I have lots to update you folks on, and yet there are Things afoot that I'm not super comfortably posting here. Oh well?
I just got back from Burning Man. After the nearly unmitigated disaster that 2010 was, I had toyed with the idea of Never Going Back Again (tm), but when some close friends decided to trek out for their virgin burn, I sort of kowtowed to Fate and said to the world that if pyro work presented itself, I would go.
Pyro work presented itself. Attached to that work came a staff-rate ticket. And so I went.
I was completely unprepared for the absolute surge in creative energy that accompanied that decision. I mean, I have most of my gear already, and I only really need to refresh the perishables each year (food, water, hand sanitizer, baby wipes, TP, condoms and vinyl gloves, AA batteries...) but for some reason the planning for this year just went FWOOM to my head. I ended up making a new shade structure - the first time I've ever invested in such significant infrastructure. And then I surprised myself by blowing through my mending pile. And starting some new sewing projects. (And then I jammed the serger the night before I was going to leave and didn't finish the wearable one, but oh well.)
It was a good Burn. There are several stories that are not mine to tell. And then there was the wedding, and lovely dinners with friends old and new, blues dancing under a sparkling rainbow dome to tango fusion music, running gear for Center Camp's main stage and staying up to watch the sunup. Playing with the gorgeous interactive CNC cut interactive math sculpture in front of the Cafe, stumbling home to beautiful low-key techno in the cool light of morning. I did pyro crew three times during the week - for BurnIt! on Monday, for DandasMan's Chapel burn on... Friday, was it? and then pyro load for the Burn at the Temple of Whollyness.
Sadly that Sunday Temple load was ten hours in a near-constant whiteout, during which I got some junk in my eye. I toughed it out through the remaining eight hours, and then went back to camp to mess with my contact lens... Only to find a 3mm whiteish spot on my eye from the playa that'd gotten under the lens and ground into my cornea. I spent the next several hours at Medical, first getting it washed out, then getting it numbed up proper and dyed with yellowy orange UV reactive dye so that they could say for certain that YEP, I had a corneal abrasion. When Mike walked me out of Medical I looked over at the giant flames and realized that I'd just missed the burning of the thing I'd toiled on for ten hours. I bawled. Pain, exhaustion, disappointment, panic and grief just sort of overcame me.
Driving home was awful. We waited about ten hours in the Gate line. And all this time my eye hurt, and I was wearing my crappy overcorrected coke-bottle thick old glasses, which shoot my peripheral vision to shit. Even after we got *off* playa it was nerve wracking. I rolled in about 3 in the morning.
But it was, overall, a good Burn. And things outside of the Burn are going well. I have a tight group of friends to incite new funsies, fun projects on the horizon, and NRE filling my stomach with butterflies.
I'm Getting There.
