beetiger

I'm feeling rather listless today. Anybody out there have a spare list you'd be willing to share?

A lovely week of warm weather, fun visiting time with hellesfarne, haikujaguar and baby, and assorted other Tampafolk, followed by more visiting with the most wonderful and graceful even while recovering from surgery ladyperegrine and family, with koogrr, and even a bit of time with rowyn who was in Orlando for a bit of the same time that we were.

There was nostalgia, and grilled fish, and mini-golf, and alligators, and fondue, and good conversation, and art. The Internet tablet is full of awesome for traveling, though I'm happy to be home at my laptop keyboard.

More details, and pictures and stuff, possibly forthcoming.

But right now, sleep.

My family and I are leaving for the Tampa/Orlando area tomorrow morning, for a week. I think we've caught up with most people from there who want to spend some time with us, but if we missed you somehow, please drop us a line. I think we're going to try to put Rhys on a vacation sleep schedule 10 am - 10 pm, so we should be able to go out to dinner and stuff if you work weekdays but want to get together.

The new tablet's coming with, the hotel has wireless, and I probably will end up online after bedtime for other folks, so I should be in some touch here.

*hugs you all*

I really, really want to go to this. Anyone interested in joining me?

Yes, I'm pretty darned cranky about censorship and poor communication on the part of SUP.

But I think the thing that maybe some people don't understand, both some people who are choosing to participate in this "strike", and some people who are laughing at them, is that this isn't a strike at all. It's a symbolic protest. This can't be about hurting LJ/SUP at all, because it doesn't. Thinking about whether it's effective in an immediate, practical sense is not the right question at all.

I've been at a large number of symbolic protests in my life, and I intend to go to many more. I've gone to queer kiss-ins, Days of Remembrance, anti-war rallies, marches against violence against women. They're very important, and they're important because they give people who have been disenfranchised and hidden a voice.

But I don't care for Days of Silence, especially not against censorship. They express the opposite of what we are trying to ask the universe, or our government, or our service providers to offer us. And as a simple sort of witch, that's not how I direct my energy.

So, yeah.

*stands on a soapbox*

I'm a queer kinky girl who does magic, dances naked, and suffers from depression. And I have a voice.

Happy Pi Day! (March 14, 2008) Cherry pi(e) with whole wheat flaky butter crust. Approximately round.

Seen everywhere:
"Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it."

I have pretty much no real TMI place, as long as it mostly includes my own stuff and not someone else's stuff. I don't expect any of you have anything you've been secretly wondering, but if there's actually something you want to hear me blather on about, go ahead and ask. I'll do my best.

A few weeks ago, when I was packing up piles of business clothes that were unlikely to fit me in the case that I ended up going back to a suit-requiring workplace anytime soon, I also packed up and gave away a bunch of artsy sorts of T-shirts that I collected from my father's closet after he died. I loved them, both because they were his and because they were cool, but they were mostly white-based and really too large on me and I never found myself choosing them to actually wear.

This morning I'm packing up a bunch of old watches that were his, that I collected at the same time, right after he died, and I'm sending them to marrionettegirl, who makes steampunk jewelry out of old watch parts. I hope she can use them. I'd forgotten I had them at all until I decided to clean out one of my drawers of jewelry and stuff.

I haven't visited my father's grave in a few years, not since my son was born for sure. It'd take me some work to remember where it is, actually. I think about him a lot, but I don't feel any need to go to the place. I get a vague feeling that it would matter to him, so sometimes I feel like I should go, but life is so busy and I know I wouldn't find it satisfying at all, so I haven't made the time and effort.

I feel very attached to the gifts that people g ive me, but stuff that I just took, those reminders? Apparently not so much. After a decade they don't have the scent to them anymore, and when I looked at them, they're just stuff. Pictures are good, but the only scent I have left is A Bachelor's Dog, from BPAL, which evokes my dad in a leather jacket to me.

But relationships with dead people, even if they are some of the most important people in your life, don't give anything back, at least not to me. My husband still has a quick chat with my dad at Samhain every year, but for me? The last few years if I do that I just feel like I'm talking to the void.

My father and I were extremely close, as close as I've ever been to anyone in some ways, and I would not be the woman I am without him, though we also fought over many of the kinds of things that have become more and more core to my life today. I see bits of the energy he put out to the world in my own son.

It's a step back, being more than a decade away, and I guess I'm just consciously noticing myself taking it.

After the recent fiasco during which I nearly neglected to get my son registered for kindergarten at all (my confusion about what CPSE would tell the district, which apparently is absolutely nothing), I decided to go to the parents' meeting about special education/disability options in the district, just in case there was useful information there for me.

As expected, this was mostly for families with kindergarteners likely to move into specific special programs. Many of the parents there were anxiously awaiting details of a new integrated classroom being put into one of the schools, or to hear how the programs have changed in the last few years (apparently, a lot.) Apparently, if you have an autistic or low-to-medium functioning child, this is the place in this half of the county to live -- this school district has 4 different programs for kids functioning at different levels.

I did learn a few things directly relevant to our situation.

-Although there's no special ed program in the actual school Rhys will be going to, he can get all his related services (speech, PT, OT) on-site. They'll probably be in small groups of 2-4 kids rather than one-on-one like he's been getting at the preschool level. The school does have a services coordinator, with whom I chatted after the meeting some.

-The district has no programming or anything for gifted kids at the early elementary level. In particular, unlike in some districts, there's no way to get enrichment stuff on an IEP< and definitely not on an intergrated IEP with the disability stuff.

-Various people in the system have suggested writing a letter to the school highlighting Rhys' reading level in particular, before screening happens in 2 weeks, so they don't miss it in the screening. I wish I knew more about how to phrase this right to start on a good foot with the school.

*fuss fuss*

I went to the Intercon LARP con this weekend, and it was really good. :) lediva did a nice little game-by-game con report, so I won't repeat what she said too much, except to say that it was an awesome if exhausting weekend, and that RPing with her really rocks. I ended up the weekend feeling re-energized creatively and in terms of my relationship with lediva --we have a wonderful time together doing not-too-much, but also doing intense stuff.

The overall quality of the players there was pretty high, which meant that the games ran pretty nicely, and the in character interactions were able to be really engaging. I think I really like the short/one-shot LARP format a lot, and especially enjoyed the four-hour games with one fairly well-developed character to manifest. Playing the Bright Half of Alice in Wonderland 2.1 was really satisfying to me -- it was an emotionally intense character, the archetype of which I really grokked, and the players playing the other Alice and both Cheshire Cats were all very fun to play with. I also enjoyed doing coordinated dress-up for it, and got to use my famous "cry at the drop-of-the-hat" skill for something more that the usual of making people uncomfortable and ruining my bargaining position like in the real world.

We played two Horde games as Horde. Unconventional Odyssey was fun if silly, and a good break after the intensity of the Alice game. Oh God, Everybody's Dying was pretty much an improv game with people playing archetypes/ famous people and trying to convince a board of angels to let them into Heaven. It reminded me why I really like LARPing, but I don't think I'll ever actually train or perform in improv formally. I don't like trying to do imitations of particular people, where watchers will naturally judge if I've successfully evoked a particular person rather than a newly created character or an archetype. And I'm always terribly worried that my spotty media familiarity and poor memory will mean someone will hand me something obvious and I'll just utterly fail to connect it with anything at all. Two hours of that was too long for my personal tastes, but this was much more about the interaction between me and the nature of the game than about any flaw in how it was built.

I was pretty tired and cranky by the time we were ready to go play Blackie's, but the game went much better than I expected. The 50 pages of background turned out not to be so much necessary to play, but more just a history of what turned out to be the last official session of a multi-year game. My wimpy character power (soft invisibility) actually turned out to be an awesome character power (soft invisibility + mimic anyone else's power for 5 minutes), and in addition, gave me the ability to have fun doing something totally socially unacceptable -- walk up to people in the middle of a conversation, get too close while staring at them and eavesdropping, and walk away without saying anything if they got boring. Also, my character got a nice dramatic end-scene involving a lioness-on-lioness death match and dragging my best friend's dead body out to be rebuilt by feminist aliens. Watching lediva be all gleeful about being "I p0wn technology girl", and then be squeeing all night because the GM admitted that the logical outcome of her being in close proximity to the alien nanotech at the endgame was that she'd eventually be able to rule the world.

I won't talk too much about the extra mini-LARP at the end of the weekend, the one where the interior light had been left on in my car and I had to figure out how to get the car jump-started when it was dead in the parking lot, except to say that lediva continues to be an awesome teammate, and that you wouldn't have the AAA card in your player packet if you weren't allowed to use it.

One other cool thing: this morning, I had one of the most socially clueful conversations I think I've ever had with projectmothra. He came in in the morning, and said things that obviously showed he remembered where I'd been and was curious about it ("I missed you Mommy! How was the convention? Did you like dressing up like Alice? Did Aunt Julia give you hugs?") and he listened to the answers. Then he told me relevant things about his weekend, unprompted ("We played a lot of games of Aquarius and we went to the library. Daddy cooked dinner and I helped him. I had fun even if I missed you also.") My little boy is growing into a person. :)