• Mood: accomplished
• Music: Callie purring

on the road (again (again))

Real quick because I must soon run off to photograph Cat Valente in the Starbucks that she wrote the Palempsest in and then off to the wedding.

I drove from Tobias Buckell's to the delightful home of gieves and darlox and found them celebrating my birthday by handing out large quantities of candy and terror to neighborhood kids. Darlox would sit in the yard, buried up to his neck in a pile of leaves wearing a pumpkin head and as kids would come to the door to grab candy from a coffin (theirs is better than mine as their coffin has a headless body in it and mine only has a bunch of sweaters, an atari 2600 and my gorilla suit -- (on second thought, mine's probably better)), Darlox would roar and leap from the leaves and the children would fall weeping to the ground crying out "Death! Take me away!"

I took this family portrait before we packed it all in:



We then awayed to the home of theferrett who was hosting Cat and Dimitri's batchelor/batchleorette party. In some Russian tradition, the bride was kidnapped by a group of the wedding party while she sat at a Starbucks sipping lattes and writing novels, bound, blindfolded, and thrown in the back of a van, she was taken to a number of different places where clues were left behind. Dimitri and the groomsmen had to race all around town, solving clues to find her. When they did find her (cleverly hidden at theferrett's, it wasn't over! No, he still had to perform feats of prowess!!!! these contests involved besting other members of the wedding party in things like a shirtless pose-off and, most entertainingly, singing. The challenger, tithenai, a musician and harp player, set the stage by singing a lovely, lilting sad song in Arabic -- the audience was cowed -- how could he ever top her? But he took a deep breath and belted the Russian national anthem in a booming baratone that stunned the room. The crowd exploded! The kidnappers admitted they had been bested in many feats of strenght and intellect. The bride had been won! The ropes were loosed and the party began.



There were many people there I knew by reputation alone, including one of the people who participated in my Hive photography project.



There was much drinking and eventually, a bona fide nerdzaster ocurred when some drunk smashed into a shelf holding about ten million of theferrett's carefully ordered Magic The Gathering cards, everyone in the room knew the gravity of the disaster. There was much comiseration until someone was heard in a quiet conversation in another room arguing that Star Wars episode II was worse that episode III and the room burst into a fierce battle that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.



Oh, and I have most excellet news that involves ... well, I'll write about it later. It's time for me to run.

be excellent today