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catsittingstillI got back from my family visit very late Tuesday night of last week. I had a wonderful time. That's the short version, and you can stop there if you like; nothing particularly epic happened.
The longer version is Kip and I went to Portland to visit my dad and my brother. Since we were flying, we couldn't take much gear. Kip proposed that we mail clothes, about a week earlier, so that we wouldn't have to take so much luggage (visiting my brother means gaming. Gaming means D&D 3rd edition, and that means reference books. I have actually played more complicated systems--Rolemaster, which I never did master, comes to mind--but D&D 3 can expand to become pretty complicated. Add to this the fact that Kip is running a game presently set in pre-European contact North America with magic, and I'm running a game that involves smuggling and pirates in an "Italian Renaissance City-State" type social environment except the Southern Continent is entirely different, with the Giant Hermit Crabs and their Crab Mahouts and their cities that are half above and half under the water, and we end up needing a certain amount of reference material.
Adventures in Shipping.
So, where was I? Oh yes, about half of our bulk and weight was going to be D&D books. We tried shipping those the biyear before, but being without those books for so long when one is trying to write games is painful. So this year we shipped our clothes instead and patted ourselves on the back for our cleverness.
The problem was I didn't quite have a handle on Kip's plans. I thought he meant "let's ship slightly over half the clothes we intend to wear and take just a change or two in our luggage." He thought he meant "let's ship everything but the clothes we wear so as not to be naked in the airport."
And I discovered the difference when the clothes didn't arrive for a few days after we got there. Their arrival the day before Christmas was greeted with greater joy than the arrival of some of the presents.
The Practice of Practice
Also, since we were flying, we couldn't take much gear. Meaning, (after much agonizing) no mandolin and certainly no octave mandolin. Meaning, unless I could find a way around it, no practicing for two weeks right before GaFilk.
I checked online for places in Portland that will rent a mandolin. The only place I could find wanted 107$ A WEEK which I thought was outrageous. After a certain amount of thrashing around that did not conclude until the second day of the visit, I ended up calling pawnshops, found a mandolin available for cheap (for a mandolin) and drove out to see it. It was playable, and remained in tune up the neck as far as I could tell by ear, so I bought it.
Her name is Rosie. For Portland, City of Roses. She lives there, at my dad's house, so I can practice when I visit. (I seriously thought about trying to take her home, but she only has a gig bag and I was afraid she'd be destroyed. While she's only a 100$ mandolin, she is a pretty decent instrument and doesn't deserve that.)
Here is a picture:
Her neck is a bit too narrow for comfortable chording, but I was basically looking for something workable so I wouldn't forget how to play while I was gone. The first couple of days I tried to practice I could tell I had missed a couple of days of practice, but after that I got back into it, and continued in my quest to memorize my material, having been convinced by Quadrivium that it would be desirable to do this. In the process I made the happy discovery that it is going to be easier than I thought, perhaps partly because I've played most of my songs quite a bit anyway without actually trying to memorize them.
I practiced on her every day, including the day we left when we got up at five, though that was kind of a brief practice, and was deeply grateful for the chance. We shall see if this makes a difference for GaFilk; I will know more when I have practiced on my regular instruments today. I may have some trouble now, remembering which instruments I use the octave mandolin for, as I used Rosie for everything for two weeks of course.
There's An App For That
For Christmas I got a new iPod, and when we were at my brother's house and I could use his wifi, I got it set up and bought a tuner app for a dollar, which turned out to work fine (with the external mic the new model has) in the quiet of dad's laundry room and was much cheaper than a physical tuner would have been. It turned out my ear was correct; Rosie was in reasonably good tune, and remained reasonably well in tune up the neck. One of the things I noticed in the process was that the store that sold specifically musical instruments didn't bother to tune them, but the pawnshop I went to did--and that makes a big difference in one's initial impression of the instrument. Perhaps musical instrument stores have so many instruments tuning them would take forever.
Kip found an app called Dicenomicon, which means I won't have to carry dice anymore :-) except maybe as a backup for when my iPod is out of juice. I also got a long-desired bluetooth keyboard (which wouldn't have worked with my old iPod--this was one of the reasons I wanted a new one) that will make taking notes for meetings and such much easier--and in the process discovered that bluetooth runs down the battery pretty fast, which I guess isn't very surprising.
Family Time
We got in a lot of family time, hiking, driving out to a local bird sanctuary, where our most exciting sight was actually a family of otters catching fish. Alas my camera was not up to the job, and was not helped by the fact that I was mostly watching the otters rather than the vague blurs on the camera screen. I have one rather nice picture of an otter tail, I think; I have not examined it on the full screen of the computer. We also saw nutria, quite close. You're not allowed to leave the car in the sanctuary, which I think is a good idea; the animals and birds are quite blase about cars but would probably flee from a human on foot. We saw Sherlock Holmes, which was actually better than the first movie, though I'm very tired of seeing Irene Adler as being out-thought at every turn, and prefer Carole Nelson Douglas's interpretation by a considerable margin. And we saw Hugo, which had good critical reviews and which Jake and I thought of several helpful plot and character reconstructions for on the way home. It had great sets and props (especially since I was thinking along steampunk lines anyway because I was introducing it in my game under the heading "dangerous things gnomes do") but it really needed some help with characterization, and the meta comments on movies could have used some work too. But we had fun.
And of course Jake and Kip and I gamed--if not quite until our eyes bled, at least to satiation, which is quite a lot for us. Jake and Kip ran two and a half times and I ran twice, not counting two short set up sessions that were mostly things like trying to decide what cargo Jake's smuggler captain should buy to cover the fact that he was smuggling. I can see I'm going to have to learn something about bulk cargo in the renaissance. I mean, small valuable things--jewels, lace, drugs, spices, sure. But I need to come up with something the characters can afford twenty tons of that would still be worth shipping.
And the iPod can take pictures of documents and they are more or less readable, which may vastly reduce the bookage next time. I have hopes.
The longer version is Kip and I went to Portland to visit my dad and my brother. Since we were flying, we couldn't take much gear. Kip proposed that we mail clothes, about a week earlier, so that we wouldn't have to take so much luggage (visiting my brother means gaming. Gaming means D&D 3rd edition, and that means reference books. I have actually played more complicated systems--Rolemaster, which I never did master, comes to mind--but D&D 3 can expand to become pretty complicated. Add to this the fact that Kip is running a game presently set in pre-European contact North America with magic, and I'm running a game that involves smuggling and pirates in an "Italian Renaissance City-State" type social environment except the Southern Continent is entirely different, with the Giant Hermit Crabs and their Crab Mahouts and their cities that are half above and half under the water, and we end up needing a certain amount of reference material.
Adventures in Shipping.
So, where was I? Oh yes, about half of our bulk and weight was going to be D&D books. We tried shipping those the biyear before, but being without those books for so long when one is trying to write games is painful. So this year we shipped our clothes instead and patted ourselves on the back for our cleverness.
The problem was I didn't quite have a handle on Kip's plans. I thought he meant "let's ship slightly over half the clothes we intend to wear and take just a change or two in our luggage." He thought he meant "let's ship everything but the clothes we wear so as not to be naked in the airport."
And I discovered the difference when the clothes didn't arrive for a few days after we got there. Their arrival the day before Christmas was greeted with greater joy than the arrival of some of the presents.
The Practice of Practice
Also, since we were flying, we couldn't take much gear. Meaning, (after much agonizing) no mandolin and certainly no octave mandolin. Meaning, unless I could find a way around it, no practicing for two weeks right before GaFilk.
I checked online for places in Portland that will rent a mandolin. The only place I could find wanted 107$ A WEEK which I thought was outrageous. After a certain amount of thrashing around that did not conclude until the second day of the visit, I ended up calling pawnshops, found a mandolin available for cheap (for a mandolin) and drove out to see it. It was playable, and remained in tune up the neck as far as I could tell by ear, so I bought it.
Her name is Rosie. For Portland, City of Roses. She lives there, at my dad's house, so I can practice when I visit. (I seriously thought about trying to take her home, but she only has a gig bag and I was afraid she'd be destroyed. While she's only a 100$ mandolin, she is a pretty decent instrument and doesn't deserve that.)
Here is a picture:
Her neck is a bit too narrow for comfortable chording, but I was basically looking for something workable so I wouldn't forget how to play while I was gone. The first couple of days I tried to practice I could tell I had missed a couple of days of practice, but after that I got back into it, and continued in my quest to memorize my material, having been convinced by Quadrivium that it would be desirable to do this. In the process I made the happy discovery that it is going to be easier than I thought, perhaps partly because I've played most of my songs quite a bit anyway without actually trying to memorize them.
I practiced on her every day, including the day we left when we got up at five, though that was kind of a brief practice, and was deeply grateful for the chance. We shall see if this makes a difference for GaFilk; I will know more when I have practiced on my regular instruments today. I may have some trouble now, remembering which instruments I use the octave mandolin for, as I used Rosie for everything for two weeks of course.
There's An App For That
For Christmas I got a new iPod, and when we were at my brother's house and I could use his wifi, I got it set up and bought a tuner app for a dollar, which turned out to work fine (with the external mic the new model has) in the quiet of dad's laundry room and was much cheaper than a physical tuner would have been. It turned out my ear was correct; Rosie was in reasonably good tune, and remained reasonably well in tune up the neck. One of the things I noticed in the process was that the store that sold specifically musical instruments didn't bother to tune them, but the pawnshop I went to did--and that makes a big difference in one's initial impression of the instrument. Perhaps musical instrument stores have so many instruments tuning them would take forever.
Kip found an app called Dicenomicon, which means I won't have to carry dice anymore :-) except maybe as a backup for when my iPod is out of juice. I also got a long-desired bluetooth keyboard (which wouldn't have worked with my old iPod--this was one of the reasons I wanted a new one) that will make taking notes for meetings and such much easier--and in the process discovered that bluetooth runs down the battery pretty fast, which I guess isn't very surprising.
Family Time
We got in a lot of family time, hiking, driving out to a local bird sanctuary, where our most exciting sight was actually a family of otters catching fish. Alas my camera was not up to the job, and was not helped by the fact that I was mostly watching the otters rather than the vague blurs on the camera screen. I have one rather nice picture of an otter tail, I think; I have not examined it on the full screen of the computer. We also saw nutria, quite close. You're not allowed to leave the car in the sanctuary, which I think is a good idea; the animals and birds are quite blase about cars but would probably flee from a human on foot. We saw Sherlock Holmes, which was actually better than the first movie, though I'm very tired of seeing Irene Adler as being out-thought at every turn, and prefer Carole Nelson Douglas's interpretation by a considerable margin. And we saw Hugo, which had good critical reviews and which Jake and I thought of several helpful plot and character reconstructions for on the way home. It had great sets and props (especially since I was thinking along steampunk lines anyway because I was introducing it in my game under the heading "dangerous things gnomes do") but it really needed some help with characterization, and the meta comments on movies could have used some work too. But we had fun.
And of course Jake and Kip and I gamed--if not quite until our eyes bled, at least to satiation, which is quite a lot for us. Jake and Kip ran two and a half times and I ran twice, not counting two short set up sessions that were mostly things like trying to decide what cargo Jake's smuggler captain should buy to cover the fact that he was smuggling. I can see I'm going to have to learn something about bulk cargo in the renaissance. I mean, small valuable things--jewels, lace, drugs, spices, sure. But I need to come up with something the characters can afford twenty tons of that would still be worth shipping.
And the iPod can take pictures of documents and they are more or less readable, which may vastly reduce the bookage next time. I have hopes.
