This was another of those insanely busy weeks. I spent my time at work trying to clear off my desk before heading out for a long weekend. I was almost successful (although you wouldn't know it going by how it looks today). In the evenings I did some combination of Ingress (which reminds me, I was highly annoyed when I checked my stats and realized I'd missed my opportunity to screencap my stats when my Longest Hacking Streak read 666 days. I'd been looking forward to doing just that, only to see 667 when I remembered to check on how close I was getting to that number), laundry, crocheting another cat bed, packing for the weekend, riding my exercise bike, and grocery shopping.

Thursday night we had tickets to see "The Red Velvet Cake War" at the Baldwin. The cast was obviously feeling stressed as they were having problems with the sound system during the performance. The crackling and whatnot was slightly annoying, but not as distracting as trying to figure out why the play wasn't as funny as it should have been. jebra suggested that the actors were focusing on their accents and that caused their timing to be off. I think he's on to something because I know timing has a heck of a lot to do with comedy and the lines themselves seemed like they should have been funny. I also thought that the play might be funnier on television as some of the things the actors were doing on stage would have been more understandable if we could see them close-up.

We took Friday off from work and arrived at the convention in the early afternoon. My first shift was from 3 to 6 pm, making sure that everyone who entered the programming area either had a paid membership or was a hotel employee. I brought my knitting with me with the thought that if I worked hard all weekend I'd have something to show off Tuesday night at the Guild meeting. The Workday Scarf is a great pattern for social knitting and by Saturday afternoon I knew I'd either finish it or run out of yarn. I ran out of yarn about 40 rows before the end of the pattern. I was highly unhappy with how it looked without matching ends so I'm starting over from tail and unraveling as I go.

Anyway, the convention was fun and as I usual I had a great time interacting with the furries and seeing their costumes. The Fruit Bat was back this year and I have her a big hug and showed her last year's scrapbook page, the one with her photo. I have no idea how many furries were in the parade this year but it was a lot. Nikon Lion took a group photo afterwards and you can see it here. He does great work and if you're interested in furries and their costumes, I'd highly recommend checking out his website.

The Kandi bracelet featured on today's page was given to me by a woman at the convention and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, this was the first time I was offered Kandi and I enjoyed interacting with her. On the other hand, she was one of a group of three women who had their memberships revoked and were kicked out of the convention. I never got the full story, but it seems that they belong to the sovereign citizen movement, carry fake ID, and were therefore unable to purchase memberships for all the members of their group. This is a big no-no as only paid members get to enter the non-public areas (such as the rave, the lounge with its free food and drink, and the programming rooms) and these three were sharing memberships among themselves.

I came home from the convention late in the afternoon on Sunday. Getting out of the car I realized it was quite warm outside, it wasn't raining (we've had a lot of rain lately), and that I was about to do laundry making this the perfect time to transfer compost from the pails on the driveway to the actual compost bins at the back of the backyard. I had two five-gallon pickle buckets stuffed to the rim with coffee grounds and other kitchen waste, plus five coffee cans full of grounds, so I put on my rubber boots and got it all out there. The corner of the yard with the compost bins was very wet and muddy but somehow I managed to get back there without slipping and at least this year the mud wasn't so sticky it attempted to suck the boots off my feet.

Monday was back to work followed by finishing up another cat bed. Which reminds me, the animal rescue guest of honor this year was Pets for Vets (Southeast Michigan Chapter). They place more dogs than cats, but when I contacted them before the convention they said they'd be happy to accept a half-dozen of my beds for the cats they do place. So I delivered those in person, plus placed another two into the charity auction. I was working during the auction itself so I missed seeing it for myself, but I'm told a bidding war broke out over my beds and that they raised $50 for the charity. It wasn't clear if that was $50 each or $50 for the pair, but either way, Yay I was able to help!

Last night was the April meeting of the Black Sheep Knitting Guild and the long anticipated Sneaky Sheep gift exchange. The was the biggest Sneaky Sheep the guild has ever held and it took quite a while to go through all the gifts. And it was a lot like the Oscars as a number of women couldn't make the meeting and sent proxies on their behalf. Another thing that was surprising was how well many of the gifts matched what the recipients were already wearing. Clearly the gift-givers did a great job creating projects that matched the recipients personal taste. My person seems to really love her cowl and that was a *huge* relief to me. I was so worried she wouldn't like the colors I selected for her.

Today I'm back at work and my mood (bitchy) corresponds with my continuing struggle with PCI compliance. Our network scan failed again and jumping through the hoops the credit card processor insists upon is a right pain. I don't begrudge them insisting we run the latest version of networking software but they are so used to working with companies that run Microsoft products they don't necessarily understand what the output of our scans really show.



Scrapbook papers & elements from the kit Bohemian Breeze
For more information about the designers and their work, see
http://mrs-sweetpeach.dreamwidth.org/903338.html.



This entry was originally posted at http://mrs-sweetpeach.dreamwidth.org/928458.html.