Burning Man 2014

This year definitely ended better than last one - no traumatic eye injuries, short Exodus, good fire, minimal drama (handled mostly like adults). But there was certainly a lot that was minorly disappointing. I won't dwell on that however.

There's something that I've been realizing though - some years back I stopped taking pictures, trusting to the world that they'd get better ones than I could hope to capture. And ever since, I've been basically absent from the online world, existing as a ghost or a silhouette in the periphery of other people's photos. Some part of me decided back then that anyone else would have more interesting and important things to say (we're talking years ago now) and, again, I've basically stopped existing for a lot of my friends. Out of sight, out of mind. Time to stop doing that.

So part of that is blogging again.
SO!  I'm writing about Burning Man, because it stands as a coherent quantum of time I should memorialize.

We left Friday. I'd packed the car late the night before, so I'd had plenty of time to remember things I'd forgotten, and I headed out to pick up Mike at a reasonable hour of the morning. We made our way up to Reno and bought a day's worth of water, since we'd expected our water to arrive on the Truck only a little after us.  We hit Gate road at dusk (siiiigh), and only spent two hours waiting in line to get in. Apparently, that was an amazingly short period compared to what was to come. As last year, I dropped a basic tent setup (draggable) since nobody in camp gets placed after dark.

OMG WE JUST GOT TO GATE ROAD

Saturday morning we placed ourselves, though the tent was totally overstuffed with our gear since the shade structure was also on the Truck. Camp setup was mostly done, except for other stuff that was also on the Truck, so Mike spent some time exploring the nascent city while I hung out at camp. Honestly, that was most of Sunday too, though the Truck arrived Sunday afternoon.  By that time we were on our last jug of water, I was awfully dehydrated, and we were borrowing from other folks - so my stress levels went through the floor when the truck arrived.

We set up the shade, and got to work on the camp bar, then all took off to work a late-night opening show at Gate. At 11:45, the shift changed and we set out our product, then at 12:01, comets and gas mines lit the night.  Apparently we were on the list of art projects. Lovely stuff, and nearly zero cleanup.

As we returned to camp, Jack told me that there'd been a weather report predicting hail and rain at 4am, so I piled as much of our gear away from the edges of our shade as possible, and went to bed. Waking up to the sound of hail on the tent while safe and warm snuggled up with Mike, is probably my favorite memory of this year. There were lightning flashes so bright that they woke and re-woke me through my eyelids, through the tent, and through the shade structure.  The thunder was loud enough to shake the bed. I'm told that the City was struck twice; once in DPW camp where some poor soul got zapped but didn't die of it thankfully, and once on the main comm tower. I don't know that I believe that it was only twice.

Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.

As we woke in the lovely cool and dim of the morning, the mud was a Thing and the portas were so far away, and the reports from the Gate line were horrifying. The camp wifi allowed me to check and confirm that the BMorg had in fact closed the City.  Good thing the Truck had gotten there when it did. So Monday was also mostly spent hoping to see things, but with the entire playa a few days behind schedule.  At the same time, we *did* do BurnIt! again on Monday, even though the city was ostensibly closed. By that time the playa was dry enough.

And here we lapse into "stories not mine to tell" land.  Sorry about that, all.

I'd put aside time to do pyro on Wednesday, but ended up building the roman candle guns for TASM on Friday for most of the day, and then not having a shoot in the evening.  TASM was a huge success, but not without some logistical and theatrical hurdles. Trying to organize a crew of 26 across playa with changing conditions and meeting times was just fucking ridiculous. But we managed that, plus two "main dudes" in the show, plus drive-bys of two volleys of art cars - one with hand-held boards of comets, and another with propane flamethrower effects.  It was a bit slow between cues, but it went well and we got props from lots of folks for the show.

Burn Night was interesting. The same glue-lam stuff that they'd used in the Temple last year, that caused so much strife and work to burn, was used in *massive* main structural members on the Man, and consequently it took him an hour and a half to fall.  I was happy to be watching it from the tower in camp, and to have the ability to climb down and do things like, oh, I dunno, go to the bathroom.  We heard lots of stories about people not having that option over the course of the evening - and I pity the Ranger Sandmen. That must've been a hellish shift.

Sunday, it turned out we weren't needed for the Temple after all, since the crew who built it this year knew what they were doing and didn't use glue-lam. I honestly don't recall much of what we did during the day except that we visited Chef and Pollen in Nectar Village.  The Temple burn itself was beautiful, with mostly quiet burners in respectful (sniffly) silence. The Temple's descent was probably the most beautiful thing I can imagine: the domed vault's intricately carved plywood flapping in the breeze like fabric to reveal the bones beneath, and the structure's final graceful spiraling collapse into a bed of coals.  After that, we took a tour of the remaining art cars, marveled at how much saner the City felt without the sound camps blaring and fighting each other, and wandered around looking at the few remaining pieces of art. There was someone putting a refractor (?) in front of the giant searchlights at one sound camp, producing amazing shifting rainbows spreading out across the playa. There was also a lovely set of electronic sound and visualization toys at Illumination Village, one using iPads to select and create viz using the touchscreens, and another using a Kinect to create both sound and viz by waving your hands around in a cutout frame.  Lovely stuff.

Monday was teardown, and it went surprisingly fast. The truck was loaded by 3. We left at 3:15. We were off-playa a scant hour and a half later (hour-and-forty-five if you count the transit from 4:30 and A to the Gate road). We took a shortish detour to try the acclaimed Indian Tacos on our way out to Reno - it wasn't great, but maybe that was a function of the one we stopped at more than anything else.  Nevertheless, food that I didn't have to cook was a nice change. We drove south from Reno to the Carson Valley, and rolled into David Walley's Hot Springs resort looking like some kinda refugees. (Mom had gifted us an overnight reservation - which was one of the nicest things...)  We took probably the longest showers in years, scrubbing and scrubbing and soaping and scrubbing some more.  Then we did the same thing again in the morning before hitting breakfast.

Civilization!

Because of road closures, we ended up taking a rather longer and circuitous route home, which took us through some lovely country. We also ended up at a place called Lockford, which I recalled from Cherylynn's tales of their Hawaiian sausage - so we made a sausage stop. I need to grill those up soonish and see if they're as good as everyone says...

Beautiful country (click to enlarge)

I dropped Mike off and headed home to start a flurry of unpacking. I got it.. mostly done in one day. Two loads of laundry down, most of the camping gear stowed in the shed, the clothes unpacked and the tubs stowed. All that remains is a load of bleachables, and a trip to the laundromat to handle the sleeping bags (which are just too big for my apartment complex's washer).

Last night I took out my braids. This morning I washed the sticky, waxy goop out of my hair. This evening I put quarters into the air machine at the gas station and blew the playa out of my sideview mirrors and engine compartment. I'll take it to the car wash tomorrow, and soon this year's event will be just a memory.

Not Much

Happy New Year! Hopefully this will be a better one than the last.

Christmas was a Thing, as it always is. This year I didn't have Dickens Fair to prop up my mood through the season though, and I never realized how much I hope that maybe this year my family will buy thoughtful gifts. Or how much I'm disappointed every year by the parade of cheap fancy tights and random "Gift for Her" mall-section presents. My little brother, bless him, got me the backup drive I wanted for Christmas though, so it's not a 100% miss this year.  Unfortunately, part of this hope-disappointment cycle involves overspending on gifts for the folks every. year. And because we've delayed our performance/bonus cycle this year at work, things are a little tighter than I'd expected.

Post-Christmas was pretty bad. I survived, but it was bad. Everyone else was gone, or invited to fun things out of town, and I sat paralyzed by indecision and loneliness at home for much of it.  I need to Not Do That Ever Again.

We bungled the NYE planning this year, so since we couldn't find tickets to that thing we liked, we headed up to Calistoga to go soak in some hot springs. Or, well, mineral water jacuzzi, but close enough, right?  It was pleasantly low-key, though a bit anti-climactic. We did have what I maintain was the BEST roast chicken evar at The Kitchen Door in Napa on the way up though.  I feel gluttonous for mostly blogging about the foods I eat nowadays, but hey.

I got some sewing done last night. I got some cleaning done this morning.  I have a spiced cider jelly project starting to set in the 'fridge, and I'm going to do some more sewing. Baby steps to feeling better.

Pre-Christmas Pyro

In the absence of a Dickens Fair in my life this year, I've been feeling extremely, ridiculously lonely. It's really hard because I'd sort of decided to take the thing off this year partly because I needed a break, but also partly because I'd intended to spend it with certain people who abruptly left my life.

So when I got an email late last week about possibly doing pyro the night before Christmas Eve, I jumped on it.  Today, (excuse me, by the time stamp it'll be yesterday) I got up nearly at the normal workaday time, ate something vaguely resembling breakfast, puttered a bit, packed my pyro gear into the car, went to PT, realized I was there 45 minutes early, got lunch at Town and Country (there's an Asian box there? huh), then went back to PT,  then got back in the car to drive to Candlestick.

Oh, did I mention that this was at the final game of the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park? Right. Because it was. They'd decided last minute to add two extra pyro positions to the lineup, so I was on the South point, as opposed to the inside-the-stadium part, or the East position. And because of it being the last hurrah, even though I left Palo Alto at 1:15 or so, it took me until 2:45 to get to the site. (The last 45 minutes or so I was literally *looking out across the lagoon at the pyro truck* and wishing I had a rowboat.)

I pull into one of the driveways that has caution tape across it, put on my blinkers, hop out of the car, leaving it running, and go to unfasten the caution tape. That done, I turn back to the car and realize... I locked the door. I locked the door, and the car is running.  I locked the door, the car is running, the hazards are on and the rear end is sticking out into the lane.  Oh, I locked the door, the car is running, the rear is in the lane, and my phone is on the front seat.

Cue panic attack.  Thankfully a nice man who was walking in let me borrow his phone to call AAA. And while this did literally nothing for my cause, it did give me the sense of having done *something*, so I was able to get out of my panic state.  I was literally shaking, and stuttering and dizzy. Wow.  Having at least set in motion the theoretically helpful wheels of roadside assistance, I ran out to the site to let them know what was going on. Then ran back and... sat on my bumper.

Eventually one of the Candlestick Point park rangers came over and asked if I needed help. He offered to get the slim jim that they apparently have for emergencies. When he came back with it, we spent a good fifteen fruitless minutes attempting to get the door unlocked, and he finally had to go back to his duties. He left the thing in my hands, so I idly continued trying to work at it - which was like trying to pick up something in an opaque narrow jar using chopsticks.  All this while the semi-legal ticket scalper guys are wandering around buying and selling and grifting their various grifts.

A pair of plainclothes cops roll by in an unmarked car and stop to hassle me - I tell them what's up and the laugh before leaving. (Thanks guys.) A giant stretch SUV limo goes by and some oddly-familiar looking black dude leans head and shoulders out of the back window and yells "THIEF! THIEF!" a few times while laughing as he goes by. I guess the sight of a woman in work clothes trying to slim jim a beat up 15 year old sub compact car *is* pretty comedic. And then a homeless dude in a bright yellow shirt comes up and sets his bag down near me. "You need some help?" I nod.  He takes the slim jim from me, and five minutes later, my door is open. AAA is nowhere in sight.  I thank him, he asks for money, I give him the entire contents of my wallet which sadly total $8, and proceed to the parking lot.

I figure, what's the worst that could happen if the best part of the day so far is having a homeless dude break into my car?  When I got to the site the racks were already built, it was nice and warm out, and there was a message from the AAA towing associate who basically said they weren't allowed on site until two hours after the game was done. Right. Useful.  I unloaded my gear and we loaded product, working in teams to help drop and wire the charges.

The ill-fated Candlestick behind me

Then we waited. And waited. And the sun went down, and I put on literally all of the layers I brought: base layer, then t shirt, then hoodie, wool hat under the hood, then eventually my turnout coat on top of it all, with the corduroy collar folded up to keep my neck and cheeks warm.  It wasn't that it was all that cold, really, but damp and sitting around just make you freeze.  I was really glad I'd thought to put on snowboarding socks this morning.

The shoot went well. Three low-breaks, but all of the charges lifted and we didn't have to re-placard the truck. Cleanup was a hassle, but I've been lucky to have so many shoots on golf greens and parking lots where they can bring the vacuum truck.

Home before midnight. But now it's rather past it - so a Happy Christmas Eve to you all.

Quiet Night

Tonight, it's supposed to get down into the upper 20s. I've brought as many of the carnivore garden pots in close to the building as I can, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be. Inside, I'm drinking hot herbal tea, and hot mulled cider, burning Christmas tree scented candles, and trying not to think of the coworker who I found out just died last night. Trying not to feel like the weight of four years of stagnation is weighing down on me, pressing down while panic bubbles up from the floor. Trying not to feel weight of the upcoming weeks in which I have but few evenings to myself, followed by the panic of one long gap in which I have nothing but lonliness.

This is hard.

(And now I recall why I'm not blogging much.)

Like Pulling Teeth

The sad thing is, when I am in an exciting new relationship, I don't feel like posting. And when that ends abruptly, I feel even less like posting, but I also feel less like doing the things I enjoy, so it's not like I have anything to post about anyway.

I am really bad at posting

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.

Here we go

Let me not tell you about my weight. 

I'm not doing it for you, dear readers, and so let me not detail my nutrition plans, my exercise regimen, what I worry about, how I feel about skinny women or my naked body or that asshole who runs Abercrombie and Fitch. Let me not recite numbers of steps, flights of stairs, calories consumed, pounds measured, pounds lifted, minutes of cardio, hours of yoga. Am I being hostile? Perhaps. But mostly tired of watching women of my acquaintance make their weight their sole, life-wasting goal.

Let me say instead how sometimes my new pants are loose, even though I have a suspicion that this might just be a factory defect. Let me tell you how my chataranga has improved, how I can do more than two per cycle, but I still want to work on the push up required to make the multiple flow smoothly together. Let me tell you how my lower back hardly ever hurts anymore, and though I cannot see them, I know that my abdominal muscles are strong enough to pull my pelvis back to a normal tilt. How I can feel with icy clarity (that wows my chiropractor) when my ribheads have come askew and when the tight typist's muscles in my forearm prevent my radius from popping back into place beside my ulna and need a little "external motivation". Let me tell you about how instead I am watching money slip through my fingers like grains of sand and how I am hoping in the end that I will not regret it.

And let me leave you with a little Frida Khalo Marty McConnell, because I feel like it's relevant.

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell:

“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”
        -Marty McConnell