If I ever do this again, I need to remember two things: One, to pick up a redder dye. (I wanted a subtle change. I didn't want it to be so subtle as to be unnoticeable. And two, to buy some decent rubber gloves. The stupid plastic things that came with the kit tore in one spot while I was putting the dye in my hair, so now there's this brown smudge on the knuckle of one finger that won't go away, and the other glove ripped completely in half when I was taking them off between applying the dye and rinsing it out. Luckily, it wasn't really necessary to have the gloves on while I was rinsing out the dye.
Oh, yeah, and I need to be more careful about rinsing - the instructions on the package said to work the dye into a lather before rinsing it out, and in doing so, it splattered a lot. Most of the splatter hit the walls of the shower and rinsed right off, but a few drops hit the painted wall above the shower, and I'm guessing the only way to get rid of those stains is to paint over them.
Well, we'll see how it goes. The package says the dye will last for 6-12 shampooings, which I figure means it'll either wash out in two days, or it'll last about four weeks, depending on whether I love or hate the way it looks. ::grin::
So I'm sure you're dying to hear how MarsCon went.
I thought it went pretty well, though as is typical for cons, we kept oscillating between being bored and not having enough time to do everything we wanted. It was great to see Braz and Kris, and we even got Kris to play in K.T.'s Greyhawke game on Friday night. (Well, we got her set up to play, and I was ready to help her out, but she didn't actually get to play much - we'd given her a fighter to run, fighters having the fewest weird rules to remember, and there wasn't much combat, so she didn't get to do very much.) The gaming room was too noisy, though, so Matt and I sortof avoided gaming for the rest of the weekend.
Saturday, Kris decided she was going to stay at the house and read, and maybe go out and do some shopping. So Matt and Braz and I headed over to the Con together. We walked into the Con Suite just as they were serving lunch, so we had a couple of sandwiches and some chips and watched the assembled geeks filing past us in the line. At one point, Matt's eyes got very wide, and he snatched a piece of paper up and started scribbling on the back. When he showed it to Braz and me, it read, "How can someone so fat have no ass???" Braz and I looked up discreetly at the line.
You understand, sci-fi fans tend to fall into one of two categories: The overweight, and the underweight. Very few gamers are well-proportioned; we've got better things to do with our time than work out. So there were a fair number of people in the line who could easily qualify for "fat" - but Braz and I locked in on the person Matt was talking about without a single instant's hesitation.
You couldn't miss him. He had to weigh at least 450 pounds. His hands could barely touch each other in front of him. It was disgusting. I'm no welterweight myself, but next to this guy, I looked sleek and svelte. And Matt's note was right: He had no ass. None.
Now, K.T. is overweight, usually in about the same proportions as me. (Both of us yo-yo so much that it's hard to tell at any given time, and she's several inches shorter than me, so the actual numbers don't match, but I think most of the time, we're about the same percentage over our medical idea weight.) She carries all her excess weight above her waist, so she's got a tiny ass and fairly thin legs, comparatively speaking. (I confess; I'm occasionally jealous - I carry most of my weight in my thighs and hips, so my butt is big and I have to wear pants at least two sizes larger than my shirts.) But this guy did not have a small ass. He had no ass. None! The back pockets on his jeans were caving in!
It was scary, and we fled.
Having nothing better to do, we decided to sit in on the Mendhi body-art workshop. I'd bought a henna kit almost a year ago, when I was actually contemplating a real tattoo and decided to play with something less permanent first. But when the kit arrived, one of the bottles of oil in it had leaked, so I wasn't sure I'd have enough to add to the powder, and I wasn't sure what consistency to make the powder, either, so it just sat around and languished. At the workshop, the instructor (who turned out to be someone I knew; a friend of a friend that I've run into at parties occassionally) told us that she didn't know anyone who bothered with the oil, and showed us how to mix the henna powder with coffee or tea and lemon juice until it was about the consistency of toothpaste.
Matt and I each drew a design on our left arms, and I had the instructor draw another design on the back of my right hand. We tried to convince Braz to let us draw on him - an Apple logo, even, we promised! - but he declined. The design I drew on myself wasn't thick enough, so when the henna flaked off, it already looked faded. The one on my right hand smeared a little, but looks like it'll last for at least a couple of weeks. I may go to the dollar store and see if I can find the sorts of bottles the instructor was using; it seems easier to control than the plastic bags that came with my kit.
After that, we decided to leave for a while. We stopped by the Comic Cubicle to pick up our comics, and I dropped by the grocery store to get the ingredients for the peanut butter pie I was going to make for my dad's birthday, and then we went back to the house. The plan was to read comics, make the pies, and relax until it was time to head back to the Con for dinner and the evening's entertainment.
We'd been home for maybe ten minutes when K.T. and Kevin showed up. K.T.'s ex-husband had turned up, and she was badly shaken enough to want to leave.
I don't think we gave her quite as much sympathy as she was looking for. I was a little low on sleep, and was beginning to get a case of con-crankies (I can't stand not being able to be alone from time to time, and I'd been around people for 24 hours solid at this point), I was trying to make this pie for my dad's birthday party, and Kenny hadn't actually done anything to her except say hello. (He's not very bright; he still hasn't figured out that she isn't interested in being friends.)
At any rate, I tried to express sympathy for the surprise, but I was busy and irritable and not actually feeling very sympathetic. (I get like this at cons. I'm a little worried about what will happen at SheVaCon in a few weeks, because we're sharing a room with her and Kevin, and if I try to escape back to the room for privacy and they've locked us out for a mid-con fuck, I'm likely to blow it up out of all proportion and get very grumpy. No, knowing about the problem in advance isn't likely to help any. We'll see, I guess. I've mentioned the problem to K.T., but I don't think there's much we can do, and anyway I'd rather get locked out for an hour than wake up to it in the middle of the night!) At any rate, I couldn't dredge up much sympathy to offer, but when she suggested that we all go out to dinner at Second Street, that sounded like a good idea. I had reached the point where I wasn't interested in standing in line for my food any more, so I asked K.T. to run the idea past the boys while I finished the pies, and then we went out to dinner.
Everyone had a drink - I think we'd all acquired a case of the crankiness, for our various reasons. Matt wound up with the strongest drink, which Second Street called "Rum Runner" but which Matt dubbed "Drinky!" (Yes, the exclamation point is necessary.) We passed it around, and everyone else exclaimed "Drinky!" and when K.T. finished her dessert-drink, she ordered a Drinky! for herself. Everyone except me had a hamburger for dinner. I had steamed vegetables, but that's because the steamed vegetable platter at Second Street comes with this wonderful ranch dressing, and I basically consider the vegetables to be a vehicle for the dressing.
By the time dinner was over, K.T. had decided that while she was still feeling a little shaky about her ex-husband's presence, she wasn't going to let him spoil the con for her. So we went back for the evening entertainment.
The first act up was a fan comedy troupe called Luna-C that I don't think is very funny - they have funny punchlines, but the setups always take too long and I get impatient. Also, the acting is so awful it makes me wince. But since I wound up in the hallway talking to people until they were almost done, that was fine. Then they had a guy come up and sing a few filking songs. (If you don't know what filking is, I'm not going to try to explain it.) Most of those were okay - there was one that I thought sucked, and another that I thought was absolutely hysterical, and the rest were pretty average. K.T. hadn't witnessed filking before, and she enjoyed it enough to buy the CD.
Then there was the charity auction, which was fun. Don't ask me how an auction can be fun; it just was, OK? And then finally, the act that keeps me coming back every year - Caprizzio, the Women of Whimsey! They sang more drinking songs and fewer bawdy songs than I liked, but it was still a fun performance.
And that was it for this year!
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