and things went downhill from there

I called mum this evening to see if she had my brother's new address and phone number. She did not have his address, but she rattled off a phone number for him. As soon as she started with the area code, I stopped her and said, "Uh, no, that's his old number from here." It turns out he kept his old number after he moved out west because it seems that Manitoba has about the cheapest cell phone rates available up here, and nothing in his new province can touch it. On the plus side, that means it was a local phone call for me. On the downside, that means I should probably call him to chat more often.

Communication is no my family's strongest suit.

The other reason I called was to bitch at her for not giving me more notice about the fact that she was having the whole family out for Christmas at her place this year. If she had mentioned it prior to her blanket email finalizing the plan, we could have arranged some vacation time. She says that if it works out this year, she may do it again next year. Sadly, I doubt she would get the same perfect storm next year. It worked out that everyone in my family can manage to make it out this year ... except for me. If I had got more notice, it could have been the first Christmas in over 20 years where we had the whole family together - well, with the notable exception of dad, who would obviously only be attending in memory this year.

I've lived away from them for so many years that sometimes it's easy to forget how much I miss my family. I've spent Christmas with atara's family, but she has never had the opportunity to spend it with mine. We may be a surly bunch of dysfunctional misfits, but I love them dearly, and I'm really sad about missing this opportunity. I daresay I may spend the next few couple of days wallowing in self-pity and feeling lonely and remote.

Fortunately MFF is coming up very shortly, and that will probably take my mind off things. I will be very busy taking down lists of petty grievances to air at the closing ceremonies. I have been to enough cons to know that the volunteers who run it love nothing more than to hear how anybody else could have run it better. No ball pit? That's worth at least five minutes of my rant time. No oldies at the fursuit rave? Blasphemy! Gravy at the sponsor buffet is only 119F? Rest assured there will be a sternly-worded letter to the hotel, copying the convention staff! Refuse to dispatch a gopher to retrieve the room card that I accidentally dropped in the toilet? There will be some terse words about that at the closing ceremonies!

On the logistics side, we have booked our vacation time, bought our memberships, reserved our hotel room, confirmed our flights, and arranged for a cat-sitter. He says that the cats do not always stay sitting, but sometimes it seems like the cats have wills of their own. All that is left to do is charge up our camera batteries, pack our suitcases and hit the road.

I have to admit that MFF crept up on me this year. I have been so utterly slammed by my job lately on so many levels that I haven't had the time to give it enough thought to be excited about its approach. It feels unreal to me that we will actually be flying out of here in a couple of days. Two more sleeps. I guess a small part of me is still waiting for one of the executive directors to pull me into a meeting room and tell me that they are cancelling my vacation because it might cause delays in this dreadful project I've been on.

The only scanner that we have at home just now is an old parallel port model, which doesn't do us a lot of good since none of our four computer possess that particular interface. We've talked about getting a new one, but the lack of anywhere practical to set it up, and a shortage of available outlets in the computer room have put such a purchase rather low on our priority list.

Fortunately I have access to a decent colour scanner at my office. Unfortunately it's a public, network-based scanner. Even more unfortunately it is located outside of my office, around the corner and down the hall a piece. What this means is that when I want to scan something personal (like this new LJ icon), I have to slap it down on the scanner, run back to my office and start the scan process over the web, then scurry back out and grab it before somebody else comes along with their own notions of using the scanner.

I always half-expect to find somebody standing over the scanner, clutching their (soon to be scanned) copy of the American Association of Railroads Interswitching and Roadhaul Leased Equipment Per Diem Tariff Agreement tome in one hand, and my con badge in the other hand, in the middle of saying, "... who is this sick fuck named Plonq, and why is he scanning furry art on our company equipment?"

As you might have guessed, I'm leading up to the fact that I finally got around to scanning my new con badge¹ (created by the much talented beerhorse at MFF this year.) I ♥ this picture much.

^{1 - Lonnie, I hope you don't mind that I cropped it a bit for the icon, but when I shrunk the whole badge down to icon size it lost a lot of the facial details.}

Well, we're about 10-15 minutes away from the road now.  We're all packed, and the cats should be okay until pierrekrahn pops by later today to feed and socialize them.  All we really need to do (once I put on pants) is load up the car and hit the road.  Everything else is done, checked and double-checked.  The only thing that I couldn't find was any of my con badges.  I haven't seen them since shortly after the last MFF.  No idea what I did with them.  =(

I'll probably see if I can commission a new one this year.  I'll have to see who's at the con, and who's taking con badge commissions.

Anyway, we've got about 1400 miles of ice and snow-covered roads ahead of us so I guess it would behoove us to to get our tails in gear.