...I want to fly like an eagle 'till I'm free. Fly through the revolution. Time keeps on slippin'...

A week later, I went to Tiki Oasis 8. It was at the Red Lion Hana Lei, excuse me, I guess it's the Crowne Plaza San Diego-Mission Valley now, in any event it's got lots of tiki decorations so it's perfect for this kind of convention. I couldn't find my bear ears -- they turned up the next day -- so I borrowed library_lynn's smaller set, and was prepared to tell people who knew me that they were a lighter "summer weight" pair.

How to encapsulate Tiki Oasis? ( Rum drinks, live exotica music (think Arthur Lyman) and surf music bands playing for the audience on the lawn, more rum drinks, go-go dancers, a little burlesque, fezzes, tiki art, aloha shirts, rum drinks in beautifully ugly tiki mugs, '40s and '50s hairstyles and clothing styles (left), ''Voodoo Vacation on Zombie Island'' theme, and did I mention the rum? Imagine a weekend full of five or six hundred amiably happy drunks... )

Before I headed home a bit of shopping was in order. On this table you can see some tall tiki lanterns for sale, along with jewelry (right). I found some tiny wooden tiki jewelry for Lynn and bought the tiki lantern on the left. It's carved from a big fat piece of bamboo, and I'll be putting a little light fixture in it so I can hang it up as a lantern. When I brought it home, I showed it to neo_serenity, and she looked at it... and finally asked me "Did you win it?"

...slippin', slippin' into the future. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future...

Everyone's quoting a line from Blackadder, so here's mine:

Look, Percy, the return of Sir Walter "Ooh what a big ship I've got" Raleigh is a matter of supreme indifference to me.

So I have to tell you about this little picnic I went to in Escondido in August, the same weekend as Tiki Oasis. It wasn't very large -- I think there were seven of us, total. I've mentioned before (e.g. this year, in March and April) that I like to support potluck picnic events and other self-organizing social structures. I brought five gallons of pink lemonade, some bread, peanut butter and jelly, and a few other snacks to share. (I wouldn't have brought five gallons if I'd known there were only six other people. It's not the smallest cosplay gathering I've been to, though, that would have to be the three of us down on Carlsbad Beach that one time.)

I saw online where Nina ("Ashenine") said "I could go by public transit but it would take at least 3 hours of traveling and jumping from trolleys to buses. Not mentioning the returning trip too. D:" She said she and her friend were coming from Chula Vista. I told her I was coming from my hotel in Mission Valley and could pick them up from the San Diego Trolley around 10:15 am.

It turns out that she wasn't really coming from Chula Vista -- they actually had to get up at 5:00 am because they were coming from Tijuana, and they needed to allow plenty of time to cross the border. My hat's off to their dedication. I've told this story a couple of times, but I keep coming back to it.

Nina wanted, so badly, to come to a cosplay picnic. She's a fan, she goes to the occasional Tijuana anime convention (they sound pretty odd -- outdoors in an arena on a sunny summer day? are there no hotels with ballroom space?), hasn't been to animelosangeles or hardly any other events up here. She made this tremendous effort, with a longer commute than even summoner_lenne9 has to make to get anywhere from her Grapevine mountain home, for an afternoon hanging out with a handful of fans.

I felt so bad when I realized that. If I'd understood out how hard it was going to be for them, I would have met them at the Old Town station so they wouldn't have had to make that last transfer. On the way back, I felt it was the least I could do to drive them as far south as I was able. We had dinner first (at Islands -- they had burgers, I had tacos). Then we went south until the traffic started backing up. They switched to the Trolley, which I expected would get them down to San Ysidro faster than the traffic jam that was building up.

Anyhow. Dedicated fans. Willing to go the extra mile, and take the extra hours, to be a part of a face-to-face event (however small it might be) with their friends from online. Nina's one of my heros.

...Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future. Time keeps on slippin', slippin'...

( How long until they put the mail drops back into the airports? And don't tell me it's a TSA rule keeping them out... )

But that wasn't the big deal with my Indianapolis trip, oh no. The trip was helpful for my animelosangeles plans, as it turns out, because I stayed in a Hilton-brand hotel while I was there which put me over the top for a free room night in Lancaster.

( One of the interesting things I saw on that trip was this machine, which is a ''pick and place'' machine assembling surface-mount circuit boards.... )

Ellen and Jason (not pictured) are the two young engineers that I get along with best. I say "young" because I'm older than either of them (though, thankfully, not older than both of them put together) and "engineers" because Jason writes firmware, Ellen designs hardware. So Ellen's like a young Gerald, Jason's like me. While I was there, we all went to El Torito Grill. For the benefit of the out-of-towners, El Torito Grill is an upscale Mexican restaurant with locations in Southern California and Indiana. In other words, yeah, I've been to ETG, the Manhattan Beach, Brea, and Yorba Linda locations, mostly.

I suggested we start with the tableside-prepared guacamole. (Unfortunately, they couldn't roll the cart into the room we were in, so we didn't get the full made-to-order experience.) The local beer-drinkers ordered Dos Equis or Corona Extra. I had a Negra Modelo, which they didn't recognize. It's one of the darker Mexican beers, and it's basically a Vienna-style Lager. You know about all of the Austrian and German immigrants to Mexico, who brought their brewing traditions and their oompah music? Have a Mexican beer and listen to some Norteño music with the accordions, and tell me you don't hear Oktoberfest. Ellen tried a bit, and decided to get one herself. In conversation, I learned that she likes the sweeter beers. Do you shop at Trader Joe's? No? Well, let's stop by after dinner.

We got there shortly before they closed, and picked one each of some of the fruity beers they have there (e.g. apricot flavor) and a cider or two. You can pick just one bottle out of a six-pack, so it was easy to get a mix-pack for her to take. And we picked up a box of chocolate croissants. I told her to take them home, let them rise overnight and bake them in the morning, and be sure to eat one while they're still fresh. We had decided to look there for dessert, and hit on the 4-pack of assorted chocolate ice creams. All of them straight chocolate, but "varietal" -- each was made with cacao from Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Borneo (Kalimantan), or Ghana. (Choctál, look from them at the local TJ'S.) We also got some of the Fruit Floes.

We went back to the shop (they have a freezer there) and sampled the chocolate ice creams. I think the Kalimantan (Borneo) is my favorite, but I really need to go and try another taste-test. Maybe with library_lynn, although of late she hasn't been having the super-premium chocolate ice cream as much as before. Anyhow, Ellen took the croissants home but she didn't follow my instructions... she let them cool off and nobody had one until I joined them. No, no, eat them when they're warm! Perhaps she'll go back to Trader Joe's, get more of the beer she likes and try the croissants again.