I was about to throw a serious tantrum, because I turned down Main Street this evening and did not see any tree lights. It’s the first of December! Come on! Fortunately for my mood this evening, no sooner had I huffed than the whole street lit up.

*pleased*

So now I’m sitting at a window table in Vinology, with the trees outside lit up with strings and clouds of little white lights, and I have an excellent rosemary-cranberry gimlet, and all is temporarily good with the world. I don’t know if this will be a regular for me or not, but the drink is excellent.

I have discovered the camper I want to get when I retire. Behold, the Affinity camper van. This is it, this is my rolling hotel suite for one. It's an open-plan camper van, I love it to death. It has solar panels and charging points everywhere, and a full kitchen, and a bathroom with shower tucked in there, and it still looks sleek and un-crowded. Even better, the black-water tank isn't built in, it's a removable rolling tank, which means I could take this baby up to Leelanau State Park, the very definition of a rustic campground.

You can really, really tell that a Scandinavian company was a major partner in this. It's just so slick. Everything folds and unfolds and lifts and rolls perfectly into place or out of the way. The open sight-lines and natural light were clearly a major design priority. Similarly the assumption that you need space for your bike way more than you need a huge television screen. (Accurate.) Likewise, it comes standard with a heater; you pay extra for the optional AC.

So, all in all, it's probably a good thing that I have fifteen years to a) save up and b) wait for it to be available in or shippable to the US. Or, just possibly, for another manufacturer to get with the program, but I'm not holding my breath for that one.

I have survived my first conference of the month! This one was actually pretty decent. Got in on Tuesday, spent Wednesday networking, caught a few sessions, holed up in my room Thursday with my travel video kit and my travel bar kit, presented today. And now I am back in DCA, and have had actually a quite good meal (yay for middle eastern food kiosks) and a not-utterly-pathetic drink.

National Harbor (apparently in the process of being re-branded from MGM National Harbor; I suspect it used to be a company town) is geared toward conferences and conventions. The convention center is actually really nice, and the “interior” rooms face a huge, glassed in atrium and have tiny slices of balconies overlooking the lounge and ‘park’ area, looking out over the river. It would even be a pretty nice vacation spot. The ‘town’ is about six square blocks and stuffed full of quite good restaurants and little shops. Also a Ferris wheel right on the river. Which I did not ride, but appreciated the pretty lights of, at night.

Presentation was well received, and my long-distance co-presenter zoomed in without interruption. (Message of my half: students need reliable network, hardware, and software all provided if they don’t have it already, here’s how.) Given it was morning of the last day, I was impressed we actually got a double-handful of attendees!

Also, Wednesday dinner featured five women all bonding over fanfic and paganism while the lone man hid behind his daiquiri. It was kind of hilarious, and I’m pretty sure at least three of them actually went to go read Avalanche right away.

I doubt the second conference will be this good. Oh well. One out of two is a solid score for the year.

In the continuing saga of “Branch’s Happy Hour Wednesdays” I have gone to The Last Word. Which is… well, okay, yes, it’s a speakeasy. Just, one with ultra fancy cocktails along with the incredible whiskey list. Sub-street level, no windows, Edison bulbs hung all over, alt rock playing, small tables.

Cocktails: A+, does blunt the pain of the fucking Regents having utterly fucked our fucking Fall term to fuck-all. (Not that I’m bitter about that or anything.)

Food: Tasty, a bit experimental, not overpriced. Not blowing me away thus far, but tasty.

Also, I’m the only one here, so far, which I do not object to; people in small doses are good right now. I expect I’ll come back, on days like this that are windy and rainy and don’t have the illuminations to look at yet.

ETA: Okay, the lobster rangoons with greens in sesame dressing did, in fact, blow me away.

Today I snapped and spent an hour re-arranging a room full of really fairly heavy tables and filing cabinets on my own, because I couldn't stand it being in cluttered state one moment longer. This despite the fact that a) it was already on the team schedule for tomorrow morning and b) the tables all have only one leg and are going to get swapped out as soon as the Movers have ten minutes to spare. Thanks to two boxes, a side-table, and a Culligan water carboy, enough legs were created to stack the tables almost evenly on each other.

The inherent ridiculousness did make me laugh, so there's that.

It’s twilight here, with the sky just barely brushed blue with the last light. The slimmest sickle moon is hanging over the horizon, just across from what may be Venus, to be that bright. It’s so humid that the fireflies are in the tree-tops. Mosquitoes too, of course, so I’m only staying out for a minute at a time.

Last night was the most enthusiastic 4th of July I think I’ve ever seen. I went to visit family, all of us hoping the neighbors would do their usual fireworks show since the official displays were mostly canceled. And, indeed, the neighbors set off an impressive set of fireworks—-not professional grade multi-stage, but the tree-top height multi-color, ten-pack deals that are the top end of what you can get privately in this state.

And so did at least eight other houses close enough for us to see clearly over the trees.

And so did what sounded like at least double that close enough to /hear/ clearly.

It started at 9 (dusk at this latitude) and was still going when I headed home at 10:30. I saw fireworks as I drove out to the highway. I saw fireworks on my way down the highway. I saw fireworks as I pulled off the highway, and I gave in and pulled into a parking lot to watch some really excellent fireworks over Vets Park just before I got home.

There was a haze of gunpowder over the entire area, by then. It was almost like driving through fog.

By which I conclude that a whole lot the whole state feels in need of light and color and blowing shit the hell up.

Sometimes I trip across an example of that intensely weird "you can only be in fandom until you're 30" thing that some of the kidlets have been taught to parrot these days. And sometimes it annoys me, and sometimes it just makes me shake my head, and then again sometimes it makes me think...

Melville was 57 when he wrote very thinly veiled self-insert expies of himself and Hawthorne falling in love for 18,000 lines of an epic poem about war and politics and religion and sex and identity.

(That was Clarel, if you're wondering, and they also had a bit of a threesome going on with the young title character.)

So you know, A) Rolfe/Vine 4evar and B) you never age out.

Roses for me. Also for yuletide, but mostly for me. Sometimes the roses in your life just need to be literal.

Mirrored from Leaf Piles.

I feel like the specifically-halloween flowers are a good picture for today.

Mirrored from Leaf Piles.