Bill Roper's Journal

The prize for not going to Capricon is the opportunity to get some things done around the house this weekend.

We'll see how that goes...

It all starts with getting K to rehearsal tomorrow morning. Happily (for me), it is Gretchen's turn.

The windshield of Gretchen's minivan was a casualty of an errant foul ball at Saturday's softball game. The windshield repair service has been booked and a replacement windshield will be installed tomorrow morning.

Because of this, I will be taking a trip off to Home Depot to acquire some more of the mounting strips for the I-Pass transponder so that it can go back onto the new windshield just as soon as possible. I note that our transponder was scheduled to expire in 11/20, but -- since we've received no notification from the Tollway that it needs to be replaced -- I'm going to assume that expiration date has become obsolete post-COVID. Since I'm going to Home Depot, Gretchen has asked me to hunt down marigolds in the garden section to join the rest of the cavalcade of flowers on the back patio, so I'll take care of that in a few minutes.

Earlier today, we went to Sam's Club and I found a couple of nice steaks that I'll be grilling for Father's Day dinner, along with a steak that we've rescued from the freezer for K. Hmm. I still need other bits for dinner, so I guess I'll stop at the grocery store on the way home from Home Depot. :)

Grilling is going to become marginally more complex in the future, as we use newspaper as fire starter in the chimney, as well as to line Ruby's kennel. While I have over a hundred unread copies of the Chicago Tribune in my garage, we are going to eventually deplete the supply, as I canceled my subscription to the Trib this morning in the wake of the Alden buyouts. I felt a little sorry for the fellow on the end of the phone line this morning when I called to cancel (which appears to be the only way to do it), as he sounded like he had taken a *lot* of phone calls. He asked why I was canceling and I explained that I had a hundred unread copies of the Trib in my garage and that, honestly, you would have to pay *me* to read their remaining columnists. He said he would pass along the feedback.

Gretchen and I had lunch today over at City Barbeque in Park Ridge, where I tried the Chipotle BBQ sandwich, which was quite tasty. I like City BBQ, but I still miss Ted's.

In other news, in and around laundry last night, I downloaded the latest Cubase point update, which seems to have cleared up a lot of stability issues with the point-zero release. The big demo that they sent ran well. Then I pulled up the tracks from the Thieving Magpies concert at Capricon last year. That sounded good too and wasn't trying to crash the machine.

So, having pulled that up and listened to it, a rapid mixdown copy went off to my cohorts in crime today. :)

Ok, off to Home Depot and the grocery store...

I (and the rest of the Capricon committee, along with the Long (Distance) Play concom which is six hours in our future) have officially gone off duty for now, although the Virtual Capricon Dead Goat filk sing is now entering its eighth hour. :)

As the Capricon filk head, I would like to thank everyone who made this happen. This includes all of the people at Capricon who made the tech work, because without the tech, we would have been absolutely nowhere.

I would like to thank our guest of honor, Dr. Cacophonie Tamayo, who played a lot of great music, led panels and theme filks, and who I saw listening whenever I looked in the circle.

I'd like to thank our guest moderators for the open filk (U.S. side of the pond): Merav, Carole, Jesse, and Alyssa, who kept things running smoothly.

I would like to especially thank Xap, our Cafe head, for the incredible amount of work that she did to make the filk track run, as well as Pat, who worked with her to make all of these things happen.

And I would like to thank Lissa and Marilisa (as well as Annie) from Long (Distance) Play for being willing to work together with us across a wide ocean so that we could, with a minimum number of seams, produce a lot of filk programming for our fannish community.

And I would like to thank all of *you* for coming.

I am going to go to bed now. :)

We're in the middle of the Friday Cafe concert schedule for our virtual Capricon. Come on by and drop in!

Progress was made on Capricon things today, which was good, although I still have more pushing to do. But progress is progress. :)

In other news, I figured out how to attach the boom mic stand that I got for Christmas to my desk. Unfortunately, it turns out that the best choice is to attach it to the *front* of the desk, which means that I really don't want to *leave* it there, so I figured I'd unmount it and put it in the closet.

Now the closet in my office (which is also Gretchen's sewing room) is a bit of a mess. Actually, the big problem is the debris field that we've allowed to accumulate in front of it, which we just need to process and make go away. But within the last few weeks, K and Gretchen were looking for fabric for a Christmas project that K wanted to do, so they were trying to get into the largely blockaded closet. I conclude that K tried pushing the closet door in a direction that was blocked, because when I went to move that door today, it really didn't want to move.

A short inspection indicated that the doohickey that lets the door hang from the track had been ripped half out of its socket by brute force. (Which is why I suspect K in this.) Great. I figured I would unmount it and take a good look at it to see if it could be repaired or whether it needed to be replaced. I unscrewed it from the door and the doohickey split into two pieces. The good news is that it could be reassembled, tightened, and fastened back to the door with the original screws and holes, aided and abetted by a unshelved loose-leaf binder from the debris field which made a fine classical plane which, when shoved under the door, elevated the unsupported end of the door to the right height.

So all things are reassembled now, except the debris field now looks like the Incredible Hulk has rampaged through it (as I was not at all gentle about getting things out of my way), so maybe we should look at putting all this stuff away tomorrow.

Somewhere. :)

I am still not nearly back to 100%, but I am largely functional today, save for my voice, which is going to be a longer recovery project, and the continuing need to clear crap out of my lungs. Overall, this makes me happy. :)

In other news, the last meeting for the 2020 Capricon was today, so that's cleaned up and done with.

If I can just finish printing stuff out, I can get packed and get on my way back to Capricon.

Damn slow PDF printing...

I am working on pulling the last of the music schedule for Capricon together.

I hate deadlines.

On the other hand, they are powerful motivating tools.

Time to pack the van. And the car.

We'll see how this goes. :)

I have now entered descriptions for all of the music-related items (and SpaceTime Theater!) in the Capricon programming database which is being used to generate the dynamic content for the program book.

Tomorrow.

Publications Will Not Kill Me.

(But they will make me stronger.)