(no subject)

My officemate just got here. She has a daughter who goes to school near DC and who was home for Thanksgiving, so the plan had been to drive her back to DC yesterday and then return to Pittsburgh. In a correctly-functioning world, that trick would take about 9 hours, which isn't bad if you're competent at the distance-driving thing (which I am not, but Janette gets lots of practice).

Thanksgiving weekend can never be described as "correctly functioning" when it comes to traffic involving DC (or Baltimore), though. I go to a convention near Baltimore every year, and traffic on Sunday is always a little wonky. Most of that wonkiness is in the eastbound direction; I always see extremely heavy traffic on the PA turnpike from Breezewood to Pittsburgh. Our direction is usually pretty good. There must be a lot more people who flee DC/Baltimore for the weekend than who go there.

This year was much worse than usual. (I'm guessing that the number of people who drove instead of flying places increased.) It took us 45 minutes to get from I-70 to I-76 in Breezewood, a distance of about a mile. All of the toll booths were open; there was just a ton of traffic. It probably took about 10 miles on the actual turnpike before traffic was behaving normally for us. The other direction, as usual, was hosed.

Remember that I said Janette was going to drive from Pittsburgh to DC? She left Pittsburgh around noon and told me that when she hit the turnpike traffic just plain *stopped*. Much worse than usual, she said -- people were getting out of their cars, walking dogs, talking to each other, etc. So she bailed and headed for I-68 (I'm not sure exactly how she did this), and *that* was slow and sometimes stopped. Then she headed for non-interstates (she mentioned 522) and even *they* were kind of bad. It took her over 8 hours to drive to DC, and she decided not to come back until this morning.

Next year I'll bet she tells her kid to take a train. :-)

Galacticon

Current fares to Chattanooga for Galacticon in March are around $250. That's over the vague threshold I had set in my mind, but it's an awfully long drive so maybe I'll do it anyway. I wish I knew whether that's a good price that I should lock in or a norml price that I can ignore for a while. I'll probably assume the latter.

Adding in the desire to be there (and, specifically, to have checked into the hotel) before sunset Friday may push this, though. That's before the change to DST, and while I haven't been able to find out when local sunset is that day, in Pittsburgh it'll be around 6:15.

Besides, On the Mark is the music GoH; at least *one* of us should be available for Friday-evening activities. And if I fly, I can also be available until Sunday afternoon, whereas the car would need to leave in the morning to get back at a civilized hour.

con report

Darkover was fun. It felt a little lower key than usual; Jaelle said attendance was down 10% from last year, but it somehow felt like more. I noticed during our concert that the audience wasn't really getting into it and I thought it was a failure on our part, but then the next night people were also mellower than usual for the Clam Chowder concert, and *that* is unusual. I'm not sure what was up. I felt like both we and Chowder gave good performance to polite applause, for the most part. Very weird.

I had Shabbat meals with Yaakov, Rivka, and their 3-year-old Aaron. We never saw some of the other Jewish regulars. I got to talk with Yaakov some, though we haven't had a really good, long conversation at a con or event since Aaron was born. We talked about the Sinai board thing, and his advice amounted to: find out the background to all of this. I still don't have a feel for whether the behavior I'm seeing is considered normal in the Jewish community.

There were some areas of "uncertain practice" involving Yaakov. One occurred when I showed up for lunch on Saturday. He asked if I had made kiddush yet and I said no, and he said he had so I should go ahead. I drifted to a corner of the room and started to sing quietly, but he made it clear that he had intended to listen to me (and he and Rivka said amein at the end). I felt awkward because as I was starting I realized I had no idea what the *Orthodox* practice is, and Reform tends to abbreviate some things, and I suddenly felt self-conscious that I might be making kiddush "wrong" from his point of view. (In fact, the reason I had not done this before going was so I could hear him do it.) I explained this afterwards and there was in fact just one sentence missing from what I know vs. what he knows, and he didn't cons ider it an issue. On a personal level *I* don't consider it an issue; this is the way I make kiddush and that's fine. Being on the spot in front of someone with a potentially different practice, and who comes from a tradition that says theirs is right and mine is wrong, made me feel funny, though.

There were some other awkwardnesses involving the lack of an eiruv and the use of the electronic keys in the hotel, but I won't go into them now. They boil down to this: I am comfortable with my practice, but I am uncomfortable in situations where I feel like I have to justify my practice to Yaakov. Yaakov is my friend and I'm sure he's not judging me negatively -- but it still feels awkward.

After this weekend, I have resolved not to share a hotel room with Kathy again. A year ago she had agreed to get two rooms next time (she snores loudly enough to bother me, and does so at length). Then a couple weeks ago she said she couldn't afford that, so we got one. Maybe my memories were exaggerated, I thought. Well, they weren't. So next time we *will* get two rooms, and if the rest of the group decides that I'm being unreasonable I guess I'll just get a room of my own, though I don't think that would really be fair. It may be the most expedient solution, though. We'll see.

There were some good concerts this year, and there was a jam session on Saturday that was a lot of fun. I'm not all that experienced with jam sessions (we're talking session-style, like you see in Irish pubs, not SCA-style where they hadn out music), but I did ok. We had a couple harps, a fiddle, a larger member of the viol family (might have been a cello), a few recorders, a bowed psaltery, and some percussion.

Saturday night at midnight was the traditional singing of the Hallelujah Chorus around the swimming pool. The pool is in the lobby area and has a 5-story ceiling and glass walls most of the way up, and the accoustics are pretty good. (Like singing in the shower, but much moreso.) I don't sing this any more, of course; I don't sing explicitly-Christian hymns. But I stood and listened, and it sounded pretty good. A few people asked me why I wasn't singing; that is an awkward question for which they don't really want the real answer, so I mostly just said I didn't feel like it.

Friday night at the filking I sang Michael Greenstein's "9/11" song; I had wanted OTM to learn it but some members thought it was too bloodthirsty. (It's kind of a revenge song, but more on the theme of "we will be united against you".) It went over very well at the filk. I didn't get an opportunity to sing it Saturday night.

The drive back was much longer than usual, but I've already written about that.