and of course things came up while I was away from home and over a holiday weekend. But they were easily solved things, especially since the folks involved were patient, and it was a good test run for doing everything with the portable equipment that I'll have with me come July. Skippy the Streambook needs some more software installed, but I knew that already, and I am increasingly fond of my cyber-control device, which makes several things about the smartphone less annoying.

As always, the highlight of the con was the people and the conversations. I had fun chilling with the other dealers, hanging with the Pros crowd, playing Cards Against Humanity in the lobby until the last eyelid drooped, intermittently smoffing with people who've been doing this a lot longer than I have, and so on. I had fun, and I'm already looking forward to next year.

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