Well, KWCS is done and as near as I can tell in my sleep deprived state, it went well. :)

My mom came into town on Wednesday night and we hung out for awhile in the evening, then I went to practice and Social. kumakun and fencingkitty came home with me and so began the rotating population at Hotel Eithni. They went to her sister's place on Thursday, but by then Dianora and jcwhitaker had arrived to stay at my place. I had a very fun Thanksgiving lunch with Iohanna and a bunch of the West Side crowd and then a nice quiet Thanksgiving at my place. It was nice to sit and catch up with Jess and Dianora as I worked on final KWCS stuff. It was quite reassuring that the most stressful thing remainint to do was some printing. Of course, it actually was stressful since I had to buy a new ink cartridge on Black Friday. :P Gack.

I was on site at 1PM on Friday and we got set up underway almost immediately. There were a lot of people on site, so it went quickly, even with attendees on site at 2PM complaining about why the gate wouldn't open until 4PM (as it had stated on the webpage. (Note - costumers are apparently the whiniest bunch on the planet. I've heard some good stuff at WW, but there was some amazing stuff...) Site properly opened at 4PM on Friday and we had over 100 people on site by the time troll closed for the night. We were only offering three or four class tracks on Friday, anticipating a lower attendance, so all the evening classes were packed, to the delight of the teachers. The social was also a great success, but the treats were very quickly decimated. After shooing everyone off site, a bunch of s went out for dinner and then I collected an inebriated little girl from the West side. jcwhitaker, devikat, teffan, Tori, and I went out to the Inferno since Jess had never been there. Hmmm... Dancing at a club in the middle of autocratting a Knowne World Event... Highly irresponsible. Lots of fun.

Saturday went very well - all my teachers and merchants showed up, troll was running smoothly, and I even got to two classes! There was a moment of stress with the projector in the Keynote lecture hall, but I had Kaydian on site as the designated geek-on-call (yeah for geeks!) and he was able to fix it with minutes to spare. We had to copy extra copies of the Proceedings because of a higher than anticipated attendance. (I know, I threatened that non-preregistered people would not get one, but then I just didn't have the heart to actually *do* that to anyone and so got to spend some more quality time with the printer). The lunch line was very long, but worth it - I received a multitude of compliments for the tasty and abundant food. People really came through for the dessert revel too - the tables were completely covered in fabulous desserts and munchies and the dance ball was a great success.

There was lots of fun at my postrevel too - Jose led bardic activities in the basement, many people hung out upstairs to talk and/or geek, and devikat was good enough to pick up enough provisions that my kitchen looked as well-stocked as the dessert revel. Josceline had found a recipe for Heather Ale, a drink supposedly drunk by the Picts, and provided it to Robert the Stout who had kindly made me a case to serve at the postrevel. For a few select Scotch drinkers, I poured little glasses of my new favorite Scotch - Caol Ila. I found it a few weeks ago at a Scotch tasting I went to with AEsa and just fell in love. It tastes like there should be a chunk of peat in every sip, but it is oh so smooth and splendid... Although I think it tastes like Gearrannan, not Islay. It made me a little "homesick" for Scotland...

I was up way too late at my postrevel and the major disaster of the weekend was my alarm not going off in the morning. (Gods I hate technology some times! I usually set two alarms, but I had accidentally left my phone on site.) I woke in a panic and sailed into site about 10 minutes into the class I was supposed to be teaching. Happily, the students were still waiting for me and things went off as planned, if at a slightly accelerated pace. I had worked myself into a panic, however, and I was sweaty and freezing cold until Wren gave me a lovely back rub and helped me get recentered. Sunday classes were also very well attended and cleanup went quickly, with everyone eating pizza at my place by about 3PM. I then spent the evening sewing with kumakun and fencingkitty, since there apparently had not yet been enough sewing goodness in the weekend. ;)

So, all in all, an excellent, if profoundly exhausting, weekend.

Eeek!

14 hours and counting! I got what I needed printed, so now it's just a matter of packing the car, stopping by the office supply store for a cartridge and copies, and getting to site by 1PM.

Crazy-happiness! :)

~E

So apparently my KWCS woes are all surrounding printing technology. :P My printer ran out of colored ink half way thorugh printing my signage. Never mind that I want the signs in black and white - it is stubbornly refusing to spit out even one more sheet. *sigh* So it's off to a retail establishment for me in the morning. Yech. I like going out on crazy shopping days to get a coffee and sit and point and laugh, but not to be part of the craziness...

However, that being my biggest KWCS concern, I am feeling pretty thankful on this Thanksgiving day. Everything else seems to be going well - we still have 85 hours of classes (1 class taught twice was dropped and two one hour classes were added). My staff rocks, my friends are awesome, and while my life is in transition, there is little I have to really complain about.

Happy Turkey Day, everybody!

***** ugly rant warning *****

So I went to photocopy the KWCS Proceedings today, and had the lovely, faithful, and priceless company of Marion and Josceline. However, the job itself turned hellish.

I mis-judged how many spines to put per page, so we were endlessly cutting down the cardstock to make it fit.

The cover was a mess when we printed it and I needed to regenerate it from scratch. PDFs are *supposed* to work on any decent computer/printer... isn't that the idea?

Then we discovered that ALL the images in the doc were messed up. We tried having the editor post it online for us to download - no go. He had to come in to campus and be geek assistance until we could get it printing.

Right then... put in covers, put in spines, put in content. Simple, right? Until one notices that steps 1 and 2 are going much more quickly than 3. Hmmm... let's time it... 3+ minutes to print 166 impressions. Pretty good... so that makes... ACK! 20 copies per hour! We need 240 copies! (frantic calculation) That's 12+ hours!

So we find two more printers we can use - photocopiers, actually, which means making a non-punched printout so we can use it in the photocopier. Well - print a non-punched one-sided original, then make it a two sided original that the photocopier would handle as a single document, *then* print copies. The printer would magically punch the handouts, but the photocopier wouldn't. Sadness! But then we found three hole punch paper! Happiness! And put it in the wrong way! Ack! Holes on the wrong side, grumble, grumble, dirty words... switch the paper.

So if all goes well, 12 hours divided by three machines (maybe less, since the photocopiers are a little faster), four hours - yucky, but better, I can live with four...

Damn paper jam.

OK, So maybe five hours.

Jam, jam, jam, torn sheets and jams, and lots of words that sound like jam and many more less polite. >:(

Grrrr...

No more three hole paper - too many jams - now we're punching each one manually, and still filling paper/clearing jams, but not as often. My mom is a saint/goddess/embodiment of pure wonderfullness and brings us pizza. :)

Finally! 240 printed and put in binders - time invested: nine hours, when I thought it would be 3-4. *sigh* My poor car is not thrilled at being used like a truck and beeps all the way home, since those boxes on the seat are clearly an unbucked passenger to be scolded.

Once safely home, devikat and I immediately went back out again to split a pitcher of margaritas and a plate o' cheese.

...

Booze and conversation with roommies and blogging has helped, so I'm finally off to bed.

Practically 10 days to KWCS!

So far we have almost all the handouts for the Proceedings accounted for - totaling about 150 pages of notes.

I just got a note from my Troll-lady... Apparently her mailbox was stuffed full with reservations today (you procrastinators, you!) - a full 36 envelopes, plus some email reservations and some I took at the Newcomers' Feast. She didn't enter all of them, but we are currently at about 180 reservations! If tomorrow brings a similar crop, I'm betting we'll end up with about 250 reservations. With 10 concurrent class tracks, that's about 25 students per class... Not too bad. It's always a concern when planning class tracks - If there are too few, you don't have a good range of classes. If there are too many, you end up with the teachers who only get 1-2 students in their class. Hopefully, this will be a good balance.

Now I just need to check in with all my crews, get refreshments for the social, get refreshments for the postrevel, (have a nip of scotch), proof the proceedings, print and assemble the proceedings, check in with all the crews again, clean my house (for houseguests and my mom), hopefully finish a project,...

Eeek.

Lists, must make lists...

So for the last three months or so I have been frantically planning the Knowne World Costuming Symposium. It's been a little unreal - Proposed at July General Meeting, approved in the last week of August, and scheduled for the weekend of Thanksgiving... We'll have 61 hours of classes on Saturday, with eight more on Friday and sixteen on Sunday - 85 hours of costuming goodness, plus a Walk through History, A&S display, merchants and more... Who says you can't do a Knowne World event in under four months? :)

However, this means I'm starting to get a little nervous about everything that needs to get done in the next two weeks (eek, 13 days, really)... No panic yet, just nerves and lots of busy-time. It's probably for the best - having this to focus on should keep me out of the worst of trouble. Besides, I have an awesome staff (including fencingkitty and House Greyfeather) and rocking teachers (Hi dread_ex and valkyr8)! :) Plus, I just got word that we now have over one hundred confirmed reservations - which I feel pretty good about since the postmarked deadline isn't until tomorrow and we are a procrastinating people.

Now I just need to figure out which classes I can squeeze in and when I'm going to get the time to play with the merchants...

So, per usual, I have 4,000 things to do, but I am wasting time on my computer instead of facing them. :P Besides, now that I have decided not to go to All Souls' I have tomorrow to be productive, right? ;)

Yesterday I did the basic set-up on LJ so today's plan is to add some friends so I am not a pathetic loser without any friends on my list.

There's not huge news in my life at the moment, other than it is one week before the preregistration deadline for the Knowne World Costuming Symposium. I'll be sending out an email blitz about it later tonight, but those of you who are planning on coming and have not yet sent the prereg should do so post-haste! http://www.students.uwosh.edu/~thens25/kwcostuming06/