Filling the Well

Quite the exciting weekend, I must say. Yesterday I went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival, an event near and dear to my heart. I worked at a food booth there for two and a half summers during college. I’d spend all day behind a counter hawking in a bad English accent (until I came back from living in England, after which I couldn’t do an English accent at all) and come home smelling like grease and cleaning dirt out of my nose. (see faire boogers.) And I loved it. I loved just being at the festival, hearing the music, eating the food, gawking at the wares, meeting the people. I worked right across from one of the stages and learned all the songs (I was at a pub in Dublin and when the band played “Whiskey in the Jar” I started singing along, and the other Americans I was with were like, “How the hell do you know this?”), Ded Bob’s entire act, and could see the royal procession pass. The Festival is all the best parts of pretending to be in a pseudo-historical fantasy world.

I still love it. Only now instead of working I run around and spend money. This year, I listened to more musical acts and even picked up a few CDs, which I’ve never done before. But the music was very good. A drum and bagpipe group called Celtic Legacy did a danceable version of “Amazing Grace” that seriously kicked ass.

It’s fun seeing what’s changed in the 15 years since I worked there. One big thing: “Pirates of the Caribbean” has changed the Festival forever. There’s even a guy dressed like Captain Jack Sparrow running around, singing “A Pirate’s Life For Me” at the pirate tavern. Beowulf clothing used to have basic pants, shirts and vests (basic guy Ren Faire outfit) hanging on display out front, with fancier doublets and such tucked away inside. Now, it’s all frock coats and poet shirts out front. And then at another booth, shaped like a pirate ship, I saw this:

Can someone tell me the difference between real pirate costumes and fake pirate costumes?

I added a convention: OSFest, in Omaha, Nebraska, July 11-13. So don’t say I never get out east! Okay, sort of east… from here it’s east… never mind.

You’ll also notice I’ve added a page to the sidebar listing my whole upcoming convention and signing calendar. I hope this is helpful.

Now, off to work! Or I could go outside and smell the lilacs and enjoy the weather. I live near a couple of lakes, except they’re actually drainage/irrigation ponds. During the winter, the flow to them gets cut off and they dry up completely. It’s very sad and I hate it, because instead of lakes, they turn into big ugly dry pits. Well, last week the irrigation flow started up again, and one of them had filled halfway up, and I bet the other one is starting to fill, too. I want to go look and see what birds have settled in!

…to folks in Colorado. Remember yesterday when I bragged about how nice the weather was?

Well, today we have this:

Sorry, guys. My bad.

Yesterday we had the first real hint of the summer to come. I was out in a t-shirt, my place got a little too warm. Trees are blossoming, I saw a goldfinch — signs of color coming back into the world. It even smelled like summer.

But right now, it has just begun to snow. The true sign of spring around here.

Believe it or not, I almost minored in geology in college. If one of the requirements hadn’t been physical geology — calculating the vectors of plate tectonics and stuff — I would have. I really liked scrambling around hillsides, looking at rocks, and figuring out how the world was put together. The geology where I live is fabulous.

This geological map gives you a great visual of the region. You have to use your imagination a bit. All that yellow and green to the right of the map is prairie. Flat, for the most part, with a few rolling hills, gullies cut by creeks, that sort of thing. Think classic waving grasses, ranchland, buffalo, and you’ve got it. The same sort of prairie stretches east a thousand miles to the Mississippi River. That dark blue and green line running down the middle? That’s a series of hills made up of sedimentary rock that’s been uplifted to almost vertical layers. This forms the Flatirons west of Boulder, among other things. (Red Rocks Amphitheater and Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs are part of the same formation.) That layer is like this big wall, almost literally, standing to the west of the great American Prairie, rising something like five thousand feet straight up. Elevation at the highest points here is about 10,000. All that gray in the middle is the Rocky Mountains. Big, ancient granite peaks. Toward the upper left corner you’ll see Longs Peak and Mt. Meeker. Longs Peak is a Fourteener. Where I live in Boulder is 5500 feet. There’s almost 10,000 feet of vertical rise in maybe 30 miles of straight travel. It’s so cool.

This is also the region where Kitty lives. So when Kitty (and any of us around here) talk about “going up to the mountains,” this is what we’re talking about.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! A day late, I know… I didn’t post yesterday because, well, I was lazy.

I am 1/8 Irish. Hardly seems worth mentioning at that point. In fact, I don’t have much Old World heritage to speak of. I’ve also got Swedish, Dutch, and German ancestors. And that’s just one side of the family. We have no clue what the other side is, except some mix of English, Welsh, and Irish. That’s me: a genuine product of the melting pot.

I used to think I didn’t have any kind of cultural heritage. As much as I tried to identify with the Irish (and Swedish, and English, and so on), I never felt a connection with those backgrounds. That and an Air Force brat childhood made me feel rootless. But a few years ago I realized I do have a strong identification with a specific heritage and culture: the American frontier. I have cowboys and Civil War vets in my family tree. Pioneers and homesteaders. The family photo album is filled with pictures of women in prairie dresses standing in front of clapboard houses on windswept plains. This is where I came from.

It may not be as venerable as Irish heritage, but it’s still proud and romantic, I think.

One of the things I like about Boulder is living a mile away from the Celestial Seasonings factory. I can drop by the factory/gift store anytime and raid the rejects bin (crushed boxes, too near expiration date, etc.) for cheap boxes of nice tea. Yesterday I scored boxes of Sleepytime, Honey Lemon Ginseng, and Raspberry Green. (They also do factory tours. Don’t miss the hermetically sealed mint room!)

Many people sent me this Get Fuzzy cartoon. I keep picturing someone throwing a tennis ball, and Kitty wolf just staring at it. Then staring at the person who threw it, with a look on her face like, “Yes? And?”

I’m contemplating a political post. Here’s the thing: I’ve been suffering a severe case of political Outrage Fatigue for about five years now. I just couldn’t get worked up about anything anymore. But the last couple of months, watching such viable Democratic candidates and watching the Republican Party implode under its own insane rhetoric (I call it sleeping in the bed they’ve spent the last twenty years making for themselves), have done something odd to me. I’ve started to feel…hope. It’s like a tickling in the chest. And this has reduced my Outrage Fatigue. Which means I’m feeling outraged all over again. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a guest blog post at Divas of the Dark. Roawr!

1. Tomorrow, I hit the road for Albuquerque for Saturday’s Wild Cards: Inside Straight event at Page One Books. 2 pm! Meet many authors! Get books signed!
2. Lovevampires.com has posted a new interview with me.
3. It snowed yesterday! Real, big, fluffy, pretty snow! Then it stopped! Today it’s sunny and beautiful. This is why I love Colorado.
4. Tuesday at fencing practice, I got smacked by an epee, right on the funny bone. I couldn’t move my arm for like a minute. Everyone laughed. That was when I realized why it’s called the funny bone — it’s because everyone else thinks it’s funny.
5. I got nuthin’. I’m in that state of trying to get done everything I said I was going to get done by the end of the month. Guess what? It’s the end of the month! Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

I was wrong, it snowed yesterday, for about ten minutes. Total accumulation: like two millimeters.

But when I went to the movies, it was blizzarding at the theater, ten miles away. Huge, big, beautiful flakes, blowing snow, and dangerous driving conditions.  Still no snowy love for my neighborhood.

I saw “Cloverfield” because I loved the previews. So cheeky. And it was way better than “The Blair Witch Project.” That’s not saying much because I loathed “The Blair Witch Project.” (Not because of the camera work, but because the characters were idiots who brought their deaths upon themselves. That’s not scary.)

There’s a paradox inherent in this kind of film experiment, and it was very apparent in this one. The jerky handicam visuals are supposed to add realism. But when the story itself is so well structured, and some of the thematic elements so well thought out (I really loved the way it cut in and out of a previous video of a trip to Coney Island that the current film is taping over), it undermines that realistic “in the moment” atmosphere. I don’t know that there’s a way to get around that.

Armchair director time: Even though it was only 90 minutes, I would have ended it about 15 minutes early. It was like a Saturday Night Live sketch that goes on just a little too long. And I wouldn’t have shown so much of the monster. The really scary bits were just seeing bits and flashes, and not knowing if it was a monster, a giant robot, or what. And running by a medical triage unit, hearing agonized screaming, but not being able to see what was really happening. But by the last half hour, it looked like a standard monster/disaster flick, we saw exactly what we were up against, and it was just a matter of waiting for everyone to die.

And what is it with Hollywood’s love of destroying Manhattan?

Earlier this week, the forecast called for snow yesterday.

There was no snow.

Instead, we had frigid, awful, biting cold, the kind of cold where I can’t walk Lily for more than 10 minutes without my nose going numb. I can put up with the cold — if there’s snow to go along with it. But there was no snow.

The forecast calls for “flurries” tomorrow. I’m not holding my breath.

My prediction: I’m going to bitch and moan about getting no snow for another six weeks. Then, sometime in March, we’ll get one of those sudden, unpredictable blizzards that drops four feet of snow in an afternoon.

Then I will complain about too much snow.