The Steampunk Symposium down in Cincinnati was a lot of fun! Here are some pictures! Colette and I are in the second to last picture in that album. We have some more pictures of our outfits, but that album is one of the more solid ones I’ve seen.

The Symposium was really cool. We had a really great time. We took our time going down and coming back, so the whole thing was totally chill. It also helped that we brought a lot of food with us so we didn’t need to run around and figure out where food was.

We met some really cool people and heard some really awesome bands. Our favorite was This Way to Egress. I’m listening to their facebook page right now. We also bought their album and two of their EPs. The production on their recordings is not the greatest, but the music is legit good and catchy so it’s still good to listen to. Caelyn ran off with some nice boy Saturday night, Jennifer flirted with a man we dubbed ‘Ashtray’ and hung out with her ex-boyfriend. Colette and I, who are both in stable relationships, spent most of our time finding out where the alcohol was and who the cool people to chat with were. I met blogger for the Multiculturalism in Steampunk blog I follow on facebook. She was really awesome. We also got to see some of the other Steampunk icons of the area like Steampunk!BobaFett.

We were repeatedly invited to go the World Steam Expo at the end of May in Michigan. We all seem to want to go, but we haven’t started planning anything yet.

May go to see Rammstein on Thursday night. They are playing at the Q. Colette and Kat are going. I’m trying to convince Chris to come with me. He wants to go, but he doesn’t want to pay for the ticket.

Work is going pretty slow right now. I’m waiting for them to sort out some technical stuff before I can do anymore work. So I’ve spent a lot of time waiting around. Friday was kind of silly though. I took the Friday off before the Symposium to get some packing done. I got a call from my assistant about 10 or 11 asking if I could do a quick task from home since she didn’t have the privileges. Then she mentioned that they announced a nationwide mandatory conference call for all Registrars that morning. So I had to log into my work account from home and listen to a boring-ass conference call on my vacation day instead of packing or getting ready. Then on Saturday, as I’m walking around the shops at the Symposium I got another call from work, asking for me to do another task they forgot to ask me to do during the week. I was just like “yeaaaah, I’m 5 hours away from a VPN access. There’s just no way.” Hopefully that will teach them to get their shit done during the week instead on relying on me to have no life.

Chris, Gene, and I found a rental house in Cleveland Heights. We’ve already paid the security deposit and first month’s rent. It is not the first place we found. I hesitated too long with that house and the landlord ended up renting it to another tenant. It was kind of shitty since Chris had just convinced me the night before that we should go with that house. After that house, we decided we had to move a lot more quickly. We looked at two other houses and liked both. One of the places was a whole house with a really huge yard and the other was half a duplex that was larger than the whole house with a small yard. Chris and Gene immediately jumped on the duplex house and decided then and there they wanted the house. I liked both fine, but the duplex house did have more character and more space. We ended up going with the duplex. We met with the landlord and signed the lease two days later. Now we are in the process of slowly moving over all of our shit. This upcoming weekend we are renting an UHaul truck to get all of our furniture over there. Hopefully we’ll be able to get most of it over on Sunday.

I had a ridiculously awesome weekend. Friday night I went over to hang out with Chris and found Colette and Caelyn sewing their corsets with April. We started chatting and we all decided to go to the Chamber (Cleveland’s only goth club). We ran over to Colette’s place to pick up some goth clothes for us to wear then we called up Tom and people to meet us there. It was my first time going to goth club (first time going to a club in 5 years) and I have to say, I really enjoyed myself. Everyone was dressed up in their goth-finest, the dancing was fun, and the music was generally pretty good. Every other song was pretty good and at one point they played Zydrate from Repo: The Genetic Opera. That was a lot of fun J I defiantly want to go again, provided I can get a group of people to go with me.

Saturday was Ashley’s birthday party. It was a My Little Pony Party! There was cupcakes with Pinkie Pie rings on them, a MLP table cloth and of course lots of balloons and streamers. We all got My Little Pony t-shirts with cutie marks on them. Mine was AppleJack. I also got an AppleJack pendent and stickers. Ashley also brought MLP coloring/activity books. We colored in some of the coloring pages, played some of the MLP activities, watched a couple of the episodes, and took themed pictures with our t-shirts. It was a lot of fun.

Sunday we had belly dance practice and afterwards Caelyn and I watched Muppet Treasure Island. It’s been forever since I’ve seen that movie, but I still remember most of the words to the songs. Especially the opening song, I love that one!

So I guess things are going pretty well for me. I’m not looking forward to moving, but hopefully we’ll get it all done quickly. For those of you in the area, you are all more than welcome to come to our house-warming party!

Um, I guess a lot? I’m always busy, but whenever I sit back and try to think of all the things I’m doing, I just can’t remember anything. Let’s start for the top.

Work- Is fine. I had to go to Florida for a week for some software training. The training itself was pretty okay, I did learn a lot. I got to meet a lot of other registrars from all across the country, so I got to do a lot of networking. I got sick on the second day down there and remained pretty unhealthy for the rest of the week. Mostly is was just a fever with a hacking cough which eventually made me lose my voice, but it made me pretty uncomfortable in my free-time. Fortunately I didn’t have much free time. The first two days we had to eat out with the group and the next two days had ‘optional’ lab time that went until 10pm. So I was hanging out with those people from 8am till 10:30pm, each day, every day, until Friday. On Friday, most people had flights going home by Friday afternoon, so there were only three of us left in the area that evening. One of the girls rented a car and we went to the beach, walk along the pier, and eat out in Boca Raton. The beach down there was lovely. The water was very clear and we saw a smack of jellyfish (I had to look that up, but that is the correct group name for jellyfish).

Otherwise work has been fairly busy, but manageable. My assistant has been sick a lot and has been to the emergency room twice in the last month for high fever and dehydration from vomiting too much. Everyone at work has been getting sick, but she seems to be particularly bad. I hope I don’t catch whatever she has.

D&D- In Al’s game, I retired Unne so she could go back to her homeland in Tangula (as so she wouldn’t kill the rest of the party when she found out they were all lying to her). I have created a new character, who I have mostly created as an experiment to see if the DM or the other players will bother to learn the backstory about a new character. They didn’t kill by character upon first seeing me, which is cool. However, Michael brought a bottle of Scotch with him to game and between him and Shane, they polished it off within an hour or two. Michael drunk is… annoying, but I’ve gotten used to him. Shane drunk is the most annoying, frustrating, and aggravating thing I’ve had to deal with in years. He meta-games like crazy, gets personally insulted by things said to his character, makes horrible decisions, and acts like an ass in and out of game. It was my initial intention to switch over to the other party Al runs, but since Shane pissed off everyone else in that group, Al is thinking of switching Shane instead. Pity, I miss playing with Fletcher, Sam, and Ty.

In Chris’s game, Gene and I are finally going places. We got through a couple of combat rounds and are starting to get more comfortable with the battle system and world logic. We still haven’t hit any plot hooks yet, but Chris is new at DMing so he  is still learning how to incorporate those.

Belly Dance-  Jennifer is hosting a party at her house for all the steampunk people in the Cleveland area. The Belly dance group was going to perform but we collectively decided that we were not prepared and needed a lot more practice (and a room with mirrored walls to rehearse in) before we could even think of performing in public. I was all for going for it, but Jennifer and Collette backed out. Caelyn apparently is uninterested in performing or practicing with us anymore. If she does show up to practice, she’ll just sit on the couch and occasionally critique whatever we are doing. We are still recruiting members, so we are still figuring out what is going on with the troupe. We need to decide if we are going to focus on being a social/work out group or if we are going to be a performance group. I’m fine with both, but it’s becoming obvious we need to change our approach or we are going to keep having the same arguments over and over again. I keep forgetting that we’ve only been meeting for four or so months now. It seems so much longer.  

Swing dancing- I’ve started going to swing dance practices with Colette! It’s awesome and fun and I look forward to doing some more! I tried to teach Chris some of the dance steps so we could do it together but he cannot give any shits about it. He is shitless. His shit meter has hit empty.  He is shitted out.

Moving in with the Boy- Chris, Gene, and I are looking for a house to rent together. We have looked at one place a few blocks away from the Boswell house. It is a little dingy, but the price is right and it’s very close to friends and a good distance from work. We’ve inquired to a bunch of places we’ve seen up on craigslist, but we are finding a lot of landlords are very poor communicators. We just haven’t heard back from some of them at all. The place we just applied for had the best landlord by far, even if the place needs some work. He is going to run a credit-check on me then he’ll make a decision on who he is going to offer the place too.

Right now those are the major things going on in my life. I’ve been playing some of FFXII lately, but I’m not very motivated to play it. Chris got me through a really hard boss, but I’m still not into it. Otherwise… that’s pretty much it, I guess.

• Belly dancing classes are still happening. Jenn, Caelyn and I finally came up with a group theme. We will be steampunk charlatans! We claim to be the mysterious middle-east, trained in all manner of temple/pleasure dance and sporting exotic costumes from far away lands. In actuality, we are a bunch of street urchins from France and Russia who joined up with an Airship Crew and having been traveling around and picking up dances and fashions from wherever we travel. This gives us an excuse to each wear costumes with different influences (which was a big problem. Caelyn wanted Turkish, I wanted Egyptian, and Jenn wanted almost American Western) Also we don't have to worry about authenticity. Plus we get to make up a bunch of fake places we 'studied' in.
• Chris's D&D campaign is starting to take off. We finally have a campaign under way instead of day to day missions. I'm really enjoying my character. I wish we had more players. Right now it's just me and Gene. It makes combat go a lot quicker, but I'm so used to playing with a ton of people, it feels lonely.
• A couple weekends ago I went down to Dayton to meet up with my mother and go to her favorite cousin's memorial service. I was expecting to spend the whole time trying to keep my mother stable and giving her a shoulder to cry on. However, since the service was several months after Sharon's death, my mother was feeling pretty steady. Instead I got to hang out and meet my second cousins from Nebraska. Please note: I had never met these people before. Please also note: My second cousins are freaking awesome. They are anime-watching, internet-lurking, nerdlings with a great sense of humor. I had a blast with them. It was the first time I had ever gone to a family function and not wanted to leave immediately. One of them, Chas, who is the closest to my age, is going to Med school out in Toledo. We promised that eventually we would meet up at Cedar Point since that was just an hour away for both of us. We went to the Air and Space Museum and had a really great time walking around and talking.
• I went to New Registrar training last week in Toledo. I spent the days hanging out with our districts best Registrar getting some tips and directions. I spent the nights hanging out with Chas. We went to see the Muppets and hit up a few bars. It was a very chill time. I ended up finishing up the training and heading home early. I stopped at Tony Packo's, which is a hungarian fast food chain centered in Toledo. Apparantly it's pretty famous. I started driving home and got terrible PMS and ended up eating Asprins pills for dinner. It took me awhile to get home since I kept having to stop and take breaks because of the pain.
• Saw Courtney the Saturday before last. We went shopping and hung out at her house. She will be coming up this upcoming weekend for Tom's B-day party. Hopefully she'll bring Broseph! Right, joebluefox???
• Work so far has been... hectic. Right now we are in our second week of open enrollments so there is a lot of 'Hurry up and Wait". I have to be here extra late today because my assistant is sick today. And even though all I've been doing today is hanging out on facebook and watching youtube videos, I can't go home in case they need to me make a schedule (something that takes less than a minute and a half). Whatever, ppl. Whatever.
• I'd post about last weekend, but honestly all I remember is buying a bottle of gin and after that...? I think I watched Chris play Enslaved for awhile. We went to see a movie. I talked to Al about his band winning the first round of Project Independent's online poll... That's all I got, people. I like gin.
• May go to Melt tonight with Chris and his friend Hanna. Still waiting to hear back from him about that.