excitement

Readiness

2008-07-22T01:53:29+00:00

Almost.

I am in placeholder time, the time between fully here and fully there in which one's thoughts are distractedly trying to root in both places at once and -- usually -- failing miserably.

The twitter repost script is turned on, so you'll see my increasingly nervous natterings as the trip inches ever closer. it feels real now, real like the fine layer of cat fur Tenzing deigned to place on my bags tonight.

Jeff is gone to Seattle already; words sneak back east of his doings and his travels. The stories await my arrival for the telling; all I have right now are Adam's snapshots of Jeff, so familiar and yet so far away.

The house is quiet without him here. We fare better in separate places than most married folk, but the sense of oddness is palpable. We chirp affectionately from different rooms when we are both here, a quick echolocation and confirmation that never quite merits a full-blown conversation, and I have always wondered if we or our sibling cats first originated the idea.

It has been miserably hot here, the range of 100F/38C that makes even the hardiest of summer dwellers long for cooler days. How disconcerting to pack jeans, socks, and a jacket, knowing I'm likely to need all three tomorrow night. how strange, when I had to wash today's sweat-stained clothes because I didn't want to leave them dirty for two weeks.

I'm ready to go, and increasingly impatient. There is the googledoc, which I've maintained in a lackadaisical manner for quite a few months now, and suddenly it is real and now and tomorrow, dammit, and do I have my flight information and oh god where do I go for the rental car and what do we do if I forget something?

We breathe, that's what, and we make up a plan B and we laugh about my OCD tendencies -- because it's vacation, dammit.

We have Mariners - Red Sox tickets. We have plans for spice shops and restaurants, of hunting noodles and bubble tea, of sitting out on the deck and giving the sun no particular reason to get in a hurry to set. We'll go to a cabin hidden in the mountains of Washington and laugh into our single-malt, and we'll hug our friends as, one by one, they trickle home before Adam and I get lost in the woods for a few days.

My bag is full and my camera is empty. It's time to go.

Almost.

We have ways of making you nap

2008-07-16T13:08:02+00:00

Consider this portion of yesterday's twitter traffic:

Itarille: Almost want to say screw working out, go home and take a nap...
adamrg: @Itarille Naps are for next week! Gosh, it is almost vacation time!
Itarille: @adamrg but wouldn't I waste a lot of my holiday time if keep zonking out on naps?
adamrg: @Itarille That's what holidays are for. I'll talk to @domesticat and we'll make sure that we have enough time for lazy reading/napping.
domesticat: @Itarille Vacation napping is awesome.
Itarille: @adamrg @domesticat how is the night sky in Everett? I want to see a nice, starry night sky...
adamrg: @Itarille We can accomplish that. How about we find a nice camping spot on the beach, and lie on the beach and watch stars?
domesticat: @adamrg Yes please!
Itarille: @adamrg wow, that sounds amazing..
domesticat: @adamrg Two thumbs solidly up it seems!

In all seriousness, do you know anyone whose response to "How about we find a nice camping spot on the beach, and lie on the beach and watch stars?" is anything but HELL YES SIGN ME UP NOW WHERE'S THE BLANKET?

(Six more days! Not that I'm counting, or foaming at the mouth, or anything.)

I plan to turn on the daily twitter reposts while I'm gone. Obviously, Adam and Asai and I all have twitter accounts, and we'll be together for quite a few days in a row. (I suggest at least looking afraid, even if you really aren't.) Technically, Brad and Jeff have accounts too. However, Jeff never uses his, and Brad won't be posting anything from the cabin due to the fact that we 1) won't have internet access there and 2) Brad still regards cell phones as a voodoo he just won't do.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my to-do list wants a cuddle.

non-refundable teachers

2007-08-28T04:57:57+00:00

My actions were characteristic of me, this post less so.

We neither of us are really sure of how, exactly, the friendship got started, but it did center around music and graduated to code and phone calls. That was years ago, and my clearest memory of them was walking outside on a lazy summer night, sitting outside in the driveway, bare feet on concrete, eyes to sky, and watching the stars circle as we talked.

Fast-forward through years, time, and changes, and you end up with the mostly-untold saga of the summer, which ended up with Adam coming out here for a very memorable week's visit.

I've known he's had a hard summer. The helljob had worn on him. The process of searching for teaching jobs in his field, of applying over and over and interviewing and getting nothing, was nerve-wracking for me, and I wasn't the one applying. I can't imagine what it must have been like for him.

Well, actually, I've had a bit of an idea. A look at our cell phone bills lately will tell the tale.

We'd kicked around the idea all summer of bringing him down here for dragon*con if none of the jobs came through. I told him I'd foot the airfare if he'd just trust me. Finally, this weekend, we decided that it was safe to make a purchase, and Sunday night, I bought the airfare.

Karma being what it is, Adam got a call the next morning (today). He raced in for the interview. It was a formality. He had a job offer by the afternoon. He starts tomorrow morning.

It's the happiest I've ever been to cancel an airline reservation. The tickets weren't refundable; I'm now sitting on an airline credit that should allow me to make good on the trip a few months from now, to fly him down during spring break. If we plan wisely, hit up fare sales, and I use a floating holiday or something along those lines, I should be able to wring a quick west coast weekend out of it as well.

But that brings me to this, and the kind of words we are always too shy or too self-conscious to say, the kind of words we need to say but are always too afraid of being the one who blinks first:

I am proud of you, Adam. I have some idea of what you went through this summer. Every lunchtime call from you at your helljob made me wish and hope that there would be a day like today, a day that would end with you bubbly and excited because life had finally given you the break you were looking for.

I am sorry you won't be at dragon*con. I bought the airfare because I genuinely wanted you there, and no matter how excited I am for you, I'll look around at the ring of chairs on Thursday night and wish, just for a moment, you could have been there with us. But this is the better answer, the right answer, and I cannot begrudge you a moment of the excitement I heard in your voice tonight.

For all the twists and turns our friendship has taken over the years, I am grateful that I was there for today, and if you think I was able to write this sentence without a lump in my throat, you think me a far more jaded person than I actually am.

Be happy. Savor this feeling, this moment. You've earned it.

Single digits.

2007-08-23T14:29:23+00:00

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

It's strange, looking at my to-do list. It's unnervingly small. I remember years in which planning for d*c meant doing enormous Sam's Club food runs, in addition to creating large vats of tea to get me through the process of coding.

This year, though, the personnel check-in system is requiring little past tuneups and refinements. I'm rewriting the radio check-in system (which is much simpler) to take care of some issues we noticed last year.

I'm not doing two hundred individual Magic cards. I've made badges, yes, and Wendy's excitement is causing more Magic cards to be devised than I was expecting to do, but it's much easier than it was last year.

Someone else is keying the shifts into the shift grid, and the room managers are responsible for dishing out their own staffing needs. If I didn't know any better, I'd say we turned into a team when no one was looking. Clearly, we must stop being productive and go drink for a while, because this is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.

Don't worry; I'm still me, and I'll still have my regularly-scheduled freakout next Wednesday night, but it hit me the other night while talking to new staffers: I'm excited. There is stress, yes, because this is a large endeavor and it requires a good deal of planning on all of our parts for it to execute smoothly, but we are starting to reap the benefits of years of planning, careful coding, and emphasis on staff retention.

I'm ready to go see my friends. I'm ready to pull out the plaid skirt and the funky shoes and smacktalk in Centennial V. I don't have any plans to attend any of the events, but I have this vague notion of wandering around with friends in the evenings.

I have a purple, green, and yellow stegosaurus hat that is begging to be worn over a radio headset. I have a desk that doesn't need me for a few days, and a set of librarians who know I'll come back with good stories.

In the parlance of tech:

"I'm bit."

Notching the concert bedpost

2003-04-05T08:07:52+00:00

Newsletter just came out - Steely Dan will be touring the States this summer. It has been approximately four minutes since I last breathed. I will resume breathing shortly.

Currently, the closest dates to AL are in Chicago and Washington DC, but the DC dates conflict with this year's dragon*con. More dates are supposed to be booked later, and I would think that an Atlanta, Nashville, or New Orleans date would be amongst them.

I have trouble believing that they won't book a date in one of those cities, but if for some reason they don't, um, hi, Matthew, Andrew, and Joy. I might be coming to visit.

Let me see if I can put this in terms that Heather will understand: Heather : Peter Gabriel show :: Amy : Steely Dan show

You will now excuse me while I wander off and make high-pitched squealing noises. I've only been waiting for this opportunity for a long, long time.

SSW

2002-12-17T17:31:07+00:00

As my friends can attest, I just went all zappy and silly about The Two Towers after reading James Berardinelli's review (in which he gave it four stars out of a possible four). Like last year, I waited impatiently to get my hands on Berardinelli's review, knowing that his taste in movies so closely mirrors mine as to be eerie.

The words that I'm hearing most about the first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy indicate that we may be in the privileged position of watching one of the great events of cinema history as it happens.
But, no matter how good The Two Towers is (and I have not seen it yet, so I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge), I don't believe Peter Jackson will come home from this year's Oscars with anything more than token awards for technical achievement.

Frustrating? Perhaps, but in the doddering, squinting eyes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it makes a strange and bizarre sort of sense.

The three Lord of the Rings films were filmed, and intended to be screened, as a trilogy. My expectation is that The Two Towers, as the middle installment, will be on the receiving end of many comments about how "it cannot stand alone as a movie." In many ways, the first film had the same issue, and I think it very likely that the Academy (silly shortsighted wankers, or SSW for short) will use this as the deciding factor in whether or not to give anything above technical and effects awards for The Two Towers.

Think of it this way.

Imagine that Fellowship of the Ring had received Oscars for Best Picture or Best Director. So what happens if, a year later, the next film in the trilogy is a better picture or is better directed than the first? There is an appalling sort of skewed logic at work here: if the first one won for Best Director or Best Picture, and the next ones are still better movies, the voters of the Academy will feel pressured to award those Oscars yet again to Peter Jackson.

The voters of the Academy, SSWs that they are, probably don't take well to this kind of pressure.

Instead, if The Two Towers proves to be of the same caliber of technical, visual, and emotional experience as Fellowship of the Ring was, look for them to nod yet again in the direction of technical Oscars.

Look for the Academy to play the waiting game once again, to wait and see if the third installment of the trilogy, The Return of the King, holds true to the known quality of the first (and the rumored quality of the second). If it is, I think it's safe to expect The Return of the King to have a free-for-all at the following Oscars ceremony. The Academy is likely to treat The Return of the King as a combined entry for all three movies, and give awards more truly based on the accomplishments of the trilogy than for the single movie.

It's probably not fair, but it's realistic.

Meanwhile, tonight we'll screen the super-extendo-cut of Fellowship of the Ring at my house, in preparation for seeing The Two Towers on opening night tomorrow night.

Ahh, the joys of Oscar season. 'Tis the season to prognosticate.

Side note #1: Competition and Academy apologies: Martin Scorsese's new film, Gangs Of New York, is being released in prime-time Oscar season to a lot of industry hype. Bear in mind that Scorsese has never won a director or Best Picture Oscar, despite his nominations for Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ, and GoodFellas. While at this point, one might think that all he has to do is turn in a respectable performance to get a directing Oscar, the same did not prove true of Robert Altman in 2001. If GoNY is critically successful, I'll expect Scorsese to finally pick up his Oscar this year, with the justification that Peter Jackson has another movie coming out next year and can wait one more year to be rewarded for the whole trilogy.

Side note #2: I've seen rumors that New Line Cinemas is starting to mount an in-industry promotional campaign to get Andy Serkis an Oscar for his voiceover/body model work as Gollum. This is an uphill battle to say the least, because Serkis himself never appears on-screen, but an interesting tack to take on their part.)