I noted 189852 mi. on odometer at the apartment parking lot, as we backed out of our space about 8 a.m.  We delivered Kethry for over-weekend boarding at the vet, and were on the road about 8:25.  When we bought the Toyota in February 2005, it had 157K miles on it.  I looked up the maintenance records; we passed the Light Second shortly before the oil change on March 28 of this year.  The receipt from the garage says 186303 mi. Considering that we’ve put 32.5K on it in 2.33 years, it should take us about 3 years from now to make it to the moon.  

 
It was a lovely day for driving; there were meandering thunderstorms in-among other dramatic clouds, but no continuous drenching rain to slow us down. We took I-40 to western Arkansas, turned north on I-540, and continued to KC when I -540 reverted to being US-71. There is only one bit of two-lane left on the whole route; about 15 miles just across the Missouri line.

I took a bunch of photos of I-540.

Lunch in northwest Arkansas 11:30-ish turned into a bit of an adventure.  We turned off at an exit advertising an AQ Chicken place. This is a local chain Morris remembered from his grad-school days in Fayetteville.  We didn’t find the AQ, though, and wound up taking a bit of a tour of an industrial part of Springdale as we doubled back to US-71. We followed it north for a bit, heading for the next road that could get us back to I-540 and wound up eating at a Dairy Queen. Quite respectable burgers, and VERY good Fries. Some other trip I’ve got to go in at a DQ and TRY that Sundae in the waffle bowl with the chocolate edges, though.

We got to the Hyatt around 5, and turned out to have beat our roommates in: Cliff and Claire McMurray and Dave St.John. They arrived while we were unpacking, though, and presently we ambled over to the Westin and got checked in with the convention. The two hotels are a couple of blocks apart, connected by part of an elevated pedestrian walkway called “The Link”.  It got immediately re-dubbed “the habitrail” (that may even be a local nickname), amid filkish images of meeting Walter the Guinea Pig (from Blake Hodgetts’ song) coming the other way.  After some conversation with Robin and Diana Bailey (haven’t seen Diana in years! possibly not since around the time Sharon was born) we adjourned to the Crayola Café in the Crown Center Shops. We wound up eating supper there Friday, as well as Thursday, and Morris commented that he wished there had been a place like that around Little Rock while Sharon was growing up: she would have enjoyed both the décor and the menu.

After that, we adjourned to the room, Cliff and Claire and I did a bit of practice for Friday’s “Rhysling Panel”, and then we all crashed.

Friday:

I think I was the only person in our roomsplit who was *not* confronted with a dilemma over what panel to attend in which time slot. The McMurrays just about had to flip coins a couple of times, to figure which two of the three simultaneous panels each of them would actually attend!

It is fortunate that the Hyatt’s Terrace Restaurant’s breakfast buffet was a very hearty all-you-can-eat, because it cost a bit more than half-again what I’m used to paying for such a meal.  The omelet chef was almost worth it, though. We did breakfast there Friday and Saturday both, and neither of us needed to actually buy a lunch (and I was the only one who had time to *eat* a lunch anyway!) either day.

We would run across one-another in this-or-that panel all day, and Morris and I *did* manage to get supper together before the evening panels. 

 A few days back on LiveJournal I’d posted a link to an illustration  in Phil and Kaja Foglio’s ‘Girl Genius’ online comic, which reminded me of The Fount of Blessings in Spider Robinson’s stories set in Jake’s Place.  Knowing that I was likely to be seeing Spider Robinson at some point during the Centennial, I did a printout of that page to take along to give to him.  It happened Friday afternoon, after a panel discussing the writing of Variable Star.  His response : “Wow! Do you know if I can get a frameable print of that?”  I said I didn’t know, but the artists were contactable from the comic’s website, and it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Friday’s “Rhysling Panel” went great! 

I’d responded to the Programming Department when they sent out the “trolling for panelists” advisory, and apparently I was the first one to answer back, because when they got back to me about it, I was listed as the Moderator!  Only, I had *no* idea of who-all else was on the panel. 

Another round of emails with programming yielded Mike Taht’s name, and about that time I got an email from Arlen Andrews, saying that he’d had some family health concerns come up that would be keeping him from attending after all, but would I like a song to sing on his behalf there?  Sure: why not, and meanwhile I’d been emailing back and forth with Mike, who was at that point a complete stranger.  We agreed that the “panel” really should be done as a group filk session.

 What Arlen sent me was “Requiem: The Day that SF Died”, which he’d written at the time of Robert Heinlein’s death back in 1988, to the tune of “American Pie”.  I’d never tried working up the chords to “American Pie”, but I recalled (after about three days) hearing Dene Foye do Weird Al’s song about The Phantom Menace to that tune, back at FenCon last fall.  So I emailed Dene, and arranged a trade of Arlen’s lyrics for his chords.

 Mike Taht turned out to have only one Rhysling song in his bag, so I put out the word to some other filkers that I knew were coming: Cliff and Claire McMurray, and Jordin Kare.  Mike was also going to have a friend along, who was musical and fannish, but had never encountered filk before, Evan Hunt. We figured that was a good core group, and we’d take our chances on accreting any others. 

I wound up being late to my own panel, on account of Brian Binnie’s presentation on the SpaceShipOne’s X-prize flights (which I was *not* going to miss) being in the other hotel, two blocks away through the habitrail. It turned into more of a concert than I’m used to doing, with Cliff and Claire and Jordin and me doing most of the singing, with interjections of single songs by Mike, two guys whose name tags I never got good looks at, and Evan, who had written a song about two days before leaving for the convention, in addition to playing bass on Mike’s song. There was also a young man from Seattle with a sixpack of variously-keyed harmonicas, who was also having his first encounter of the filk kind.  We had a two-hour time slot, but when nobody from the hotel came by to lock the place up promptly at ten, we just kept on singing, and it was after 11 p.m. before we ran out of audience.

That’s Mike with the grin in the left picture below, and Evan in the yellow shirt in the right picture. Barbara Trumpinski-Roberts, who originally contacted me in search of Rhysling lyrics when the Centennial was first being dreamed up, is the lady in tie-dye. Richard Hanley, sitting next to her, did one song.

Arlen’s song was received very well, and I gave away (all three copies I think) that I brought along. Terry Brussel-Gibbons (that’s her right above the date hack in the left picture) wanted to know whether Lee Gold had already printed it in Xenofilkia back when it was first written. I said I had no idea, but gave her my edress so she could get Arlen’s edress from me if Lee had *not* already published the lyric. Dene Foye had also done the song at ApolloCon, to good audience reaction.

I think Arlen has a hit, here.

Evan is a bit of a find, too. The song he’d written just before the convention is from the POV of a Luna Colony prison transportee, who somehow never quite manages to make it back to Earth after serving-out his sentence.  It reminds me strongly of “Kilkenny, Ireland” that Cliff does.

Saturday:

After breakfast at the Terrace, we scattered to our various panels-of-interest, and I went scouting on my lunch break to see where-nearby one might find a Kansas City Strip steak. I had more gaps in my schedule Saturday than Friday, and spent the time in-between panels in the “Ad-Hoc Programming” room with my guitar and singbooks, chatting and noodling music. Bob and Tricia Crichton from Seattle brought their lunches in and were part of the chat.

Saturday Supper at Morton’s steak house:

Dramatis Personae:
Russell and LouAnn Miller, and the enchanting Elizabeth (all 15 or 16 months old of her)
Bill and Kelly Higgins
Kip and Claire, and Dave St.John
Morris and I

 When I scouted them about 11:30 Saturday morning, they weren’t open for the day yet, so I did not get a chance to scope-out the menu. When Morris called to see if they were open at 5, he didn’t ask about prices either. So the prices on the totally a-la-carte menu came as a *bit* of a shock. We might have done better at The Peppercorn Duck Club in the Hyatt; it had similar prices advertised, but at least their entrees came with *some* sides included. The meat at Morton’s was good, but not *that* good.

We got some really good conversation going, though. Bill (beamjockey on LJ; he and I have seen one another’s comments on mutual friends’ postings but had never met faced to face to remember ‘til now) works at FermiLab and they’ve ‘inherited’ some of the surplus equipment from the Superconducting Supercollider that was only partially built in Texas. His wife Kathy is a psychologist and social worker doing DUI re-education, and Marty Coady Fabish is her office manager.

Russell and LouAnn are from the ORAC group in DFW-land, and Russell is on the FenCon committee. They’ve recently finished building a monolithic dome house.   Dave St.John has worked on constructing at least one monolithic dome structure.

After finishing the meal, we headed back to the Hyatt to get changed for the Saturday  Evening Gala (which we’d missed the first portion of on account of the supper conversation running-long).  Claire and I had arranged ahead of time to dress alike, in the purple outfits she’d picked for the bridesmaids when she and Cliff got married a few years back. Her daughter-in-law Fern had given hers to Claire after the event, and we’d each worn ours to convention banquets since then, but never simultaneously.  When we got to the Gala, we found a crowd milling around in the lobby: it was Intermission. We took the opportunity to go in and stake out some good seats. We’d missed the video interview with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, but we got to see a video of Ginny Heinlein reading the piece Robert had written for the original incarnation of “This I Believe” back in the 1950’s, and a video of the firing of a brass cannon which had formerly been on the Heinleins’ front lawn but had been corroding in storage ever since Robert’s death. Ginny had bequeathed it to Brad Lineaweaver, who brought in an appropriate expert to clean and recondition it. The video is on YouTube. We also got to see Jeanne Robinson’s presentation on her Stardance Zero-Gee film project, and hear Spider sing the song lyric included in Wandering Star.

Eventually the speechifying ran down, and Toastmaster Robin Bailey came back to announce that as a finale, Jordin Kare and I would sing “Green Hills of Earth”.

Bailey explained afterward that he’d been asked on Saturday afternoon to lead the song, but had to delegate it to Jordin; then they couldn’t find me to warn me because we were off at supper away from the hotels.

 But in the meantime, all I can think as I step up to the stage is, “I’m glad I dressed up”.
Then I ask “is there a guitar in the house that I can borrow?”
And Spider Robinson steps forward to loan me his.
And then all I can think is “I’m glad I’ve been practicing A LOT lately, because Spider’s guitar has steel strings”.
And then my reflexes take over, and Jordin and I agree quickly that he’ll lead and I will accompany and harmonize, and we sing the song.
And we get the whole room, pretty-much, singing along on the final chorus.

 Fortunately the Official Photographer got shots of the event, or they’d never believe this at Studio Joe. This photo is at the end of Page 6.
I've also heard from Tina Black, who made an mp3 of it with her cell phone. We're working out how she can get that large a file to me gracefully.

On *that* kind of adrenaline rush, I decided I was good for another couple of hours of filking, at least, so we (Jordin, Cliff and Claire, Mike, Evan, and I) arranged that we would meet-up in the hallway outside the room where we had the panel last night, and if it was locked we’d just kidnap a piece of hall.

It was, and we did.
It was retro!
It reminded me, in miniature, of the filk at MidAmeriCon in 1976, in the lobby outside the art show at the foot of the escalators where the Dorsai Irregulars were being ad-hoc overnight security.  I was kind of disappointed, actually, that  there were so few Dorsai Folk there (us, the McMurrays, and Bill Higgins) and NONE (that I saw) of the DI.

Evan turns out to have a friend who throws parties themed around well-known fairy tales. He breaks the story up into scene-bites, and invites his friends to select a scene and write a song about it. Then when the story is read, the songs are performed at the appropriate points. The one he did was a jazzy piece from the POV of the Wicked Queen in Snow White. She’s musing about how she’s clawed herself up from nothing to being the Queen and the Fairest In The Land, and how dare that upstart Snow think she can take over the top place! It was cool, and we told him that if it is typical of his other songs from that background, he need have no fear of showing up at future filk circles.

 We gave him and the harmonica player from Seattle (whose name I never did get) information on contacting their local filk communities, and it was about 1 a.m. when we all started to run out of steam.

 Sunday:
Morris and I had originally planned to follow the McMurrays and Dave back to Wichita on Sunday afternoon, and stop-over with them rather than springing for even a Motel-6 hotel-night in KC, but we turned out to not have compelling interests in any of the Sunday panels, so what we really did was get the Hyatt bill settled, load the car, and hit the road. We ate a late breakfast at Waffle House, where the meal for the two of us totaled less than the before-tax cost for *one* of us at the Terrace buffet, and was just as satisfying. The trip home did not include any off-road food expeditions (we spotted a KFC right at the freeway exit at Clarksville AR somewhere around 4 p.m.) and we got back home about 6:30, with plenty of daylight to spare. I picked up Kethry at the vet on Monday morning, after refilling the Toyota’s gas tank, and we spent most of Monday catching up on missed sleep.