aitchellsee

Well, THAT resolution worked out about as well as most New Year's resolutions, didn't it?

But here it is, June 1st. What better time to make another stab at "posting regularly" :-)

And a good time to look back at how far I've come since last year, too -- back then I was just starting to recover from surgery, with a huge incision that didn't fully close til sometime in July. I was staying with a friend, away from my own stuff, and feeling rather cut-off from my normal life. And looking forward (if that's the word) to a lot of stressful moving -- both my office and my home -- and wondering where it would all end up.

And now, here I am on a perfect June Sunday, sitting in front of an open window in my third floor brownstone apartment with the beautiful woodwork, looking out at green leafy treetops and listening to birdsong and the sound of the breeze rustling through the leaves.

ETA: And now it's June 23rd, and I'm back from a most enjoyable and thought-provoking weekend at 4th Street Fantasy Convention in the Twin Cities, and a whole bunch of things have happened in between (as is the nature of Life). The draft of this post disappeared into the ether back in the day, and magically re-appeared just now under the guise of "do you want to post from a saved draft?" when I meant to wrestle a few words about 4th Street onto the screen, and I can think of nothing better to do than to post the June 1st thing and then Do It Again! Post Early and Often!

Happy New Year to all and to all a good night!

from HLC in NYC
whose resolution for 2008 is to post regularly in LJ :-)

Well, I'm home.

I've just been in hospital for a week having part of my large colon removed due to complications of diverticular disease -- I realize I should put this under an Ick! linkie-thing but my brain is pretty fried at the end of a long day wondering if I'd be released today or have to stay over again as I did yesterday, and then packing up and coming home, and getting ready to go stay at a friend's while I recover, and I can't deal with the coding. So there's the brief edition.

Suffice it to say, the op went quite well all things considered (though I have an ostomy bag now for a few months) and I'm doing OK with coping with the various new attachments.

I missed all of you a great deal == probably never catch up with all of Bear's posts -- and I'm looking forward to catching up as I lounge around recovering ;-)

I have just about the best Real Life Friends (and family) that there are.

And Doctors and Nurses are pretty damn kewl human beans.

More anon.

For all my friends who celebrate, may the light and warmth and joys of the season be yours. (And may there be Peace on Earth!)

O Tannenbaum O Tannenbaum Last Christmas a German friend invited me to see a real Christmas tree in the old style, with real candles.

I voted.

I went at mid-day and the turnout seemed pretty light - there was one person ahead of me for my Election District, and I didn't really see any lines for any of the, maybe three, maybe four, ED's whose voting macines were all in the one big room.

My polling place is a couple of blocks away, at a residence for the blind, and they were having a bake sale, so after casting my ballot I scored a couple of cupcakes, one chocolate and one seemingly vanilla, but as it was wrapped in green saranwrap I couldn't yet swear to it :-)

I have to keep my fingers crossed that this election goes as the people actually vote, and not as some crypto-corporate-fascist group alter the voting machines to make it come out.

And that it is the start of a turnaround for the country, and a return to the values of the Republic for which our Flag stands, and all that.

I can't believe that no-one on my f-list (which includes several very active communities) has posted a single message since the middle of the night -- is something wrong with LJ this morning?

The beadses have been speaking to me again...as you see, I've been busy making a pair of earrings to go with my elisem necklace "Wyatt's Cat".  These earrings have been prowling around the odd corners of my mind ever since I found the little cat beads that matched the eponymous Wyatt's Cat bead in my necklace, and they've finally taken (temporary) form.  I expect they'll evolve a bit as my skill increases and they speak to me more clearly about what they're supposed to be, but in the meantime I can wear them :-)

Apologies if the series of Scrapbook photos has clogged your friend's page -- I'm still getting the hang of working with the LJ Scrapbook feature and haven't mastered the LJ cut, either.

Not Wyatt's Cat - Mr Zak is Really In (the inbox) The ruler of my office surveys his domain

Earrings by Aitchellsee (Alt. View): Another view of my earrings, an homage to the necklace "Wyatt's Cat" by elisem , named "Wyatt's Kittens". [Sterling silver, bone, early Moe's beads, dalmatian jasper, fancy jasper, glass, horn, coral, and some other stuff]

Earrings by Aitchellsee: My homage to "Wyatt's Cat", a pair of earrings I call "Wyatt's Kittens". [Sterling silver, bone, early Moe's beads, dalmatian jasper, fancy jasper, glass, horn, coral, and some other stuff]

Wyatt's Cat (detail of necklace by Elise Matthesen) This is my first and favorite necklace by elisem. She named it "Wyatt's Cat" for the cat-bead and the marshal's star that reminded her of Wyatt Earp.</lj>

I just clicked on a link from one of the plus-sized communities to an online costume retailer.  And there were lots of pictures of sexy ladies in scanty costumes in perennial themes such as pirates, housemaids, cheerleaders, playboy bunnies, nurses (and doctors), and on and on....


Then there was the gal in pinstripped cleavage and a fedora and tommygun. Her costume:

The Gangster Mole.

said she with a Sheepish look.

Anyone can see from the sparse entries on my LJ that I don't often post memes, or even my own entries on life, books, food, and the like.   However, I ran across the "Gay Rights" thing when I was feeling communicative, and knew where to find the "update journal" button without much searching.  And ever since my first year of grad school (theological seminary) when I met my first significant numbers of openly gay folk, and met increasing numbers of gay friends over the years (some now gone, alas for AIDS and time) and learned how many people who were friends in highschool and college had come out later, I've been increasingly committed to gay rights in general, so it seemed like a good thing to join in the meme even though I couldn't quite figure how it would do any real good. ( I'm the first to confess that I suffer a lot from my plain vanilla het middleclass college-educated privilege.)

But since then, I've been seeing well-thought out comments on various friends' pages with reasons why they felt that participating in this particular meme was folly, and fairly useless folly at that.  And it's made me rethink my decision to post the meme, though to delete it has a feeling about it of  making a different statement, one that I wouldn't want to make.  So I'm leaving the original GR post up, but posting this link to one of the better analyses of why it's not such a great idea, over on <lj user="oursin">'s LJ.

http://oursin.livejournal.com/533546.html

Found via ginmar:

Pass it around
Gay Rights
"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?" - Ernest Gaines

We would like to know who really believes in gay rights on LiveJournal. There is no bribe of a miracle or anything like that. If you truly believe in gay rights, then repost this and title the post as "Gay Rights". If you don't believe in gay rights, then just ignore this. Thanks.

[like D'oh!]

Pass it around.

What an utter shock to turn to Making Light this morning only to read the news of Mike Ford's sudden passing.

Though I only knew him, really, from reading his incredible posts on Making Light, and a few of his books, and met him once or twice briefly at cons when passing in the halls, there are few writers whose loss has hit me so hard. I attribute this partly to knowing that he was elisem's beloved Mr. Ford, but more to the fact that he revealed himself in all his works, the poems, the pastiches, the passing comments, the essays, to be a rare and golden soul, with the true poet's eye for capturing the essence of a thing in a few perfect words, and the humor, the creativity, with, the actinic brilliance of his vision, the...anyone who's read Ford knows what I have no words for, and anyone who doesn't know his work -- could do no better than go to

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008033.html#008033

and read some of the hoard of Ford-words they have linked there.

It was an honor and a privilege to share the planet with him, as it is an honor to be part of the species that gave us Shakespeare, Donne, and other great writers.

I have two little photos of Mr. Ford that I took at Wiscon this past May:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aitchellsee/sets/72157594299227622/with/160340895/


May light perpetural shine upon him.

Ever since I bought my first elisem necklace, "Wyatt's Cat" (see icon) at Noreascon two years ago, I've been under the spell of the beadses.

I found myself going to bead shops here in NYC and when visiting friends, say in Columbus OH, and ordering beads from eBay, and joining elisem's BOtM group, and I'd accumulated A Whole Bunch of Beads, but with the exception of a few pair of earrings for myself and friends, and one pendant for a friend (simple -- 1 bead on cord, so it doesn't really count) and watching elisem whenever I could at various cons, especially last month at LaconIV, I still hadn't been able to really sit down and make anything with them. Until recently.

Then, thinking about Jo Walton's book Farthing and the book launch party she was planning to host in Montreal, and the fact that she was filling in at Elise's booth at Noreascon when she helped me pick out "Wyatt's Cat", and the number of blue beads I'd accumulated over time, things just fell together and something clicked. I found myself putting together my first major bead project, a necklace for Jo that incorporated as many blue beads as I could pick out of my stash, a trio of pre-decimal British coins that matched the titles of her alternate history trilogy, and a scattering of BOtM beads that blended with the theme. I called it "This Farthing P[iece]" after the line from the book in which alternate-Churchill was reputed to have said "This Farthing Peace isn't worth a farthing".

And on the Amtrak ride up to Montreal I committed a second necklace, with Fishies (no pictures yet).

And then when I got home, I made another necklace, No. 3, for my sister-in-law who had hip replacement surgery the week before. And you can see the results here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aitchellsee/252131599/in/set-72157594298723555/

Last weekend I went up to Montreal for Jo Walton's "Farthing Party" mini-convention cum book launch party for her newest novel, Farthing.  I had a terrific time, putting faces to names and meeting new people and seeing a bit of Montreal as well as enjoying some great discussions of books and ideas -- to say nothing of the music at the launch party on Saturday night.  I'll post more of a con report later (and maybe my Worldcon report as well) but now that I've finally uploaded my FarthingParty pictures to Flickr it seemed wise to get this up here before time slips away from me :-)

Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aitchellsee/sets/72157594294905380/

A temporary thingie while I finish thinking up my Worldcon report and take the redeye out of my worldcon pix

Edited to say: bother, that doesn't work at all right...sorry to intrude nasty html-stuff into your Friends Pages..I've deleted the thingie.

O Growl. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

So I was attempting to find a room through Travelocity.com, and they were showing availability at some hotels Very Very Very close to the convention hotels ;-) and I was trying to put through a reservation -- this is the sort of travelocity hotel reservation where they have you prepay the full room charges plus taxes etc, I believe it's coming out of some block of rooms reserved _by Travelocity_ for their customers, anyway I got all the way through giving them my credit card info et al, and waiting for it to process,  when it suddenly flashed a red notice that said "this hotel no longer available"...so I went back and tried to pick a different room, only THIS time it said my card wouldn't go through, and perhaps it was because la-la-la-TMI, so I called my bank to check, and Lo and behold! what had happened but a hold for the first (fairly large sum, about as much as if I was taking a double or triple room at the Hilton under con rates) had been placed on my account by Travelocity already.  And by the time I found this out, and got through to a Travelocity customer service rep, and she'd called my bank, and we'd jointly been transferred to the Authorizations dept, the bankers had ended their Sunday afternoon hours (31 minutes earlier) so now I have to wait til Monday and make sure they release the hold ("but it's not an approval, it's just a hold" saith the Customer Service Rep, and I semi-snarl But It's Still A Hold On MY MONEY Which May Keep Me From Getting A Room At My Preferred Hotel....

Ah well. So it goes. 

Oh no!

I've finally worked out my schedule of Real Life so that I can definately attend Worldcon, and got my plane tickets in hand (well, e-tickets printed out and stowed safely where I can't loose them) when what should I discover but -- oops! I never finished converting my Supporting Membership to an Attending -- I think that at various cons,  I chose to stand instead on the Interaction line, and the (what's Next-Year-In-Nippon called again?) line, and the Columbus in 2008 pre-support line, thinking that I'd have plenty of time and would surely remember to take care of it at another con, or by mail, and Oops!  Now it's here, and I'll have to fork over $160 more at The Door (but it's all for a good cause, right?)

Also -- does anybody still need (or know anyone who still needs) another sentient being to share room costs? I'm a reasonably mild-mannered middle-aged non-smoking spinster (have drop spindle, will travel), straight but not narrow, a night-owl but not a party animal, with reasonable amounts of cat-hair lurking on my belongings, and fairly quiet except when I'm asleep (or so I'm told). Lights and noise (or even a modicum of tobacco smoke)  don't bother me tho.  I'll be in Anaheim from the 23rd through the morning of the 28th.

(goes away to study the latest travel advisories from the DHS and TSA)