I woke up later than planned, and spent a good chunk of morning working on the benighted skirt. It will be really gorgeous when finished. All that's left to do is the trimming, joining and anchoring of the elastic, the closing of the pockets, the hemming of the bottom, some reinforcing of the side seams, and some additional hemming at the waistline. It's long enough for me to wear as far up as I like my skirts, far above my actual waist, or down at my waist and have it long and low.

The fabric swatches I linked to in comments on the post about the material really don't do it justice. The base color is a variegated indigo blue, with shreds of parchment with fine italic penmanship, all dusted about with gold. It looks like Bad Tom's diary, either being stitched together with material and magic, or coming unglued and floating about somewhere in the After, or perhaps inside Jo's head in the Before.

There were some crazy things with the automatic map in the car, and we were running late to start with, so I wound up at Borderlands at 20 after 12, rather than noon sharpish as I'd originally hoped for. I was immediately singled out by the local cat, a Sphynx looking rather the worse for wear in spots. The look of a Sphynx cat is startling to start with, and she'd been itchy enough to scratch and get a few beat-up-looking spots recently. Her human had been out of the area, and she decided that she needed attention. I wound up on a couch with a book in my hand and a warm cat in a blanket on my lap.

ataniell93 showed up around two-ish, as Life had Attacked. We rocketed around the store for a bit; I had been stacking books up on a corner of the counter, and I found a few more, to the tune of some rusty squeaking. We poked in and out of various shops, wandered towards a bus stop, got a package of hers mailed, poked about scarily crowded shops 75% written in Japanese, then came back, stopping first in Good Vibrations (glee! I stopped dead in the sidewalk and dragged her back with me) and then a curiously spacious resturant for a late lunch. After that, I finished up cadhla's afghan on her couch while she read me spoilered scenes from the pre-Potter-era RPG Lightning War. Her cat decided that stinky permanent marker was better than catnip; I caught a few action shots of the creature snuggling up to a well-labeled paper bag. Cute cat. Very friendly, though a little standoffish while high.

Over lunch, the topic of Author == Fandom came up. Many authors tend to collect fandoms much like the authors themselves. lmbujold has a fandom that's generally pleasant, well-spoken, and polite. outofambit wondered at one point how she came to have a mostly sane fandom. It seems that she herself is mostly sane. (Not mentioned in this exercise: Mercedes Lackey, who has a fandom that really does mean well, though they can get overenthusiastic, and it's not always interpreted as a good thing.) J.K. Rowling ... well, the tone of the fandom in general is perhaps excessively youthful (inexperienced, high-energy, idealistic), with very Gryffindor attitudes, and a rather lot of Random Crazy, which all of the above is generally how she tends to come off in interviews, or so I've heard. I thought that it wasn't just like the author themselves, but the people that the author would tend to gather around them in person (by choice or in general) as well as their own personality.

Movie and television fandoms are a little more difficult to look at this way, as you've got to contend with the writer of the screenplay, the director(s), and all the actors.

But it's hard for Random Crazy to exist so well in the Young Wizards fandom, for example. The Lone Power is very well-described, and it would have to be someone very dense to not see the Lone Power in themselves if they went really far overboard. Even those who are sufficiently odd as to believe that Wizardry is Real and that the novels are a series of exemplary tales as to how a wizard should conduct herself tend to keep it quiet and not boast about the skills of wizardry they've acquired, and how the novels themselves tend to act like Manuals when re-read, and the Whispering is very real. It doesn't come up in casual conversation, because it's not polite to discuss those things with people who aren't Real Wizards, though a Real Wizard may mention casually in discussion of the fandom that they did take the Oath, and then maintain a silence when people start saying disappointedly that they did too and nothing special happened.


Giggling over kitty pictures was great fun. There was even a photo of Tissriel with a cat-5 cable (as V calls it, 5 Cat cable, since it's thick enough to take 5 cats to destroy where regular phone cord takes 1 cat to mangle.) As Serious RPG set in, I betook myself off BART-wards, and was pleasantly surprised to find the sidewalks not too terribly weird, though more crowded than in Phoenix. I had a bit of a bad moment when I looked around and didn't see much that looked like a train station, but I espied myself the stairways going down underground, and figured that must be it, which it was.

A helpful dude in the information kiosk responded to my explanation that this was my first time using BART ever, and told me what to do and what train to get on for where I was going. I got the little card ticket from the machine (I'd helpfully brought a lot of quarters with me) and zooped it through the machine, went through the gate, went down the stairs, and was just in time to see the train to where I was going pull up alongside the platform.

Whee, train!

I am delighted with systems of mass transit. I think it's some weird non-sexual fetish thing holding over from my childhood as a Daughter of Mercury. It was spacious and comfortable and smelled like an airplane. The seats faced many different strange directions. I loved it. I loved the buses-on-a-leash too, but I loved this more. I was fairly bouncing with glee at being on a train, and that always makes me prettier. I saw in the dark train window. I discovered that I don't get signal underground, but that the woman in my car facing the wrong direction did get signal. Alas for being me, but yay for being her.

I was waiting in the wrong place for my aunts, but we found each other via cellphone tag. I also discovered that call waiting doesn't work so well on the cellphone. Alas. Sorry, amberfox.

I came back bouncy and bubbling over with glee. It was a good day.

There are sewing misadventures. Keep in mind this is the first time in years that I have been sewing, and also that this is essentially my first time ever working with a pattern. I am a decent operator of a sewing machine, but not a particularly good follower of exact instructions when it comes to something I've not practiced following instructions on before.

Things were going along fine until Aunt-Fayoumis realized that the pattern as given was not likely to be comfortable or flattering on my lumpy self. Desperate measures were called for, things were stitched together that were not meant to be stitched together, and seamrippers were employed.

Things proceeded to go along swimmingly after that, but then the sewing machine commenced making this funny clunking noise. Incidentally, I really despise dealing with the sewing machine's bobbin area. Scary things happen in there, and I don't have a map of how the $#&*@# thing goes together.

We decided it's best to be knocking off for the night and resuming in the morning. Bad when the damn thing makes scary clunking noises, especially when parts that are supposed to be moving start moving too much, and then not at all.

If the skirt ever gets finished, it should look pretty killer.

If.