Dear me, photos are urging enough to get to walking and drop a few pounds.
We are safe and well. We went from Spokane to Buffalo WY (where new pet policies at our hotel (15.00 a head) make it certain we will use another routing)—then on to Sioux Falls SD, where we stayed the night, on to Lisle IL, and dropped off the kittehs with Jane’s sister…with two pens, and a cat tree for their amusement, plus ample food and water—‘Don’t open that door whatever you hear from in there!’
Went on to the Nebulas at the Palmer House, and meeting people. Wiishu channeled Bren…I’m sure Jane will have pix. Betsy had a lovely gift for me, a short kimono, which I wore on awards night, with black kit, and we had a very nice evening; had lunch at the Billy Goat Tavern, a little distance away, which was fun; and otherwise snacked off the con suite: two hamburgers at that hotel Palmer House are 65.00, counting a glass of beverage each. Good burgers, but not that good.
Sunday we all went our ways, and I began to cough. By Sunday evening, back in the far more comfy Red Roof Inn, which had ac that worked and mattresses that were comfy—(the fancy hotel, not so much)— I then came down with a royal case of whatever was floating about, respiratory crud. I don’t remember much, except we bought some groceries, and I survived while Jane helped out her sis with a couple of construction problems. We did collect the cats, who emerged fat, happy, and oh, so glad to see us. So I cat-sat, semi-conscious, too contagious to go near Jane’s sis, so I stayed and slept, oh, from Monday until Friday morning, at which point we gathered up the cats and baggage and took out. Jane drove the city traffic, which is insane, and when we got to the Dells, I took over and drove a bit.
First night we aimed for Al’s Oasis, a huge travel stop on I-90 at Oacama SD, and the comfiest hotel mattresses in the universe—Serta Pillowtop Commercial Grade—we asked. We tore ourselves away from the mattresses, and unwillingly aimed ourselves at Buffalo WY, but somewhere around Spearfish, or Gillette, our GPS advised us to hang a right and go up toward Broadus MT…through what proved to be the back side of the Crow Reservation, and a good route, if you don’t need gas, which there isn’t, except at Broadus—which is a western movie set doing business as a modern little town. Absolutely lovely but basic little bar, which fed us lunch, and on we went, across territory that at some points didn’t even have phone lines, and into a windstorm at the Custer Battlefield Conoco…nearly blew me off my feet as I was trying to cross a massive puddle. We had 60+mph headwind from there to Rocker MT, where, thank goodness, we had an old familiar hotel and a room.
From there, home is easy, except for driving rain and poor visibility: we were still back noonish, had lunch at the Swinging Doors, and collapsed. The aforementioned windstorm had also hit here, so we have flowers down, and weeds exploding from the warm moisture, but we’re glad to be back.
Waves limply.
Jane is sleeping in this morning—past 9:30 and she’s still out. But she needs it. She worked beyond reasonable limits getting us in order, packed, on the road, and back again—she’s exhausted, and I’m glad she’s sleeping. I only hope she doesn’t take what I’m just getting over.
Did we believe the GPS that did a rotational dance in central Chicago? We were dubious, being told to take off into a long run of empty territory. But that diagonal route between Spearfish and 90 at the Custer Battlefield is a big time-saver. It would be much easier if we had stayed at Bozeman or nearby, but prices there (it being gateway to Yellowstone) are higher, and we happen to like the Rocker motel.
Welcome home — you have been missed. From the pictures we’ve seen elsewhere, the con looked like good fun (except for the part about coming down with the creeping crud, which seems to happen frequently at cons, and on trips in general). Did the GPS redirect you because of some type of road problem, or just because reasons? A few years back DH and I missed our exit on our way to DisneyWorld, and the GPS directed us all the way round Robin Hood’s Barn before depositing us at DisneyWorld — the back fence, with no nearby public entrance!
Isn’t it funny how the high end hotels can have less than comfy mattresses (I suppose you are paying for the name), while you can run into wonderful accommodations back of Bourke?
Glad you made it back safely!
I spent the night in Rocker on the way out to Shejicon V this past August. America’s Best Value Inns, advertised $35 or so for a night, when I got there, they said, “Oh, there’s some kind of Irish heritage convention in town, so no discounts, and the price is $80 a night. How….nice….so, when I left, that was the last time I’ll stay there, despite the fact that the room wasn’t too bad, but I hate having the price jacked up $45 as I’m standing there.
I probably passed Al’s Oasis, both coming and going, but honestly, don’t remember, as I was focused on the road ahead. Heck, I hardly looked at the billboards in Sturgis…..I did take pictures of the sunflower fields, though…..
I see why the GPS said to hang a right toward Broadus, it cuts off a big chunk of I-90 that continues west and a little south, and then starts to come north just after you cross the Big Powder River and then meet up with I-90 again somewhat east of Billings…..long drive, but very pretty country, it would seem, especially if the spring flowers are in bloom.
That would bug the stuffin’ out of me. Do you get the impression it was simply because you were a sale of opportunity, probably wouldn’t be coming through again soon, and they were collecting while the getting was good? People may make fun of me for planning a year or more in advance for trips, but for Events, sometimes getting your reservations nailed down way in advance is better than trusting Allah to provide!
Glad you made it back and sorry that the crud managed to find you.
Hotel pricing is such an art. Friend of mine manages part of a very well known chain and started to explain one evening how it was calculated. Fast forward two days later and he is still not through the explanation!
Weekends cost more. And ‘high season’ when tourists abound costs more. We’re accustomed to 60 a night for two with cats at our Motel 6’s. GOt hit for 125 at Al’s Oasis, on a big hunting weekend. But I don’t even want to know what the Palmer House is—every 3 feet down the halls are photos of all the stars and presidents and royalty that has guested there: it occurred to me that the hotel is a sort of national historical place, for sure; and that most historical places you kind of walk through and look at, and pay an admission fee. But this is an ongoing one, and you get to live in it for a few days, and experience the 1930’s, and a ballroom where (when they took down the chandeliers for cleaning) they found some of Carol Channing’s jewelry that she would toss to the audience in Hello Dolly. The woman had a good throwing arm, I’ll say. The Empire Room, which was a venue for just about everybody in showbiz from Nelson Eddy to Phyllis Diller, is TINY…just about half our highschool auditorium, so I’d say maybe it would sat 500 in straight chairs and 250 with tables involved, though I could be wrong and it might be double that. Bitsy—very up-close with the entertainers on-stage.
If I recall, that was Saturday evening, August 15, as I’d spent Friday night before in Mitchell, SD, and had left home at 5:30 AM Friday. So, weekend prices might have kicked in, but I just thought the attitude was kind of snotty….take it or leave it, and yes, I could have gone further on and maybe made it up to another town…. I arrived at your house approximately 11:30 Sunday morning, in time to help with the removal of various and sundry pine cones, branches, and other biological debris from the front yard…..after which, we repaired for lunch to the Swinging Door.
The drive home was nothing like the drive out…I left Spokane at 5:30 AM on Thursday, drove all day, and into the night until I got to Wall, SD. From Wall, I left the next morning and made it the 1100 miles or so home by 2:30 AM Saturday.
Business area hotels sometimes very cheap at weekends in the UK. Thursday and Fridays are often much cheaper than Monday, Tues. Wed. Yet Sunday sometimes available as a free add=on if you stay Friday and Saturday. Translight physics so much easier to understand
I’m glad you’re all back home safe. Wishing you health, and hoping Jane will escape the con-crud. After being cooped up in the car together for three days and being exhausted it would be a minor miracle, but resting up and taking your vitamin Cs might help bolster her resistance.
She is up, and swears she has no trace of illness. I took advantage of the drenching rain of the last several days to pull half a trash can of the most egregious weeds, but we have a deal yet to go, and we are yanking the yellow and some of the blue and white iris to give to friends Tim and Cheryl, who did above and beyond, washing the pond filters after the storm.
By chance would your yellow Iris be planted in or around the pond, wanting their feet wet? If so, one expects they may be “Yellow Flag Iris”, which have been declared a noxious weed in this state for what they do to natural watercourses. 🙁 Just treat ’em as other invasives.
“And what do we do with witches…” MPFC
No, they’re tall bearded, but they are the ‘go to’ any time you have some varieties go to seed, so to speak. Hardy in the extreme.
I grow the bulbous little I. reticulata, and hybrids. They only get 6″ tall at blooming, so in pots they make nice little living centerpiece arrangements with, say, miniature Tete-a-Tete daffodils.
Afterward the “spaghetti strap” leaves may get 18″, but by then you want to have ’em, and they want to be, back outside in the sun.
Glad you and Jane made it back safely. ReadyGuy and I are celebrating our 36th anniversary so that means you are celebrating your anniversary as well.
All is busy on the Arizona front. ReadyDaughter has received a job offer in the Washington DC area and is flying out to find an apartment. Our nest is really going to be empty as Halloween kitteh will be moving with her mistress next month, rather than staying as an adopted child of the house. The only inhabitant who will be genuinely happy is our dog Pepper who will once more be able to go into any room in the house without fearing that small black cat who took over the den when daughter had to spend months on the road with her present job.
Over here, we say it ‘meowstress’, indicating a feline personage’s personal pet.
Welcome back!
Google Maps driving instructions want me to go down the wrong side of a divided road. It’s been that way for years. The divided road is short, doesn’t have signs, and the divider is a little wide. It seems a pretty obvious case to this human, but it makes me wonder what Google is not cluing in on. Sight range vs. LIDAR range?? And I wonder how many glitches automated cars will–ahem!–run into.
Cyber Sally, as we call her, can’t find our street. It insists we turn on “Road,” which is an alley, from which you can’t reach our drive (it parallels it) and we duly turn on the proper streets, then Sally advises us we are ‘arriving at home on Road.’
It USED to know the proper turn. Her current incarnation is a little dim. And it was thoroughly useless near State or Wacker in Chicago. WE were on Monroe, and the hotel is on Monroe, so we stayed the course and got there. If we’d followed Sally’s instructions we’d still be orbiting that boxed square.
How often do you update the maps in Cyber Sally? Generally, whenever I take a long trip, I check with the GPS manufacturer. In my case, Garmin, and I have a lifetime update package for my unit, as long as I own the unit, and as long as the unit continues to functions. Mine’s named “Samantha” from the woman’s voice I use as the guide….
Not enough, clearly. It takes more organization than we have…I think our update happens every couple of years, before we begin to think it’s gotten crazy.
occasionally, I get a notice from Garmin that they have new updates available….I can also connect my GPS unit to the computer and have it check for updates that way….am I wrong in presuming that your GPS is a separate unit, and not integral to the Prius?
Ain’t been the same without ye!
Psssst, it’s her website! Of course not.
Never mind.
Looking forward to “Wiishu channeled Bren…” story. My mind goes off on tangents wondering if he had a small brocade suit and his hair in a braid. Was he being very diplomatic? things that can wait for photos.
The Kimono was beautiful!
Yes, yes, he did.
OOhhhh! Pictures!! DO WANT!!
It is very, very good to hear you both and the two felines are back safe and sound.
One is very intrigued and looking forward to nand’ Wiishu’s exploits en envoi diplomatique à la Nébula.
My two wacky cats send greetings.
Welcome Home!
Glad you are feeling better, CJ! Around here, it is called Con Crug and it manifests itself in a variety of nasty forms. I try to muscle up on vitamins in advance (A-Kon / Doll AKon is next weekend) but sometimes you cannot dodge the bullet. I hope to dodge it this year since I already dealt with a horrible cold earlier this month. It knocked me out of work for three whole days and it took two weeks to finally get over it completely. Ugh.
The best hotel bed we ever slept in was at the Yaoicon hotel back in 2006. Honestly? We did not want to leave the bed because we were so comfortable and slept so well. That year, the guest artist also collected Volks BJDs so a big BJD tea party was given in her honour on Sunday. It was also a meet-and-greet and autograph session, all rolled up with pretty dolls and meeting people I had met on Den of Angels. I finally had faces to the names of my friends.
Looking forward to photos!
Onna-san! Long time no see!
We just wrapped up one of our two big gaming weekends during the year; sadly, this one was on the verge of being canceled due to sickness in the house of our usual venue. We ended up doing a quick rescue RPG down at our house, with several rounds of WarMachine and topping off with a homegrown Hero System game. It hearkened back to the simple days of pizza, beer, and tabletop games.
IF this ends up double-posting I apologize; WordPress is being finicky.
Onna-san! Long time no see!
We just wrapped up one of our two big gaming weekends during the year; sadly, this one was on the verge of being canceled due to sickness in the house of our usual venue. We ended up doing a quick rescue RPG down at our house, with several rounds of WarMachine and topping off with a homegrown Hero System game. It hearkened back to the simple days of pizza, beer, and tabletop games.
WordPress is being weird; I tired to post 3x last night, with no results.
Onna-san! Long time no see! The gist of what I tried to post earlier was basically good to see you again. That, and cats iz stoopid sometimes.
WordPress is persistently ignoring my attempts to post, so if you suddenly get a rash of the same post further down the line, it’s the spam filter gone berserk, then giving up abruptly.
This may be a longshot, but it may be the browser you are using, and what firewall/AV software. I use Firefox, and one of the “add-ons” I have allows me to disable Javascript. That makes sites many times safer but it stops the sort of scripts that enable posting. A too restrictive firewall could also get in the way. These things may have gotten reconfigured in the recent past on your system.
Just a thought.
I’m not late this month! But I’ve reason to know this will be the 72 anniversary of Operation Overlord, AKA D_Day, but the 4th (which would have been the “Eve of”) will be the 72nd of the Liberation of Rome and the 74th of the Battle of Midway. I chose this avatar for other reasons, obviously.
Jane sent me a picture of the “event” and asked me to post it on the Shejidan site. Not everyone here is on Shejidan, but I have a link to the picture.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24007601@N07/26923975413/in/dateposted-public/
Definitely a dead giveaway as to who he’s cosplaying…. LOL.
He looks so neat and elegant and ‘soigné’! His household staff may certainly be proud of themseves for how well turned out he looks!
Odd linguistic moment: At the moment, I find I can’t recall soigner beyond a feeling of the general area of what it means. This means I’m too out of practice. I should be able to give an exact shade of meaning, close enough to describe it in English. IIRC, avec soin is with care, carefully, as in exactly or meticulously, in French, and I’m getting the feeling that soigner is related. Oddly, I know what you’re saying, Hanneke, I know soigné covers it more precisely, but I’m drawing a blank as to whether I should translate it as, carefully, meticulously, dapper, well turned out, that sort of thing, or if I’m confusing it with the real meaning. I’m embarrassed and frustrated to admit I’m going to have to consult my Larousse Bilingue to refresh my memory, to be sure I’ve got it right. My college French was not so truly fluent that I could’ve gotten by in France or Québec without keeping my dictionary handy, but it was good enough to manage a fair bit of conversational French well, and to read adult level essays and short stories from famous French-speaking authors.
So I feel odd and it’s curious, while looking at Wiishu cosplaying as the paid-aiji, that I’d have only a general feel, but be uncertain of the exact meaning, of a word I know full well I should know easily. I was good enough to think and dream in French and take notes in other subjects without always knowing I’d code-switched and put in French words or abbreviations. Heh. — But now I’m rusty. Vien ici, Larousse. Dites-moi ce que veut dire «soigné». — I wonder how close I’ve got it.
Sorry for the French word, it was the middle of my night and I couldn’t think of a better English word to describe a distinguished gentleman looking elegant, well groomed, in beautiful clothes that have been well taken care of. In my head, soigné carries more of an upper-crust connotation than dapper does, which I associate with both good cheer and not-quite high society looks – a salesman could be dapper, but if he was soigné he’d be too smooth for his level and I’d be suspecting him of dastardly motives, while for Bren’s usual high-octane negotiating environment it’s the necessary and expected armor to wear into verbal skirmishes. Maybe a remnant from the time the upper crust spoke French?
Strange, all these nuances and sub-levels one’s mind attaches to quite ordinary words, isn’t it?
I regret that my command of French is just enough to be boorish to those who actually can speak it 😉 along the lines of the kids learning another language, the first things they pick up are gutter language. There are levels of subtlety that I didn’t catch; thank you for the explanation, Hanneke!
Well, that’s just my Dutch interpretation of the word. In older Dutch novels you find a sprinkling of French used by and for the upper crust, while for a real French person it’s probably just a word like any other, denoting “well taken care of” etc. like BCS found in the dictionary, but likely without the specific upper crust associations it has in Dutch. Because English nobility had the same French-speaking habits, I tend to assume they kept some of the same French and Latin/Greek words alive to help distinguish them from the ‘hoi polloi’ (ordinary people, in case that isn’t one of the kept-alive classical words in English…).
Somehow, that isn’t something my head remembers in the same place as it does the English vocabulary – they each get their own drawer in my mental cabinet, and having labelled them Greek/Latin, I apparently don’t add the mental cross-reference ‘May be used while communicating in English’, so using these foreign words is usually a hope and a guess that they’ll be familiar. Sometimes I guess wrong.
Oh wow, I got it right! There are other shades of meaning and idiomatic nuances, but yes, soigné, meticulous, tidy, neat, careful, well-groomed, well taken care of, well cared for. Others meanings get into nursing or parental care, gardening, and so on.
Good that I had it right after all, but not so good that I was no longer certain and needed to look it up to check myself.
Hanneke’s example usage gives a good case where sometimes a multilingual speaker will use a more precise word from another language and code-switch, especially around other speakers who’ll know the shade of meaning she’s using.
This also goes to show how Bren’s day to day life depends on knowing shades of meaning, connotations, lots of vocabulary, and how practice and notes are needed to keep it up.
And (lol) I see I moved my French Lit. 2 volumes and my larger Larousse into my bedroom, intending to read and practice and then, (ahem) I slacked off from my good intentions. — One finds one ought to resume that, as well as to restart what ought to be a habit, of reading a few foreign words a day to memorize them from the dictionary, to amass vocabulary. Most of my grammar should still be OK, but I know I had weak points, like the literary tenses and some prepositional usage. — And now, thanks to the web, I have easier access to text and audio-video of native French speakers, for practice. 🙂
My Spanish is in about the same shape, I think.
— Wiishu looks fantastic as nand’ Bren. He would also do handily well in Revolutionary era America, England, or the French or Prussian courts. 😉 But please, M. Wiishu, do try to avoid Mme Lafarge and M. Darsay. Better to stick with M. Dr. Franklin at court. 😉 Though yes, mixing real and fictional characters.
One also finds one would prefer the movie 1776 to the current campaign cycle.
Mais oui, BCS! I think you hit it with ‘dapper’, he looks ready either for a Season or an ambassadorial event in Shejidan. DH says he would prefer the movie “300” to the current campaign cycle, but that might drag the conversation off into regions best left unexplored.
Thinking of reading Jules Verne?