A tale of two Waffle-paloozas

Well, National Novel Writing Month ended on a random but fun note here in the Greater Hamilton area, which is certainly appropriate. For a few years we’ve been doing ‘Waffle-palooza’ on the last night of November – an occasion to gather together at a Williams Coffee location, type madly to reach 50k or whatever other end-of-the-month goals we have in our sights, and then celebrate by ordering Belgian waffles.

This year, since there was a regular Friday write-in at the Burlington Power Center Williams, it was agreed that this should be the venue for Waffle-palooza 2012. It was next door to a dessert joint called Demetre’s that also had great Belgian waffles. And since my Co-ML is out of town, Waffle-palooza was all on my watch.

The weather forecast said scattered flurries throughout the day. Yesterday afternoon it began to really snow – not a ferocious blizzard, but more than flurries. More than anybody was prepared for.

I left work just before 5 pm, crawled the two and a half kilometers through crazy traffic, and tried to take a shortcut between one Power Center parking lot and another that was much too steep and slippery to drive up. Back out onto the main road the wrong way, an illegal U-turn to get going north, (well, okay, more of a three-point turn, but it worked out alright,) and I finally got to Williams around six-twenty, to find one of the Burlington write-in regulars and two of his friends, who had just gotten there by bus a few minutes earlier.

Blogging live from a write-in

The write-in is starting to wrap up at this point, actually – somebody is packing up to go. But it was a great session this afternoon at the Williams Coffee Pub at the Power Center in Burlington.

There were six wrimos in attendance, including me, and all of us reached our write-in goals. I wrote over 3000 words in two hours and a bit, and somebody actually reached 4k. We had a ten-minute word war, and I gave out stickers and prizes from the goody bag, and there was good food and beverages and raffle tickets and many descriptions of crazy, fun plots.

I’m already looking forward to the next write-in, Sunday afternoon.

And my word count is up past 26k, Whoo-hoo!

Final Polaris round-up.

Okay, my sleep schedule’s a little wonky at the moment, work stuff kept me up last night, but I’ll share some of my favorite moments from Sunday at Polaris 25, after I signed off from yesterday.

The writing workshop with Julie Czerneda was really cool – it was oriented for beginners, but I learned some cool stuff – working in groups to come up with science-based ideas, develop them, and then start to add in protagonists, settings, emotional reactions for the reader, and figure out how to explain the science to the reader. I also thought it was interesting that she didn’t see much value in writers critiquing other writers.

The meeting with the other writers from Ad Astra was nice – hi guys, if any of you are dropping by to catch up on my blog!

And then, there was the Jewel Staite stuff – she had a fun Q&A, didn’t want anybody recording video or sound so that she could ‘trash talk’ without fear of it coming out to haunt her. I actually asked four questions:

• What were you thinking of when filming the strawberry scene? (She said that she had cheeseburgers on the brain when Joss told her to imagine it was the tastiest thing ever – and that he really loved the very first take she did.)
• What was your favorite outfit of Kaylee’s? ‘Not the birthday cake dress!’
• Favorite episode of firefly? ‘I really loved filming The Message, even though we’d found out we were cancelled by then, because we decided to have a great time and make as much fun for ourselves as we could.’
• If Firefly came back, what would you like to have happen next in Kaylee’s life? ‘I’d love to see her and Simon have a baby together, I think Kaylee would be a really great mom.’

And I got a picture signed, and also had her sign the ‘Those Left Behind’ comic book, which is starting to accumulate nearly as many Big Damn Signatures as the Firefly Blueprints Book.

After going through the signature room again, in only 20 minutes or so, I hit a few panels, covering Starship captains and Smallville season ten, (which I haven’t finished watching, and got spoiled on a few details, but what the heck?) Then it was time for the Geek-off Championships, where I scored a single point, which meant I was in a four-way tie for fourth place or something like that.

Then my brother had arrived to drive me home, and I drove half-way myself, along Lakeshore road from Oakville through Burlington, and then across the Burlington lift bridge.

The groundhog day storm.

I started hearing things earlier this week about ‘the big storm’ that was going to hit on Wednesday – we haven’t really had a big snowstorm yet this winter, though the snowfall that hit the day I went down to Saint Catharines for the workshop was substantial. But everybody was talking about this one being a biggie, so I made sure that it would be possible to work from home if that came down to it. This is something that often is done on really bad-weather days at my job if some people think it would be dangerous or a tremendous PITA to get to the office.

As the snow started to pick up Tuesday night, I remember noticing that the streetlight glow through my bedroom drapes was so bright that it was distracting, and ended up putting on one of those eye mask deals. That was from all of the snow in the air and the ground, of course, reflecting the light around.

Wednesday morning, slept in till nearly seven, got up and turned on the local TV news, and they’re going through a big spiel of local closures and ‘If you don’t need to get on the road, don’t,’ so I figured that I wasn’t going in to work. Logged on to the office network, started working on the top item in my to-do list, and soon enough emails started coming in from the other team members confirming that they wouldn’t be coming in, so I added my me-too.