wolfwings

...someone with a few grand can still one-up all the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar racing teams.

Seriously. $500 craigs-list BMW with NO EXTRA CREW AT ALL takes third place at WRC Mexico.

Like many others, I have an anniversary. That of evil_dwagon's death by DUI, or as more among my friends know/knew of him, Furp, or Patrick Reed. A year ago today, he was taken from us. And I've been working to give him a proper memorial in the only way I know how... this is the first step, it's a shortened re-mix/re-blend of a VNV Nation song, Beloved, from their full version and their 'official' short version down to one that's just under 3 minutes long now when I was done, rendered into mono since for the intended purpose stereo would provide no advantage.

Now... construction and planning of the rest begins. I had hoped to have it done for FC this year, but realized getting it done right is infinitely more important than getting it done by any artificial deadline.

Beloved - Heartstring Mix - VNV Nation

It's colder than before... The seasons took all they had come for.
Now winter dances here; it seem's so fitting don't you think?
To dress the ground in white... And grey...

It's so quiet I can hear... My thoughts touching every second, that I spent, waiting for you...

Circumstances afford me, no second chance to tell you... how much I've missed you...

My Beloved, do you know?
When the warm wind comes again,
Another year will start to pass.

And please don't ask me why I'm here...
Something deeper brought me, than a need to remember...

We were once young and blessed with wings!
No heights could keep us from their reach!
No sacred place we did not soar...

Still greater things burned within' us...
I don't regret the choices that I made...
I know you feel the same.

My Beloved, do you know? How many times I stared at clouds, thinking that I saw you there...
These are feelings that do not pass so easilly; I can't forget... what we claimed as ours!

Moments lost and time remains! I am so proud of what we were!
No pain remains, no feeling... eternity awaits!
Grant me wings that I might fly; my restless soul is longing...
No pain remains, no feeling... eternity awaits!

I just realized... I've made (or committed to making, technically, though basically just holding final payment for delivery in both cases) two seperate $2k-ish purchases.

One of them, I'm working patiently to be meticulous about getting every detail right, for multiple reasons, then will hand off final approval and get out of the way as the final piece is made. And by patiently I mean I'm willingly taking extra months here and there to let the concept-artist work out details until they're happy with the options they make, and then we discuss the options, lather, rinse, repeat until we're both satisfied.

The other? I basically handed the money across, and am waiting for the product to very loose specs. Species, name that indicates an easy-to-integrate theme without specifying how to integrate it, etc. No concept art, just 'get to it!' and let the artist chart their own course on things.

I just... something says it's the 'right way' to do each of these commissions, but I wonder am I really that odd to try to take such a hands-off, no-bother approach with the artists I commission as much as possible? Even on the detailed one, I'm quite happy biding my time while life works it's kinks out and moves along around the commission.

Dunno why I'm being so introspective lately, but between that, and someone commenting that my ratio of credit cards to bank accounts is backwards compared to most folks, am I really doing things that out of whack with how most people think they should be? =^.^=

I bought plenty of gear to be ready for damn near armageddon in my Yaris; good extra-skinny winter tires, heavy-duty snow chains (which I have used to chip the ice off of a friend's street, amusingly, without harm to the chains), heavy gloves and coat and hat, etc.

This entire trip, I haven't run into so much as snow on the ground. The closest I came was deep mud in one friend's driveway that I stopped at along the way. Nadda else, at all. Even here in Denver, Colorado, it's bone-dry and staying that way all day today so my drive down out of the mountains will be sedate and boring.

I'm not complaining about the hassle-free drive, and my tires/chains have saved my bacon once or twice already back in Kansas City, but I bought them all for this trip... and ended up not using any of them. *laughs* Ah well, at least all the gear's gotten use a few times, and proven itself useful; just not for it's intended purpose.

How does that old song go? You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need... I definately needed this gear in the last couple months and upcoming few more months, but not in the way I thought, or wanted.

Getting in early to help with the load-in let me really re-focus myself, finding my way if you will... but the rest of the con, just went so flawlessly I was able to relax with friends, but even more importantly make some new friendships and reinforce existing ones quite heavilly.

I left work on Friday at midnight, and immediately drove to Oklahoma. And got stuck in the mud of a friend's driveway. Upside: Learned my car has a full set of four recovery points hard-mounted to the unibody frame stock, seperate from the tow-hook point available for heavy-recovery situations and seperate from the dingy-towing mounts and tow-hitch mounts the car comes with as well. That's better than most Jeeps. =O.o= Upside: Took the tow-truck driver all of 6 seconds to pull the car free when he had all those options to work with so easilly.

So... Saturday I spend there, enjoy a wonderful meal and conversation with friends, and then headed west to New Mexico. That was remarkably uneventful, though I gave my hosts a bit of a surprise when they needed us to go down a dirt road and I didn't go all namby-pamby but just hauled ass and skittering gravel the whole way up and down their driveway each time. *laughs*

Sunday spent with them, I headed off again, and caught wind of a truck that goes by Sandman that I'd seen off-and-on every since Oklahoma City in a yellow-cabbed truck with two GIANT green machines on his flatbed. Thanks to him and his routing, we made some EXCELLENT time through New Mexico, Arizona, and all the way to California where he dropped down to 55 while I could keep going 70. Yay! First sign of stupid California laws encountered! Oh, how I missed loathed thee...

Anyways, that burned Monday along with picking up batnwolf and whyrl, and Tuesday I managed to get us up between the storms. My mom drove most of the way as I'd racked up the last 2200 miles. Got up to the bay area, and found crash space thanks to my friends up there before we could check into the hotel on Wednesday morning and sleep s'more!

Now... the con itself was an outright BLUR! A wonderful, excstatic, hyper blur of labor at first, then some bit of time that just didn't seem to really exist... I managed to bump into jurann finally, along with Skant and jaelyn during the con, which was nice to touch bases/catch up/etc with all of them. Saw drama-bombs land around me, but none really impacted me directly thank the Goddesses. Quite a few folks, I will say, I both wish I knew better so I could have been there for them, but admittedly a shard of myself was glad I didn't so I at least knew the drama didn't involve me.

Then the part I will never forget which began at the fursuit parade. I'd encountered the 'elevator hell' of heavy loads and the fursuiters not combining well so I went to the parade in Lumi Kelluke as a partial instead of a fullsuit, my usual gray gryphon-emblazoned sports-coat ensemble. Met up with pretty much all the other Soki suits at the con: Kahlua, Malibu, Serpy, Silver R. Wolfe, tdiwolf, and Tuxedo Kitty all in the parade. Someone suggested we get together and do a Soki TwoPaws photoshoot, so texts went out, etc. Gunnar, and Balto Woof both joined us, though Serpy couldn't make it, and a deer I can't find on the Fursuit Database that was also by Soki joined us. So we had 9 suits total, ended up in a really awesome 3x3 pose showing everyone off.

After that, de-suited, ran around like a loon on Sunday, then got into suit at about 18:00 as Dealer's Den closed with the recurring tradition of a Dealers Free Pizza Feed I enjoy helping fund each year. While that was going on, I ran into Serpy, Vex, Clementine, and a small additional herd of suiters whose names didn't stick very much I'll admit. =-.-= Serpy had had their phone off so missed the reminder/text about the photoshoot, so me, her, Clementine, Vex, and company all headed over to the photoshoot area. Along the way, we all became sheep! BaaaAAAaaaAAAaaa...

And once we get to the photoshoot area, even more sillyness ensued between the photoshoot area, piano outside the headless lounge, and in the headless lounge itself. Good grief, I'm sure dozens of photos and videos will pop up of the lot of us, including TDiWolf when he joined up with us in suit as well. We gave the photographer full reign over posing us, and ended up with some really marvelous shots as a result. We also got a good video of me carting Clementine around on my back like a horse, which was fun if tiring. Also carried her on my shoulders to the dance, but I don't think anyone caught any proof of that unfortunately. Need to work on that more for next year, so I can maybe lug someone on my shoulders for the fursiut parade itself. =^.^=

But after that, danced a little bit but the music just wasn't catching any of us, so we all ended up back in the headless lounge for a'while until the rest of the herd decided to de-suit, but I was still feeling good so I went off again... It all became a blur again of hanging with TDiWolf for quite a'while until... gah, around 4am when I finally fell over and passed the fuck out after de-suiting and gorging on what became my daily ritual meal for FC: Ultimate Cheeseburger w/ Cheesecake and a Large Dr. Pepper from Jack-in-the-Box.

Monday... actually ended up much the same, amusingly. There was remarkably little to be done on Monday, as the bottleneck wasn't people to move stuff or carts to move stuff, but places to move stuff to. So most of the rooms were closed by compacting them into other rooms... then waiting for the final staging space to clear for the final shuffle. So for a good chunk of the day I spent time with friends, snuggling closer ones I knew or want to know better and impact-hugging everyone I could. At 18:00 again, I pulled on Lumi and headed down to the Dead Dog party, and kept up much the same, the night turning into a very sweaty, wonderful, hyper-chaotic blur of dancing, panting, and finally using a taxi-cab as a boom-box for half an hour and running around the streets outside the hotel with a horde of other fursuiters getting random photos taken of the mob of us being lunatics but never quite breaking any laws or being too stupid or dangerous thanks to the handlers keeping an eye on things. Oh, and I was able to offload that bag of firecracker-ultra-hyper orange glow sticks on Clementine, I don't think I've ever heard such a perfect 'schoolgirl on helium' squeal in my life before she saw one get lit off in front of her, nor have I had the air crushed out of my for a change before that either. =^.^=

After that... well, it's Tuesday Morning, I have to check out of the hotel in a few hours, and whyrl is in the shower now. I'll hop in next, we have a nice late checkout of 14:00, then a bit of driving ahead of us today once we pack up the car and what-not.

...since we're snaking up north between the storms, anybody have room for me, whyrl, and my mom batnwolf to crash at their place until we can check into our hotel room at the Fairmont on Wednesday afternoon?

EDIT: Safe crash space located and plans finalized. Zzz...

Please? =^.^=

...darkwolfie has passed away.

...do not like. And I've yet to find a single map that whichever side is playing soldiers doesn't end up utterly dominating a side with a lot of demo-men on it. I've played at least a dozen different maps, from payload to CTF to CP, even TC_Hydro. And every single one, in 12-24 players playing, if 50% of each team were demo or soldier... the side with soldiers just steamrolls the side with demos. Bleah!

And there's no way to NOT end up spawn-camping the HELL out of the other team with this much explosives flying around. So... congrats, Valve. I'll play less than ever, at least I have a reason to play Left 4 Dead 2 now instead of just TF2.

...as some know I tend to bend social norms up to the actual limits of the rules, and have and will continue to use the technique of begging forgiveness instead of asking permission when my research says it won't cost anyone anything, but is more likely to let me succeed in what I want to do.

Case in point: I've organized and run the chaotic frenzy of a group of truly extra, extra, stupid-large pizza's that I bring to the dealer's den, just for the dealers to eat at their leisure while they close up shop.

This year I'll likely be adding an order of Ceaser salad on top of it, and trying to get the word out to the dealers ahead of time. Dealers/artists? I can't promise the hotel won't stop me cold, but the pizza'll get ordered and brought to the Fairmont at least. If anyone reading this is an actual pizza-delivery worker and doesn't mind assisting with subterfuge by pulling on your jacket and hat and helping carry the pie's in, I'd appreciate it!

Anyways... main reason for this post: I'll have a room at the Fairmont to check in on the 21st, checking out on the 25th. So four nights. I'll be in the area very early on the 21st, since I'm leaving from SoCal late in the evening on the 20th for an overnight leisure-drive up there.

As I've heard there's no free shuttle to/from the airport for this hotel, please feel free to call or text me if you need/want a lift! I'll have my 2007 Toyota Yaris, which can hold quite a bit of stuff comfortably. This offer is primarily for artists, fursuiters, or others with a bunch-o-cargo they want to be careful with to/from the airport or other major transportation hub in the area.

Only warning: My car lacks a split-folding rear seat, so it's either 3 passengers and a bit of dedicated cargo space, or 1 passenger and a *LOT* of dedicated cargo space.

Contact Information including phone numbers and all that.