Mostly good day.<\/p>\r\n
Today (the 17th) would\u2019ve been my mother<\/a>\u2019s 76th birthday. I wasn\u2019t as fragile or distressed as I sometimes am this time of year, but nonetheless decided it would be good to keep social interaction relatively minimal with people who I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\r\n In the morning and early afternoon, I helped Mary Anne with a couple of interviews for an SLF<\/a> project, and we had brunch with Ben and Alec and Alec\u2019s utterly adorable daughter (who I\u2019ll call B here) near our hotel.<\/p>\r\n Then I attended the performance of the short play P\/Faerie Tale<\/a><\/cite>, in which a Filipina woman and her Irish mother-in-law go to Faerie to try to rescue their son\/grandson from the Tuatha D\u00e9 Danann<\/a>, with the help of Sarimanok<\/a>, a Filipino diwata<\/a>. Unusual and interesting.<\/p>\r\n Attended a TJ Burnside-Clapp<\/a> concert. She closed with \u201cLullaby for a Weary World\u201d (I\u2019m not providing a link because I don\u2019t like the easily available Julia Ecklar version nearly as much), and the audience sang along (with some nice harmonies), and I tried to sing along, and I cried pretty much all the way through. Still one of my favorite songs.<\/p>\r\n The Diane Duane fireside chat was full, so I went to the second half of an inclusion\/equity panel. Afterward, chatted with Mary Anne and Alec and B for a while. Went to Ellen Klages\u2019s reading (always worth attending); she read the scary ham story<\/a> (content warning for metaphors about dead babies), and I found out that Ellen came out with a new collection last year, Wicked Wonders<\/cite>, which I was completely unaware of. Have now purchased as an ebook.<\/p>\r\n I stood and sat in line for the Diane Duane reading for half an hour or so, figuring that it too would end up with a full room and people turned away at the door. But nope, room ended up only 2\/3 full. And it turned out that Duane was running late. A white guy I don\u2019t know told jokes to the audience for about 20 minutes while I caught up on Facebook. And someone in the audience retold the opening scene of the US version of House of Cards<\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n When Duane arrived, she read part of an imminently forthcoming interstitial story that\u2019s one of three or so stories that bridge the gap between Door into Sunset<\/cite> and the long-awaited soon-forthcoming Door into Starlight<\/cite>. I\u2019m excited about these stories and about Starlight<\/cite>, but had a hard time focusing on the reading, alas.<\/p>\r\n