Going acoustic by default

It was a weird weekend for electronics at this past OVFF.

I figured, “Hey! I’m staying at the hotel this year! I can lug the theremin along, I’ll have a place to stash everything!” And so I did. Pity I didn’t also lug along its power supply… so poor Sergei sat silent. I suppose I could’ve set it up and whistled while waving my hands at it, but it wouldn’t really have been the same. It would’ve sounded too much better than I normally play.

Now, I can’t say I didn’t know that my amp had a fuse… but it had been in there so long, I had forgotten it had one, which made it problematic when my amp went silent in the middle of the Farewell Jam and I had to figure out what happened. Fortunately, the drummer from Toyboat let me plug in to his amp, so I could raise up a joyful noise. Then another musician whose last name is lost to my sieve-like memory lent me his acoustic — all I recall, unfortunately, is Douglas McC. If you’re reading this and are him, thank you!!

Anyway, I had a great time, and the post-con comedown is all but non-existent this year. And I had the con crud two weeks ago, so I didn’t pick anything up to get over!

It’s still weird to walk into the dealers’ room and not see Juanita at her table, though.

It’s all timing.

The Draconids were kind of a washout; the sky was clear enough, but Draco was low in the northwest sky and the peak had passed eight hours before by the time I got home. So I gave up on looking for meteors and just kind of perused the sky randomly with my binoculars.

So imagine my surprise while gazing off in the general direction of Orion and had a meteor flash through my field of view! Beautiful golden thing with a delicate smoke trail. It may have been an erratic since it was not coming from the radiant of the Draconids. But it was astonishingly beautiful and exceedingly rare to see one under magnification.