Busy
And another weekend flies by, just like that.
I have lots of things to post, but keep not having time to post them. Started the weekend by writing up a twenty-item to-do list; did about five of those, but added about ten more to the list over the course of the weekend.
I will say that the Fire Arts Festival was spectacular; more specifically, the fire-tornado people were there again, and that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. I stood watching it in astonishment and awe for as long as they kept going, twice that night. (And being slightly seared by the heat whenever they directed a tall twisting column of red and gold flame toward my general direction.)
I was worried that having gone through my father's smoke-damaged house would make me twitchy about fire, but, y'know, fire can be both dangerous and beautiful. I have no desire at all to do the things with fire that people there were doing, but some of it was mighty cool. And some was funny (and also scary)—like the Dance Dance Immolation game, where an audience member could put on a silver flame-resistant suit and play DDR on a big screen, and if they made too many mistakes a gout of flame would blast out at them. Also, there were giant towers sending jagged spikes of lightning ten or twenty feet in every direction. Kam and I took a bunch of photos and brief videos, and at some point maybe I'll even post some of them online. Oh, and we ran into Morrisa and her visiting cousin (?); was nice to see them too.
The rest of the weekend involved such activities as trying unsuccessfully to help Lola move (she and the others she'd recruited to help were all done by the time we got there), looking at air conditioners at Sears, and watching the first few episodes of season 3 of West Wing, including the famous 9/11 episode.
Warring impulses: on the one hand, I want to write lots more here, but on the other hand I really need to go read submissions. I'll settle for one more thing (unrelated to any of the above): I recently read Clovermead, a YA fantasy by David Randall. (I went to college with David; he was probably the best fiction writer I knew there.) I confess I had been a little hesitant about reading the book, which is part of why it took me a year to get around to reading it, but now that I've read it, I think it's pretty good. The opening chapters are charming; Clovermead (a 12-year-old daughter of an innkeeper, who longs for Adventure) reminds me a little of Amy from Amy Unbounded. And things get significantly darker later in the book, in some interesting ways. Parts of the plot are a little predictable, and some of the complexity of the religious stuff goes away toward the end, but overall I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.
Okay, enough. Time to go read subs.
Btw, I seem to have finally gotten over my illness from last week.
