Please to be putting ur memez here.

In the dark woods
she ran
'Till the running tasted quiet
and blood was on her tongue.
Never more a passing glance
intimacy suffocated in a wall of silence.

Fear to be seen and yet never to be seen.

The windows flicker evasively,
perhaps the cutwife is returned home.

Hello there.

It now happens that can no longer post comments on entries without seeing the ugly crying goat art.

Shame on me, I didn't notice that my census from last year disappeared over a month ago. Ooops.

93 stated readers last year, but I expect the decline to accelerate now. I've moved shop a bit, trying to get all of the costuming content somewhere where I won't be afraid to put my legal name on it, and I think the personal content, such as it is these days, might follow to somewhere suitably nameless.

This journal is nearly a decade old (soon!) and so much has changed since then that the anniversary might also be the expiration date. I feel like the world has come so much further in the interim, like how so many stepped out blinking from the confines of AOL once upon a time, and now we're ranging further from the sheltered pastures of LJ.

Worlds within worlds.

This journal is a decade old.

Ayup, it was a thing. Not to sound unenthusiastic (because that is the OPPOSITE of how I'm feeling about it) but I'm pretty exhausted. There were some timing blips, but overall it was totally awesome. Because of my roommate and our... I dunno, suitemates? What do we call the similarly-crazy people in the next warddown the hall?

Oh yeah, and door tags. Apparently people were navigating the 3rd floor by ours. :D

Once again I managed to get everything *nearly* finished in time, and then spent a good deal of daytime finishing the thing I planned to wear the next day. Doh. I also got the bike skirt done in time to wear it and realize that... I didn't fit the waistband over the corset properly, and the back pleats hung wrong. So it's now *re*-de-constructed, and back in the "FIX ME" pile. :P Kentwell stuff was good, but not glamorous enough for anyone at the event, quelle surprise. *I* was comfortable though. (Surprisingly so, perhaps, given that I was in LA in all that wool...)
Sunday was all 30's - 1930s undies (though I forgot my kimono and chickened out about going down without it), 1930s day dress, 1930s hairstyling class, 1930s bathing suit.

I feel like there weren't many classes that I wanted to take aside from the billion limited ones. I mean, seriously, there were SO MANY limited ones... :\ We could really use more lecturers.

So I'm stepping up, you know, because I can. I have a few ideas for things, all of them stuff that I'm interested in and could maybe give a lecture on. Fancy dress? Sewing machine repair and/or diagnosis? Making lacing strips? (Should I teach two lacing strips classes? I mean it's like half an hour tops. :P )

And in just four days, the super crazy time of commitments to everyone except myself will be DONE and maybe I can get some SLEEP.

Doo-dah, doo-dah.

And I can't find the fucks to even care.

Oh the doo-dah day.


(No, that's not depression, that is apathy at the sad state of LJ. :P I'm too busy sewing to be depressed!)

My paid account here expires in 5 days. I've already scraped the raw pictures out of my gallery, since there's no handy "export all this shit in one place" feature. (Guh. The Scrapbook architecture is totally *fucked*, and I can say this now with certainty, as someone who Works In Tech. They were right to stop developing on it, wrong to not find a replacement...)

I might miss the icons. Maybe.

Okay, probably not. I don't have them or need them or use them on my other blog, ad I won't have/need/want/use them if I also start personal-blogging elsewhere.

Non sequitur: Today in Palo Alto, I stomped out a small but growing piece of smouldering landscape bark, while a rich white man in a BMW hung out his window yelling at me that he'd already called building management and someone would take care of it, as the cinders and bits of cherry-bright shredded bark rolled across the street in the breeze. Idiots.

Hawaii was a place. It was a beautiful place (with terrible tap water that reminds me of Pleasanton, blech I am spoilt out here), but I'm glad to be home.

All in all, we saw and did *much* more of the stuff on my list than I actually expected.

The shopping damage was fairly extensive. ;) Skip to the next paragraph if you don't care about my shopping exploits. I figured out that even though the ABC stores sell those 64" ropes of freshwater pearls for $19, there's a stall-style street market on Waikiki where they'll go $10. I did admittedly figure this out *after* buying one at the ABC store price though... but still! Pretty, and holy cow, hand-knotted all the way around the string. And a pair of matching earrings. Oh, and said street market also has the foam hair flowers that ABC sells for $7 each, for $1 or $2 for the super fancy ones. I bought pairs of each kind I liked. There was a cute dress. :) It is still cute, and it is now mine, too. And I also bought (surprise!) a bottle of plumeria perfume. I couldn't find anything like the little tiny bottles that I remember mom having, so I ended up with an eau de cologne spray. It's quite pleasant! And before we left, we also hit the Fabric Mart nearest our hotel and I bought five-yard dress lengths of very nice Hawaiian print fabric in three Laura-compatible colors. I AM TOTALLY MAKING A GOTH HAWAIIAN OUTFIT. Muahahaha. Oh, also the obligatory carrier of chocolate covered macadamia nuts.

On Monday, we walked up and down Waikiki beach a lot, and then took a submarine ride to see the man-made reefs about 100' down. That was pretty impressive from a technical perspective, and Chris really enjoyed the experience. There was one trevally (giant territorial toothy fish) that kept trying to chase off the submarine by bumping into our porthole repeatedly. We may even have video of this! Also, it was good to get some sciency facts from the tour guide people, and their experiments with the loss of colors at depth were easy to follow if not exactly accurately worded.

Tuesday we ventured out on TheBus, the Oahu transit system, and visited Diamond Head. From the descriptions of other people I was expecting to be absolutely dying by the top, but we reached it in good time without much in the way of stopping. The view was mightily impressive, and with the wind-whipped waves and wind-driven clouds, absolutely gorgeous. I cannot overstate how breathtaking the color of the water is. We then hiked down the mountain and made a pass through the local foodmart so we wouldn't have to deal with spendy breakfasts for the rest of the trip. I don't know if it was the sun, or the continued jetlag, or the stress of travel or what, but we crashed out hard when we got back to the room and we didn't emerge until like 5pm. At that point we hiked down the beach to Duke's and waited for a table. I tried the poke; it was tasty, but I still don't like raw fish. The chicken katsu with macadamia nuts was delicious. So was the burger, and so was the Lava Flow, which might just be my next favorite rum drink. As we walked back after dinner, we ran into a bunch of fire dancers from the Hawaii Conclave practicing at the Hilton Lagoon. It's a very small world sometimes.

On Wednesday we again took the TheBus and headed down to the Pacific Fleet. I had wanted to cram seeing the USS Arizona memorial into the same day as seeing the Hawaiian royal palace, but alas that was not to be. Actually, we didn't get to see either of those things - We decided to see the USS Misourri, which took just longer enough than we expected that we missed the shuttle that would've taken us to our appointed slot on the last Arizona memorial tour. ProTip: the iPod touch tour is kinda cool, but wastes a lot of extra time in maudlin storytelling, dramatic music, and repetitive historic footage. Oh well. (Though in retrospect, given my negative reaction to the maudlin stories, it's probably good that we missed the Arizona. There is only so much heartstring manipulation I can tolerate, and they were laying it on *thick*.) Instead, we toured the Bowfin, which is a totally awesome submarine. So many awesome space-saving devices, so many nifty that-was-then-this-is-now apparatuses. Think giant lever-activated all electric ship control bus. And man, but they polished every last thing in that small metal tube to a high shine. It was nearly blinding in some places - chrome and brass and copper - but it made for some neat pictures. There was also a museum, where I saw a mockup of something Dad might have worked on, and a giant 1920s diving suit. (I took tons of pictures in case anyone is interested.) We took, well, the wrong bus back. It was over twice as long as taking the express would've been, and gave us a scenic tour of some of the less pretty parts of Oahu and some of its colorful homeless people. Ask me about Chinese Repatriation Guy sometime. We celebrated our escape from the bus by going to a Japanese BBQ restaurant, which was a first for both of us. Oh man, that was amaaaaazing. And Mike tells me that there's one in Cupertino now too.

Thursday started off with rental drama, but thanks to Anna's recommendation we were able to get on the road without having to wait until 1pm for a car. A good thing, too - we took the route up to the North Shore and cruised along towards the Pacific Cultural Center, stopping once to take in the amazing views and waves of the North Shore. I wrote earlier that Waikiki reminded me of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk - well, yeah, this confirmed it. The North Shore beaches are comparatively pristine and unharried, and I wish we'd had a picnic lunch and a few extra hours in the day. I probably could've watched those waves for hours.
Instead we headed up to PCC, and got there just after lunch in a gale of a windstorm. As it turned out, we had just enough time to see most of the timed talks, and then take a canoe ride back to the luau dinner spot. I honestly wish we'd spent more time looking at some of the hands-on demonstrations, because they tickled the hell out of the experimental archaeologist in me. We used a fire knife! I could've seen barkcloth being made! There were coconut opening demos! It was pretty damn cool. On a meta-note, the educational programs at each place were masterfully done, with integration of all of the different learning styles, and big glop of humor thrown in. Oh, and the hip-y dance that everyone seems to equate with Hawaii is apparently Tahitian, which blew my mind. The only thing I could really criticize I realized late in the day - that the whole place is run by the Mormon Church. I was wondering what the heck this "Ioseph" exhibit was about, and it turns out it's about the spread of Mormonism into the Pacific. There was a free shuttle ride to the largest LDS temple in Hawaii. And the PCC was like an appendix on the BYU:Hawaii campus. On the one hand, I felt like these ulterior motives discredited the work done at the Center, but at the same time the fact that it was run as a work-study scholarship program made it a little harder to argue with. I'm definitely in favor of both cultural preservation and getting more kids into college. Still though, there was a certain amount of "recreating the Noble Savage" to it that bugged me in some small way. The luau was okay, with mostly steam-table dishes that were bland and kinda overcooked. Only the Kahlua pulled pork was worth writing home about. I tried the taro. It was also okay, but I agree that it's not to my admittedly mainlander tastes.

Friday we got up extra early, because our rental car was due back at 11, and drove out to Hanauma Bay. It became clear pretty fast that if we stuck to plan we'd only get an hour of snorkeling tops, and we were easily convinced that this wouldn't be enough. So I called the rental company from the snorkel rental shack and extended a day, and changed our drop-off location to the airport. This solved both the "getting enough snorkeling time" problem and the "how are we getting to the airport" problem. Hanauma Bay is absolutely gorgeous. We took lots of pictures and a few videos of fish before my camera battery died completely. And even though I was a bit worried about snorkeling in contact lenses, I didn't have any issues. (Only salt in the eye once, but never a lens issue.) We saw all sorts of tangs and wrasses, and a few triggerfish, and even a giant moray eel who we accidentally interrupted feeding. I heard there was a sea turtle hanging out in one of the pools. Unfortunately, the wind was sharp and biting, and Chris turned an alarming shade of dark blue before I convinced him to come out and warm up. We probably could've spent more of the day there, except that Chris needed food and warmth - it took him like an hour after we gave up and left to stop shivering and warm fully up. So of course, after lunch, what did we do? We hit Waiola Shave Ice, which was absolutely amazing. The texture of this stuff was totally unlike any other shave ice I'd ever had - it was almost fluffy like cotton candy. We ended up having a second one. :9 We stopped by the local Safeway to discover that no, there really isn't that much of a price hike on milk; the resorts are just gouging hard. We bought sandwiches. And then there was an epic fabric run, and then epic napping, and one last trip down the Waikiki strip to get dinner and a handbag to carry my tourist acquisitions in. We ended up in a bizarre little pizza place with an oven that vented directly into the rest of the shop. It smelled good, but then the pizza I ended up with was a bit bland and also... covered in mayonnaise. o_O Whatever, it was food. We also stopped at the food pantry place to grab one last item on the to-do list: mochi ice cream from Bubbie's. It was pretty good, and I think I liked the peppermint holiday flavor the best, even if it was three months out of season. We spent some time packing, then headed out to drinks with trundle, then conked out at a reasonable hour to get up and go to the airport.

Our Saturday morning-ish flight was delayed, but not hugely so - just enough to piss off and generally ruin the nights of anyone with a connecting flight. It was pouring down rain when we got home too, which is kinda nice, but was a bit weird for California in March. Then again, after spending a week with the tops of the mountains in Hawaii totally invisible behind looming and never-producing rainclouds, it was a bit of a relief. Also, In-N-Out Burger has never tasted so good.

Today, we recover and unpack and do laundry. Tomorrow we both go back to work. That was one hell of a week!