nosrednayduj

I just sent this to the organizers of NEFFA. Mostly I had a good time but there was one obnoxious interaction at the start that kind of colored everything.

I have been dancing contras on and off for about 30 years; I have been dancing western squares for longer than that and much more consistently. When I last danced contras, there was this newfangled terminology called "larks and robins" for what has traditionally been gender-based roles in dancing (often said as ladies and gents), but it was only used by a few groups.

Evidently this has caught on, and I was surprised by it when I attended NEFFA this year. I would guess my previous NEFFA was in 2017. Before my first set at this year's festival, I acquired a partner who presented as male, and told them that I'd prefer the girl's role. They were offended, and abandoned me as the line was forming. I think that's on them – they could have explained the new wording and how it relates to the traditional roles. Maybe it's not new to them. Fortunately, somebody who didn't have a partner and knew me through square dancing saw this happen and was able to rescue me by offering to be my partner for that set. They explained the roles (specifically, that I wanted to be a robin) and following that I had an enjoyable evening.

I just poked around on the NEFFA website looking for a way that I might have been not surprised, and I didn't find one. In fact, I found some information saying that "we use larks and robins", but not giving the etymology, so that somebody who prefers the robin role would know which one to say when somebody asked. Of course, "I know how to dance contras" so I did not look for anything about contra dancing before attending the festival, and I did not attend the "intro to contra" either. So the fact that this information is missing would not have changed my experience.

I'm not sure what the TL;DR here is: I don't know if anybody except the person who got offended could have helped me out with the new terminology without this strange socially awkward event. In fact, they told me that they didn't think I belonged at the dance before walking away. I do not believe that opinion is shared by any other person with whom I danced for the entire evening, be it as a partner or a neighbor.

I went to the annual board game event in Vermont, which I'm blogging about so I remember in January to put it in my "places I slept" list; some previous year I forgot, and nearly missed it. (Some things are important? Not really.)

I had a good time; there was board gaming, there was square dancing, I brought my bicycle and biked to New Hampshire (it's only 4 miles away). I successfully charged the Kia at a random fast charging place in Lebanon NH on the way there. This particular place was selected because it's halfway to Montréal, where I am going in July for a square dance, and there's some thought about using my car for the trip, carpooling with some others. So I wanted to make sure that it would actually work out.

Anyway, on the way home we passed under two separate protests on overpasses, saying things like "no liars war" in three foot-high letters attached to the overpass fencing, one on 89 and one on 93. I managed to see both of them in time to give little supportive toots.

The dance was great. One of the callers was kind of too hard for my little pea brain, and apparently also for a number of other people's little pea brains, but there was a lot of stuff that I did understand in real time and able to execute, and there were a lot of good moments of teamwork, getting the whole square to do all the parts, and not just one person pushing, but really working together where some people understood some parts and were able to explain them well enough in tiny soundbites to get other people to understand other parts and really make the whole thing work.

I wanted to put my feet in the ocean this trip, since two years ago I had failed due to weather. Somebody said there was a nice restaurant on the beach that had its own parking lot (parking is always an issue) and we could go there. 6 people wanted to go, so we split into 2 cars, with one other person was assigned to my car to help navigate. The other car got going a few minutes before the two of us got going. The other person didn't really know where she was going, and was just using Google, which was fine, until it ran us into a traffic jam that seems to be being solved by the cars ahead of us making three-point turns and coming back the way from which they had come. When we got to the head of the line, we discovered that there were barricades across the road, so we made a three-pointer etc.

We called the other car, they had successfully arrived at the restaurant, and were giving us various advice about which roads to try, and we tried one and then we tried another and then we discovered there was another thing that was blocked off and then we went really far east so that we could get around it, and then we were on the south side and that should work, but it didn't, and there were cops everywhere and it was just a mess. Turned out it was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Nevermind that it was really pi day. Anyway, at some point the two of us realized that we weren't getting there in time to have lunch and get back to the dance, so we bailed and went somewhere else that was quick. Bummer. Sunday, there was not a St. Patrick's Day parade, and the two of us and one of the people in the rest of the group who actually liked this place a lot so happy to go again did succeed in going, so I got the beach view experience at this restaurant. And I got my feet wet.

But, since I didn't know that that was going to work out, on Saturday evening I said to some people "I want to go to the beach this evening after dinner" and a couple of them said "sure that sounds like fun let's do that". So we had dinner and we headed towards LAX because there's a giant parking lot on the beach very close to the airport. We dodged some airport traffic successfully and were heading towards the beach when we discovered a road closure with a lot of police activity. Didn't seem like a time for a parade. So we tried to dodge the closed road, and we discovered a giant amount of traffic. There's a lot of hills right near the ocean in some places, so we were able to see down to the actual beach from the road we were on, and there was this enormous crowd and a lot of lights and more police cars which seemed more like security as they didn't have their lights going, and a ton of traffic where we were, apparently trying to find parking and/or get down to the beach area with the crowd, and we were like "we don't really want to be here; we don't know what this crowd is all about, but we just want to walk on the beach", so another three-pointer. After about 15 minutes we got away from the horribleness and found a place where there was a beach, with less parking but we were able to park legally, and I got to get my feet wet on Saturday evening as well as Sunday afternoon. It was extremely foggy, so that contributed to the delay, because you couldn't really go fast even if it wasn't heavy traffic. Fortunately it's not like I had anything else to do that evening.

Here's hoping that traffic is not insane tomorrow morning when I am driving to LAX. There could be some excitement returning the rental car, because they have just opened, and I mean just, it was the first day when I rented my car on Friday, a new consolidated rental car center for the airport. I hope there are signs. I did see some signs when we were returning from the beach, though I'm not planning to go that route, so hopefully it will in fact work out.

I spent the weekend at the Tech Squares annual square dance weekend, where I had a blast. There was dancing on ice skates, dancing to pre-recorded stuff from the 1950s, dancing to silly hacks that people invented, just regular plus dancing, higher level dancing, board gaming, jigsaw puzzles, chatting with people I only see once a year, chatting with people I see more often than that, decent food, and not enough sleep.

Somebody had brought a Rubik's 4x4 cube, and I learned that I have forgotten everything I knew about what to do with the centers. At some point I had edges and corners solved and was making progress on the centers, but slowly, because the thing I was doing did more than I wanted it to, so I tried to figure out what I needed to do to be more restrictive in what changes my moves made, and of course ended up messing it up completely. Then I repeated that situation, and then I got into a mess where I couldn't solve the edges, and the centers were still a mess. Then I gave the cube back. Maybe I will get mine out and spend some of my retirement re-deriving how to do this.

The new car went 220 miles and returned with 24% left in the batteries. It's "guess-o-meter" is moderately accurate.

I found out about the whole bombing Iran thing while I was away, but mostly was not looking at any news sources and stuck my head in the sand about it til I got home. Today I clicked around for protests, and I found one, this evening in Boston. I would say there were 200-300 people there. This one was also put on by the socialists, like a previous one. Some decent speakers. The MC was pretty good at getting everybody to cheer at the right times and he led us in a number of chants. After an hour of rallying we started marching. I don't know what the destination was, because after 40 minutes of walking, it seemed we were getting further away from the train station, and when it was 15 minutes away and there was a train in 20 minutes, I got my phone to give me walking directions and, like a dork, I just stuck it in my pocket and had it announce things like "your next turn is in 1000 feet". Walking is often faster than taking public transit, and more reliable (assuming your feet work, which surprisingly, after dancing them off all weekend, mine did). I'm sure I would've missed the train if I'd taken transit, even though I walked past a couple of T stations.

After meeting with my fidelity representative a couple of times, we have concluded that I have enough money in retirement + Social Security to retire (assuming that they fix the SS problem by 2033). So I am stepping back from the brink of the job market cesspool. I have toned down my LinkedIn profile, and written various announcements (like this one, not that any of you are going to offer me a job), and started replying "nevermind" to recruiters (none of them really had a job I wanted anyway).

I realized that it's been five months since my last Covid vaccine, and I'm about to go to two separate square dance weekends, the first in two weeks, so I went and got jabbed this afternoon.

Then I took the train into Boston for an action which was billed as a "Valentine's Day Vigil for Dignity and Freedom" (never mind that it's actually Abe Lincoln's birthday). They were having a vigil in support of incarcerated women, and protesting against a proposed a new women's prison. They say, correctly, that the money could be better spent on community support, in particular support so that people don't do crimes just to survive. Stop the pipeline. And a couple of "fuck ICE"s thrown in for good measure. They had some good speakers, many of them were young people. They had a chorus leading us in songs (starting with "this little light of mine"). At the end when it got dark they handed out little electric candles for the vigil part.

This weekend I am going to Boskone just for Saturday. I haven't been to Boskone in many years, but it seemed to have interesting things on the schedule. Decided to go just for the day rather than spending on a hotel room. Also not plugged into the volunteers and I probably would get bored if I were there all 3 days without filling time with volunteering. Next winter when there's no Arisia, we'll see if I go to more of Boskone.

Yesterday was supposed to be some "work stoppage walkout between 2 and 3" protest. That was easy; my work was stopped already.

Separately, there was a rally in Boston at 5 PM. So I decided to go to the square dance on Tuesday (which I rarely attend) and go to the rally beforehand. It was pretty well attended for being 20° and dropping; I would guess 500-1000? They had a bunch of speakers, two of whom were high school students who had participated in the walkout. Apparently hundreds of high school students walked out. The school administration was not supportive, and they were irritated about that fact. One of them spoke quite well. At 6 PM we marched from Copley Place to Boston Common shouting various slogans as usual. Then I took the T to MIT for the dance and had a good time.

Best sign: "the wrong ice is melting; the wrong Amazon is burning"

I went to the International Gay Square Dance Convention over Fourth of July weekend. They had over 800 attendees! Not all of them were gay; many were allies or some other form of queer. And many of them were excellent dancers (not all, but enough). And I had an awesome time. Next year's is in Montréal. I'm sad about the timing of this convention, because it interferes with seeing Fourth of July fireworks. (Third of July in my town.) I did not go see fireworks in San Francisco, because it would've been quite the trek, taking a bus up to pier 39. So instead, before I left I discovered that there were some July 2 fireworks near my house, but the place you viewed them from was an extremely well lit parking lot, which kind of washed them out. I took a couple of pictures but they are pretty lame. And next year's convention is July 1-5, so I don't know. Maybe there will be fireworks for Canada Day? (Maybe I should decide that fireworks are bad for the planet?)

San Francisco has gotten to be as expensive as New York! I was glad I had brought little instant oatmeal packets and an immersion heater; it torques me to pay $20 for breakfast.

Today I rented a car and drove down to San Jose to hang out with some people from work. That was fun, meeting people who I only ever seen over WebEx. I didn't actually do any work; there had been some thought that I would, but it didn't happen.

The car rental is kind of annoying; I had reserved an electric car, but when I got there "they are all being charged". I was like "okay, how fully charged are they? Because I don't need them to be 100% charged today". So the agent called back, but was told to call a different station, and nobody answered at that different station and we waited a little while, meanwhile he went ahead and completed the rental process for a gas car; I had said I wanted the smallest one possible, and I got a Nissan Versa, which isn't exactly tiny, and my guess is it will get the usual 30 mpg that pretty much every car gets these days. Anyway, at some point I decided to stop waiting, so I could proceed down to San Jose and have my lunch date. The agent had said "we are required to provide electric cars", which must mean there's some California law about that. But I guess they don't need to provide them in a timely fashion, or at the time that your reservation starts.

After I was done in San Jose, I drove back up to Millbrae for my next hotel reservation, and as I was passing signs for Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, I decided on a lark to drive up it, since that had been the access road to our house in Los Altos Hills. And then I continued up it and drove down Skyline Boulevard and looked at the view of the ocean and the bay from the crest. So I wasted some gas, because it wasn't exactly efficient, driving up a 2000 foot elevation gain. It's hard to believe that I used to bicycle up that hill. I don't know if I could do it today. 2000 feet gain in 11 miles.

Pretty, though, and I got to drive through some microclimate bits where there were tall pine trees that got good foggy watering and various other different vegetation things that must happen with different amounts of water, being a nice contrast from the brown hills dotted with live oaks.

Now that I am in a much cheaper accommodation, of course they provide free breakfast. And free Internet. (The convention had arranged for free Internet, but it's not the default in those expensive hotels.)

Rode my 1000th mile for the year today. In fact, ended at 1001. Just about halfway through the year so that's about right; fortunately summer is longer than winter (that pesky February), so I shouldn't be concerned about making 2000, even though I'm about to have 8 days with no bicycling due to travel.

Getting ready for my trip to the International Gay Square Dance Convention in San Francisco on July 3. Which means that I will miss fireworks here. I vaguely clicked on fireworks in San Francisco and it looks like I will have to travel some distance to see them. I'll have to look at the schedule and decide whether or not I would prefer to see fireworks or dance at 9:30 on the fourth. (They don't have the caller schedule on the website yet.)

Annoyingly, I have to get some money back from Dollar rent a car; they weren't able to just add my loyalty number on the website, so they canceled my reservation and remade it with the loyalty number. And they said they would refund it. It's now been like six weeks, and I've made like three calls. It's like ridiculous but I guess I have to call them again.

Following up on earlier postings; Ken got over his Covid, but gave it to Perry on the way (who is also better). I managed to not get it. I did get to go to the second weekend event, which was a games party in Vermont. Unfortunately Perry was still testing positive at that time and so he did not get to go. Posting this mostly so that I can put a trips tag on it so that in January I will be able to find all the places that I actually took trips to this year.

Hm, looks like I also forgot to mention my square dance in Troy NH first weekend of March! Editing to do so. I had a blast.

Check it out!

https://www.olum.org/yduj/garage/

Last weekend I went to the "Fall Challenge Weekend", held in Vermont and organized and attended by various people associated with MIT Tech Squares. I often don't go, because it is quite a long drive; just about four hours with a stop to charge the car. But this time I went, because I wanted to be distracted from the current political situation. It did an extremely good job of that. Pretty much everybody who was there was in agreement and pretty much nobody talked about it.

Not only that, the dancing was awesome, and there were some fun boardgames and jigsaw puzzles. A lot of the attendees are queer in some form or another, so I danced with boys and girls and everything in between, and took the boy and the girl dance role randomly throughout the weekend.

The food was meh and the housing is dorm style and also meh but I coped.

I brought my bicycle and rode my 2000th mile. There wasn't actually that much time to bike in between all the dance things I wanted to do (and the fact that the sun sets before 4:30 makes the hour before dinner not useful for this purpose). Mostly the bike was useful for commuting to and from the level 2 charger about 3 miles away. The place is on a lake, and there is a 6-mile loop around the lake, which has some steep-ish bits, but is a reasonable ride. There are some spur roads coming off of that loop, some of which are dead ends, but before they get to their dead end, they go straight up! I am not used to that level of steepness. So I didn't get very far up the spurs. I've been up some of them before, and they seemed to be steeper this time. Possibly because the other times I've gone it was warmer (this is held at the same place as the spring gaming weekend). I seem to have a little trouble moving dense air in and out of my lungs, or at least that's what it feels like when I'm riding in the cold.

Earlier, we took the dock out the day after I posted about taking the sailboat out. It's been so dry, and they let the water run out of the lake in order to keep the downstream aquifers alive, thus the level has dropped, so we are just putting the canoe and kayak on the shore. Someday we will have to move them up on top of the wall.

Tomorrow, the garage people are supposed to come and demolish the existing floor! Fingers crossed that this project goes well.

I’m in nyc for a memorial service for a square dancer who died suddenly a few months ago. http://patrickross.life/

Drove down with friends last night. They got an expensive hotel room (tho they were proud it was less than $300), but I have a coworker who lives in manhattan who said I could crash there, so I took him up on that.

It’s really tiny; 3 guys, 3 bedrooms, tiny bathroom, small kitchen/laundry/living space. They have a futon-like object that folds (mostly) flat. It was surprisingly comfortable despite having a ridge where it folds; you just have to arrange yourself carefully. There’s also only window A/C in the bedrooms so it was kind of warm. Helpfully I’m fairly resistant to heat, and I actually slept really well!

It’s a little odd because all 3 of them are terribly introverted so they (even my host) disappeared into their rooms all evening (I arrived at 9pm) so it was a little like being in my own hotel room, reading my book till I was sleepy, then this morning eating the random food I’d brought after asking if they were the sort that never had any food in the fridge. I mean, they were polite in the 3 sentences I exchanged but that was it.

Off to explore Central Park for the morning (which is only a couple blocks away) and then figure out how to ride the subway to the memorial.

I continued to have a good time at the square dance convention, so much so that I signed up for next year in San Francisco. There were announcements of people having got Covid, but I crossed my fingers and continued to wear my mask for all dancing. After the announcement, a few more people started wearing masks. I did take it off while I was eating, a few times indoors with other people. I didn't try to do the two-fisted eating thing where you hold your mask in your off hand and stick it over your face every time you want to breathe in, using the dominant hand for wielding your fork.

Last night, 36 hours after getting food from a buffet line where there was no splatter shield, I had the incredible barfs. This is consistent with norovirus incubation time. I'm feeling better this morning, but I'm being cautious about what I eat. I just took a Metrix (nucleic amplification) Covid test on my housemate's suggestion, because pretty much anything can be a symptom of Covid, and it was negative. (I did take a Covid test when I arrived home, but I wouldn't have really caught it yet then. And apparently I haven't caught it yet now either.)

Here I am at the International Gay Square Dance Convention in Durham NC, where the dancing is fun and the weather is obnoxiously hot. I am reminded that I am terrible at small talk. I can chat for hours about a particular topic or with people I know well but it’s a little random if I have to hold up a conversation with a stranger. Some guy who I had just encountered in a square came over to sit next to me while I changed my shoes just kind of talking about how he’d lived in the Boston area years ago (my location is on my badge) and I had a hard time caring. And it caused me to not get lunch with people I did care about!

It’s all good, I’m having a good time.

I'm going on a trip! It's not as complicated a trip as I had hoped it would be, because we had to cancel the scuba diving plan due to impending storm in Southern California. Apparently visibility will suck and storm surge will suck and possibly bacteria counts will suck. So I'm going to come home a day early, which did not actually even cost any money to change my flight. Probably because I'm changing from a midday flight to a redeye, and therefore they are happier to possibly sell the midday seat for more money to somebody. Although, there weren't many seats left on the redeye. We will see how much the redeye sucks. It didn't suck as much as I expected it to when I took one to Germany over the summer.

However, there will still be vast complexity: I start by flying to Sacramento, renting an electric car, staying overnight in Roseville (30 miles from SMF), driving to sugar bowl ski area (82 miles), skiing most of the day, driving to Chico (121 miles), having dinner with my stepfather, staying overnight in Chico, stopping in at the assisted living place where my mom lived to say hi to the staff, driving to Sacramento airport, flying to LAX, renting another electric car, having dinner with a friend, and going to a square dance all weekend, culminating in the redeye home on Sunday.

I have scoped out charging stations for this ski plan, and it should work. I wish that there was a closer motel than Roseville. It sort of surprising that there isn't something in Auburn. Anyway, I will try to charge to 100% in Roseville, where there is a fast charging station a mile walk from the motel, so I will plug-in, walk to the motel, check in, mess with my stuff, walk back to the car where it will hopefully be fully charged, and go to sleep, so I can get up, hopefully early enough to charge again at the 70 mile mark before going up to the ski area so that I can make Chico without having to charge again. There's tons of charging in Chico, including supposedly at my hotel, except for the fact that the Internet says that charging station is under repair. Then it's 90 miles to Sacramento, and I have to return the car 70% charged (or pay $35), but there is a fast charging station at the gas station at the airport, and so I can just like eat my lunch or something while I wait. Or I can decide to pay the $35.

It will be much easier in LA, because I'm hardly going anywhere; the dance is fairly near the airport. I haven't even bothered to scope out charging stations yet.

So before the square dance that we had last weekend, we were supposed to covid test. Ken had a cold earlier, for which he had rapid tested and gotten a negative result. And then he felt better, but just in case he did the Cue test, which is one of those molecular tests, in addition to rapid test. Well, it was positive! Dang. So I tested with Cue, and I was negative, and also negative on rapid test, so I went to the dance. He did not go. He tested with Cue again the next day and was negative. He's been negative rapid test all along. So we think we might have had a false positive. Which is sad, because he missed a great dance.

It's that time of year. We decided that late fall waterskiing was not going to be a thing this year, and so rather than waiting until late November, we hauled the power boat on Saturday morning, just managing it before the rain started.

Today I did the winterizing project. I have the idea that last year I had written notes about this process, but searching on several different computers did not reveal any files with "winter" in their names. So I guess I never actually wrote the notes. Today, I came in and wrote little paragraphs after every step. So maybe next year it will go more smoothly. In fact, this year it went pretty smoothly, despite the fact that it was quite windy, which is a headache. You wipe your oily fingers on a paper towel and now you are holding a paper towel which you can't just put down or it will blow into the backyard. So you have to go find the little bag with the other oily paper towels, which is held down by a stone, because otherwise the whole bag will blow into the backyard. It was kind of nice not to be below freezing, which often happens when we haul it in late November. It did take about 4 hours total, though, which is kind of a long time.

The boat is still sitting in the driveway, uncovered. I decided at 3 PM that I wanted to ride my bicycle to the grocery store and then make dinner, rather than spending another probably more than an hour moving it and getting it covered. Unfortunately, now it's going to be weekdays, and it gets dark pretty early now, even though it is still daylight savings. We'll manage. I want to finish this before next weekend, because next weekend is the Berkshires square dance weekend, and thus we will be away.

My other activity for the weekend was to go to a games party yesterday afternoon. I played "Three Ring Circus", in which you have to build a circus out of different types of performer cards, and then put on performances to get victory points. There were kind of a lot of fiddly rules. I got confused about what I should focus on, and ended up with the least amount of victory points in the end. It was still fun. And themely! When people were deciding what games to play and who should play in which groups, and this game was floated, I said "I think I should be playing that game." And other people agreed that totally I should.

Then I played "Micropolis" which is about building ant colonies, in which you get victory points for different kinds of cards that you play and how they connect together, and there are rules about how you acquire these cards. I came in middle-of-the-road of five players. Finally, I played "Shake That City", which was a game of tile laying for creating a city, where you get points for different groupings of neighborhood tiles, and had a fascinating mechanism to restrict where and how you could lay tiles, to make it trickier. Surprisingly, I won that game.

Square dance is over. It was OK, but mixed. Multi-level dances have the problem that people "rise to their level of incompetence", because rather than dancing well at a particular level they get excited about moving on, and when that level is harder than they can actually achieve, well, they stay anyway... Callers are not motivated to tell them they're not ready to move on or that they should drop back. So it's kind of a problem. I'm lucky that I'm fairly competent at the highest level there is; there aren't really enough people to sustain a higher level. Anyway, there were also a lot of good dancers, and I was very happy to meet and dance with people I'd only seen on zoom. And it was fun to dance to callers I didn't know.

Dance ended at 1pm, so we scarfed some lunch in the hotel and took the train in to the city. First we stopped in at St. Bartholomew's Imperial cathedral, which was pretty impressive. Then we looked for a potty, and found a 50 cent potty. Sexism at work: men were free if they just wanted to pee.

Then we went down to the river and watched boats go by for 45 minutes before our scheduled boat. It was a nice hour boat ride, with descriptions in German and English of the sights we were seeing and some random history of the city. Which is exactly what I had in mind. Street food for dinner, and a trip up the Frankfurt Main Tower (note: Main is the name of the river, pronounced "mine", not meaning the essential item).

Then we wanted to improve our food supply in the room so we clicked on grocery near me, and walked towards it. It was kind of a "bad part of town"; lots of broken bottles on the street and sidewalks, graffiti, neer-do-well's hanging around, bars, casinos, and girlie shows. It seemed to me that there was a drug deal going on; I could see a guy cutting something up with a razor blade over by a closed storefront. After all that, the actual grocery store was closed because it's Sunday! But it was near the main train station, so we got ourselves tickets back towards the hotel. A little confusion on where the right platform was, because it's such a big station, but we managed. Hopefully tomorrow we'll manage to refill our supplies; we have enough food for a breakfast and we'll have lunch out being tourists.

Our hotel is right near the Frankfurt Stadium, and apparently there was a soccer game today. When we left at 2pm there was an enormous police presence at the train station, and also when we returned. There was a lot of shouting and cheering going on when we returned. We managed to walk a way that didn't involve swimming upstream against all the revelers leaving the game.

My feet are tired!

Whatever my G.I. illness was, I got better. I did the crazy plan about car retrieval and Perry pick up, and there was a nightmare of traffic due to tunnel closures and patriot preseason games, so it took an extra hour.

We had a two-couple zoom square dance here today – I mean, the caller was on zoom, and there were many other people on zoom who were dancing, but locally I managed to score 3 other people, so we had a full half square; I have sometimes done these with 2 people locally. Occasionally I have done them alone, but I don't find that to be fun. Sometimes I'll stop in and say hi to the other people briefly before the actual dancing starts if I would be alone. I will be dancing with some of the people in person in Germany next weekend, who I have only met on these zoom things, so that's very exciting.

Apparently I'm allowing zoom to train its AI on my data, because it asked me about accepting its new terms of service, and the Internet has been on about how it's going to be training it's AI on your calls. I did not read the terms, so I don't really know what they are. Bad me.

I'm in California.

After the delayed flight finally arrived, I had very late (for me) dinner and went to bed at my host's house. In the morning I did morning things, including a walk around their neighborhood with a stop at a convenience store to acquire Mountain Dew. Enjoyed this art, and also did not take a photo but there was a driveway which was covered in sidewalk chalk, and they'd had stencils, so it looked like a stained glass window.

There was a square dance at my host's house, which was supposedly a one square dance, but we had 16 people for C2, and preceding that we had 14 for plus, so it was quite a crowd. We did intro to hex with the plus dancers for part of it. Some of them are small children (okay, 10-year-olds), which is great. Perhaps there is hope for the activity after all. And we crammed a second square into their kitchen during a few of the C2 tips. A great time was had by all. Well, by me anyway.

And there was some gameplaying. I surprisingly came in second in Dominion, I had thought I was way further behind, and we also played some game whose name I've already forgotten, about path building, which was pretty good, and that one I won, which didn't completely surprise me; I think my planning-ahead skills are superior to 10-year-olds'.

Today I drove to Golden Gate Park where my mom's ashes are and walked around the tree in question, didn't see any sign of them, which is probably best. Said "goodbye mom" and admired some other nearby foliage. Then I headed to Sausalito where Jocelyn is performing with Flynn Creek Circus.

I got there early, and offered to "do stuff", since one of the problems with the traveling circus is that, because she has no car, it's hard to get stuff done when you are set up in a random park that is at least a mile walk from anything. So she gave me a shopping list, and I fulfilled it with two different stores. Then I picked up subway sandwiches for me, her, and her boyfriend, so they didn't have to worry about feeding themselves lunch. Unfortunately, the whole shopping expedition took a little longer than I had hoped, and so they only had 10 minutes to inhale before they needed to do show things.

I invited some of Clyde's relatives, and they thought it was great. Some other friends also came (I let them buy their own tickets), and they also thought it was great.

I did a little clandestine videoing of Jocelyn's main act, which she does not do every show. Every show she has a few acrobatic/clown sequences, but those were difficult to video without disturbing people behind me.

The rest of the show was also good: they have an amazing juggler, and a guy who does "card tricks" – it was really a whole magician act, but it was based on doing amazing things with playing cards in your hand. I hope they make a professional video of this show, because it would be great to see it again. I'm not really a fan of contortion, but their contortionists were very good.

The theme was a little odd: it was about finding water in the desert, so there was some clowning, including people dressed up as cacti. There was a bunch of stuff about aliens visiting Earth, and I guess that might have something to do with area 51 being in the desert. The intro to the juggler was people being dressed up as Men in Black (or maybe from The Matrix? Men in Black is kind of a spoof on The Matrix, right? I have seen them both, but it was a while ago.) And there was a bunch of other random stuff about mysterious things happening, and then they would segue into some circus act. They had Chinese Pole, in the guise of a coconut tree which our hero was trying to get water from, and had to climb and so forth. He did an excellent job.

And there were a lot of other things that I'm not remembering, since I didn't video them and I didn't take notes, I just said "wow man".

During the second show (I had gone to the first show), I did laundry for Jocelyn and her boyfriend. Laundry is expensive when you use a laundromat! It cost about seven dollars for one fairly large load.

Then I drove to Chico, where I am now. It was lovely in Sausalito, and it was still 101 degrees at 9 PM in Chico. On the drive up, I was treated to a stellar sunset. I stopped and took a picture of an early portion of it, and it just got better and better, but I did not pull over again, and by the time I actually got to my hotel it had faded.

I took a lot of pictures of Jocelyn's abode, and the outside of the circus tent, but I had the stupid "live" option selected, so it is a minor headache to extract the photos for posting. I guess I must select that option in my pocket or something, because I always turn it off when I notice it's on, and it comes back.

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May 2026

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Entries tagged with dancing

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