Templecon 2010 was terrific!
This year, it was held at the Inn at the Crossroads. This site is easier to get to and had plenty of free parking. Having the convention in a large, accommodating, luxury hotel was a real treat.
On Friday evening, I ran a Call of Cthulhu game for a 4 hour stint. Then we did some shopping with the Clockwork Bazaar merchants. Saturday was more shopping, doing the art show, and schmoozing. In the afternoon, Manuela ran a Yoga session and then a jewelry making workshop for the attendees. Later that evening, we participated in the variety show. Manuela performed two dance numbers and helped me do the last, for awhile anyway, performance of the Tail of the Dorset Duckling along with Terrance and Grimpen at the controls.
A very short but very cool clip of Ameena in Godzilla drag at the variety show at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBcGft28SPU
A steampunk fashion show followed and then a costume contest after that. Then off to an invitation party for the performers which, likely as not, was the coolest party I will ever attend. We finally wrapped the evening up with an independent stop motion film of E.A. Poe’s Annabelle Lee at a midnight showing. The next day, we hung around some more, marveling at the gaming tables and all the miniatures, and then bought more books from C.J. Henderson, one of our favorite authors.
A full and rewarding weekend, indeed. The TempleCon folks wrote me a few days later to tell me people were raving about my Call of Cthulhu session and asked if I would do another in 2011. Well then, that is what I call booking in advance. We are looking forward to TempleCon 2011. Support your local convention!
HAPPY NEW YEAR and the best of whatever it is that you seek for yourself in 2010! Yep, I know it is a bit past the new year but Life has a way of sticking her fingers in my pudding and messing things up. The least of Her meddling lately is a broken rib incurred from sword fighting. I am just going to have to learn to protect myself better! Anyway, the following is a list of the events that I am going to be involved with in the next couple of months. If you are attending, please come on by and say hello!
January 15-17 Arisia 2010 Cambridge, Ma……art show
January 29-30 Birka Market, SCA, Manchester NH……fencing
February 5-7 Templecon, Warwick, RI………..art show, puppet performance, CoC game
February 12-14 Boskone 47, Boston, MA………art show
February 26, Odditoruium, Canbridge, MA……..puppet performance.
The February 26th date at the Odditorium show will be the debut of my new poem called Ten Pound Lafitte. It’s a rousing story about a chef and an unwilling frog. Terrance and Grimpen will be doing the performance.
Hope to see y’all about!
Two of my puppet creations, Terrance and Grimpen, who have helped me stage several plays this year have an Important Public Service Message they would like to pass on!!
Happy Halloween! I hope y’all had the best of the best day of the year. Festivities for us actually started the night before when we went to see F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu, accompanied by a musical arrangement by the Devil’s Music Ensemble. It was a real treat. The next day brought wild weather as warm winds from a southerly storm shook and bent the trees all day. Brightly colored leaves swirled everywhere. An anniversary dinner for our fourteenth year, some old black white movies and then off to a friends house for a costume party. A great day and evening!
Taking advantage of a rare beautiful weather day, I got out and finally finished the fence. This meant fashioning some gate latches with the scrap lumber I had left and then putting up some decorative trellis like pieces over the main gate. And then onto the final section of work. The finials.
Finials are necessary for the life of the post. You need to prevent water from getting into the ends of the posts for during the winter, when that water freezes, it will render the posts worthless. I had decided on flat surfaces, so we could put items on top to decorate but it took a while for me to find the perfect material. I tried a wood plank but just could not seem to find a piece that understood what straight and flat meant. Casting about, I came upon the perfect finials at a local discount lumberyard. For 12 bucks, I scored 28 pieces of slate sized 6×6 and 6×8. A bit of liquid nails and voila!! They went up as easily as I had imagined.
We already have one resident up. The next is a T-rex with plans during the winter to create and fill all the available spots with something fun overlooking the yard.
Congratulations to my son, Matt and his wife Sue who have had their first. Her name is Zoey, 7 pounds 4 ounces, everything intact and healthy and ready whoop it up. Note the great monkey toes!! This kiddo comes into a world stuffed with relatives, cousins, and every version of grand someone that you can think of. The challenge will be not spoiling her!
Necon 29 has come and gone! The economy apparently kept the attending numbers a bit lower however it seems to me that this actually worked in favor of the convention as things seemed a little bit closer and more personal than usual. All in all, everything went pretty smoothly.
The art show was actually a little busier than I would’ve expected. The food was good and the company great. The roasting of Von and Wes was a heavy basting with a chewing of the meat while it was still on the spit…..Ouch! I hope those sweet people come back next year. Not sweet because they tasted good, sweet because they are nice people!!! Lars Grant-West, the artist guest of honor, made absolutely gorgeous medals for the Olympics. Weather was typical of late with some thunder storms at night but it left off for beautiful balmy days with cool ocean sea breezes.
Perhaps one of the oddest events that happened and only could happen at the event called Necon was the synchronized drowning event organized by John Skipp. This has been captured beautifully by Madelon Wilson and can be seen can be seen at this address:
Synchronized Drowning Event
The sharing of lots of wonderful pictures made me realize that there were many Necons all going on at the same time and I am wondering which one I attended. Check the links below to see the many different flavors of the wonder that is known as Necon.
Monica Orourke’s Necon
Tracy Carbone’s Necon
John McIlveen’s Necon
Once again the Highland Scottish games have passed and what an event! This year amidst a backdrop of continuous bagpipes and cannon fire, the Barony of the Bridge’s finest competed to be baronial champion of their intended class. It was cloudy and warm and fortunately the weather decided to take a break from raining one more day as it has been raining for two weeks. The spectacle of armored fights drew large crowds and they got what they came to see. At the end of it all, the new champions were:
Lord Dorne – Champion of Arms
Lord Radagast – Champion of Archers
Dona Natalia – Champion of Rapier
Lady Blythe – Champion of Bardic Arts
Lady Vibeke – Champion of Arts & Sciences
Congratulations to all! This also includes Lady Áine, the marshals, and the countless selfless volunteers who helped to make sure that each little piece worked in service of the whole event.
My understanding is that, it has actually been several years since the last baronial champions event, so this definitely was something special to be part of.
With the arrival of Daisy, a.k.a. Little Bit, we found that our 4 foot chain-link fence did not pose a challenge whatsoever to her. She simply walked over, gathered her haunches underneath her and bounced to the top edge of the rail. Perching there momentarily, she gazes about and then drops to the other side. Then she’s off to investigate those interesting birds bathing in the pothole down the road, chasing that squirrel or just saying hello to a person now quaking in terror and she wiggles most terribly in all her exuberance. So, we needed a higher fence. After some research, price quotes, calculations on pre-built sections and two separate episodes of retail cardiac arrest, we realized that our only avenue lay in building a fence from the ground up. Not exactly what I was expecting but very cool as we would end up with a custom fence that we wanted, gain privacy from the street, contain the dog, and all at about a 10th of the price of a contractor.
The design we settled on, I am told is called a shadowbox fence. Basically, it is staggered spaced boards on one side and on the other side the boards stagger covering the holes of the first side. What you end up with is a fence that looks like a solid barrier when looked at straight on but on an angle appears to look like open picket. This nicely prevents a feeling of being barricaded. An estimate of about a month and a half was pretty close to the amount of time it took. It rained a lot during this time frame but I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours almost every day and the whole thing went up with relative ease. The majority of the posts are 4×4x12 with the ones at the gates being 4×6x12. All posts were set down somewhere between 28 to 36 inches. My thanks to Joe for coming over and helping me to put all those big heavy chunks of wood in the ground. I had pre-dug the holes and together we manhandled the posts into their berths, leveling them and finally filling and tamping the earth down. That effectively turned a projected four day process into four hours. After that, it was basically joist mounts and regular construction bits of supplies and work. The entire fence is PT. It is 6 foot high and runs for about 87 foot with one four foot gate and one eight foot double gate.
I still have to do a little bit of finishing trim over the gates, lop off some of the length on the posts and put covers on top of them to prevent winter water damage. We plan on putting statues of frogs, owls and gargoyles and such on top of these little platforms. Once it gets real hot outside, I’ll get out there and apply a couple of layers of staining sealing type stuff for general protection. The work wasn’t really hard. It just took some time. It looks pretty good but the real test will be see what it looks like one year from now after it’s rolled through the seasons. Meanwhile, we now have a beautiful privacy fence that runs through the middle of the yard effectively delineating the space.
And the dog? Well, the damnable thing is that Daisy, a.k.a. Little bit, walks to the edge of the fence gathers her haunches under and bounds to the top, perches and then drops over. Ain’t this where I started?
The April Culmination Blog Entry, a nice cheap easy way to write a quick note about what happened this month and how it flew by all too fast.
The Bunny Hop Revue was a wonderful success! Manuela’s efforts in combination with all the performers who gave of their time and skill were able to scare up $500 to benefit Amy Budd’s upcoming play, The Thing That Ate My Brain…Almost. The revue boasted burlesque dancers, a juggler, belly dancers and, last but certainly not least, Terrance Redbone’s debut. By all counts his performance of “The Tail of the Dorset Duckling” went over quite well. Pictures are courtesy of Ernie; generous husband of Baseema Moirae (shown on the left, third picture down).
Now about the play that the benefit was for:
The world premiere of The Thing That Ate My Brain..Almost, by Amy Lynn Budd and directed by Connie Crawford opened at Perishable Theatre on April 24th and will run until May 10th:
“In 2002, dancer Amy Lynn Budd discovered she had been invaded. By a brain tumor. In this performance about the diagnosis of and subsequent living with a chronic genetic condition, the artist combines burlesque dance, puppetry, and the genre of 1960’s sci-fi movies to affirm that creativity and curiosity are the best medicine.”
We saw the play and it rocked! Go see it while you can.
Tickets can be purchased here.
Some photos from the play can be seen at Amy’s facebook page.
In closing….Happy Walpurgisnacht and May Day!!