Rook and Moomin and I spent Saturday morning peacefully having bagels and smoothies and buying alarm clocks. Then Moomin and I branched off (while Rook went home to chill out and do game-prep) to downtown Deadwood City for the "Victorian Age" street fair which was basically the farmers market + a guy on stilts in cow-pattern chaps and your standard street fair pony ride/petting zoo thingies. So lame yet so much fun! Moomin was a hoot on the tiny train as every time it came around to where I was sitting he solemnly whipped off his hat and waved it at me, gentleman-like.
It was a long walk back and I had to become a pony ride myself as we had no stroller! But I was up for it and felt strong and mom-like as I hauled Moomin back home. I didn't hurt myself or hurt my back or knees or anything. Huzzah!
We played the cool RPG and had a great time. I liked it much better than Soap. Soap was neat. With practice we would become better at playing it, but My Life with Master was easier to get into. It had instant thematic unity or automatic plot coherence - or at least more automatic than we were getting with Soap. Rook points out that this may be because we are all more familiar with mad scientist plots than we are with soap operas.
He is very cool how he works in out of character issues with characters. I was asking him to help me come up with a good concept -- the first part of the game is really just a lot of sitting around thinking of the details of your characters and of the Master. It turned into me being the mad scientist's daughter: my "more than human" characteristic was that I was irrestitibly attractive except when speaking. (this, rather cool because I tend to make characters who rely heavily on fast talking or orating or some verbal ability -- and just because in real life I also rely on this. So it was a good challenge.) My character's less than human trait was "falls asleep every hour on the hour, unless someone else is touching her." This was a fun concept but didn't come into play as much as I thought it would. whump's char was a man/mouse combination - the result of a past experiment - and Cyn's was a cat/human combination.
*** to be continued -- must take Moomin to the playground****
I skateboarded all the way to the park on the new smooth pavement of the street and the new very smooth perfect blacktop of the school! My knees are strong... On the perfect blacktop I even practiced skating goofy-foot.
**
So then last night I went haring off to the city for this poetry thing. Chula was not going to go as she was already doing like 8 things on Sat. including Leeann talking to some atheists and dinner and stuff but -- as in the real world not the game world I am irrestitibly attractive and even more so when speaking, she showed up, only for us to be embarrassed by the human race by a performance thing that she later described as "like sandpaper up my nostrils". I so agree... There was some really good stuff aside from the sandpaper art. I bought books from 2 poets and will be reading the poems that impressed me when I heard them out loud - to see if I like them just as much read on the page. L.H-L. was there and was incredibly nice. There were a couple of times where I was kind of forced to say something in spanish and was embarrassed by my ineptitude... I still automatically hear the spanish but answer in english. Oh, I'm such a dork.
***
Speaking of being a dork. did i even blog about getting my car towed on Friday? Ugh! Well it got towed and it sucked and I decided to call Moomin's school and see if i should come get him right away or if I could be late They said it was just fine, and so I got the car, got to my appointment on campus an hour late. And then there was very awful traffic coming back on 101. So I could have been on time, or at least closer to being on time, but was not and I felt kind of bad about that. though moomin was happy as a clam reading and helping and having snacks. I scrubbed and polished and painted... I find it bizarre that they always seem to do things the maximally annoying most inefficient way. "We knew we'd need help to peel these labels off the plastic bins - it always takes ages and ages and is such a pain," teacher Anarchy said in a martyred way... "Well. Why don't you... " and i'm off, quizzing her on putty knives, flat razor blades, brillo, and why not permanently affix clear plastic slidy things to the bins which could have name labels slipped in. But NO. There was some ineffectual dithering and running around and rummaging in drawers and then Titania drifted over nervously offering me a butter knife. "No." For fuck's sake. No one ever thought of any of that? Brillo? unheard of. For 10 years they have been using their fingernails to scrape gummed on name-stickers off of things. I have zero patience with this sort of thing. But I forced myself to zone out into Neanderthal mode with Anarchy. With our digging sticks and carrying nets we sat together and used our fingernails and gossiped idly.
i love you, little l.
instead of razors and butter knives and, say, acetone which rips hell out of gummed labels but also would hurt plastic and your skin and the environment, try--ta dah!--vinegar. plain white vinegar. i soak a paper towl in vinegar, let it sit on the label for a little while, and then gentle scraping makes the nasty stickers of commerce all go away. voila!
Posted by: RJ Mical | August 29, 2004 at 08:16 PM
O wise RJ -- aka Hinty Heloise! It's all done thanks to my flinty-tough fingernails and iron will. But perhaps I'll bring them a bottle of vinegar and a putty knife for next semester -- pointedly and acidly.
Posted by: badgerbag | August 29, 2004 at 09:56 PM