Bill Roper's Journal

daisy_knotwise gave me the chorus for this song right after FilkOntario. I put chords to it a few weeks ago and we picked it back up in the last couple of days to put together the verses.

Did I mention that Katie wants to go to the moon?
( Lyrics inside... )

The dead dog filk is starting to wind down, it being nearly 2 AM here. The day has been, well, complex.

I had my workshop this morning, where it turned out that the folks there were generally at a higher technical level than I'd prepped for, so we zipped through the first 80% of the material and spent the rest of the time discussing how to construct a melody given a chord progression, which is certainly an interesting part of the problem. Then I ran over to the A&W to pick up lunch.

The problem is that daisy_knotwise appears to have picked up Katie's bug or some close relative. She'd crawled out of bed early in the AM with intestinal distress and by the time I got back with lunch, wasn't really up to eating a cup of chicken noodle soup and a plain turkey sandwich. Since I still had a number of things to do as Filk Waif, she crawled up to the room with Katie in tow, warning me that there was no way that she was going to be able to sing The Chicken Song for the Filk Hall of Fame concert at 3 PM.

Hmm. This was not exactly what either of us had hoped for. And although I could do the song myself, it plays better with two. And I needed someone who was used to working with a partner.

So I recruited Marilisa. Gretchen and I had covered her and Mich's song, Go Home, for the Pegasus Nominees concert at OVFF last year, so somehow it seemed only fair.

And then I handed Marilisa the lyric sheet and she found out exactly what she'd gotten herself into. Fortunately, she's quite good at following along, given the occasional vagaries of the song and my performance. The audience certainly suffered appropriately.

Earlier in the afternoon, we'd had the Penguin Song contest, which I missed most of while sorting things out with Gretchen; then Heather Bruton's slide show and Ju's concert, sans Katy, which she did handle quite well. (We offered to loan her our Katie, but it just wouldn't have been the same.)

When I checked in with Gretchen after Closing Ceremonies, she had napped. Katie, not so much. Katie had also found the blueberry muffin that I'd bought for Gretchen with predictably crummy results. (We'll be tipping the maid well in the morning.) I'd made arrangements to meet Tom and Sue for dinner; Gretchen told me to take Katie and go.

Dinner was quite pleasant, including second-hand quotes that I delived from Sally, the rhythm nazi, to Tom, the budding sound engineer. Katie was well-behaved until after dessert was finished, at which point she realized that Mommy had been missing for some time and she started crying. I ran out and solved the problem by taking Katie back to Mommy and turning her over while I went to the Dead Dog filk.

The Dead Dog filk was a lot of fun. I checked in on Gretchen twice, the first time borrowing antacid from Steve Savitzky in response to her nastily acid stomach, the second time around 11 PM to find both her and Katie asleep, which fell in the category of best possible outcomes. (Although it did thwart France when she asked if there were any possibility of Gretchen coming down to the filk long enough to sing Stuff, since she'd missed much of it during the concert while wrangling Katie. *sigh*)

There was a lot of good music, but I think it's time to go to bed. I've had a wonderful time, which I've thanked various members of the committee for.

And we'll all hope that Gretchen's feeling better in the morning.

daisy_knotwise took Katie in for a long-delayed evaluation by a physical therapist to make sure that there was no lingering effect from the broken clavicle that she suffered during delivery. The report is that she's within the normal range for left/right preference, so that's probably going to be fine, although we'll have another follow-up later.

The PT also confirms what Dorotha told us this weekend -- Katie's going to be crawling within two weeks. That means that it's time to get that gate for the top of the stairs right about now.

In the meantime, tryphina13 sent us some fine Katie photos that she took this weekend.
( You can find them behind the cut tag... )