Tag: Philly

  • WordCamp Philly: Dev Day! (Part 2)

    I wasn’t planning on attending the second day of WordCamp Philly, since it’s focus is developers, of which I am not one (yet). I’m gradually sliding deeper down the rabbit hole, and was certainly helped along by the main event yesterday, but still not at a level at which I would consider myself a developer, even a wimpy amateur one.

    But, a couple people said I should come anyway, and today’s event was even more conveniently located for me, so once again, I figured Why not? and headed on down! And once again, I’m oh-so-glad I did!

    Dev Day is more free-form and hands-on than the main event, and a smaller group, so everybody’s in one [really sweet] room, hanging out and working on things and enjoying cookies as big as my face, punctuated by some informal presentations. Much to my surprise, this included a Q&A time with freaking Matt Mullenweg (co-founder/creator of WordPress (among other things), and occupant of the coolest domain name I know of, ma.tt), which tended toward the future of WordPress and the internet in general. Also, silliness.


    https://twitter.com/HTMLbyJoe/status/260102904046825472


    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260106170159734784


    https://twitter.com/melchoyce/status/260109060307812352
    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260107984888283140


    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260112705409667072
    (Poor guy must have like 100 @ mentions from today!)

    Jason’s hidden talent was also revealed:

    And I even found a collaborator to work with on that calendar of nerdy events idea!

    When the official day wrapped up, we migrated across town to Barcade, “a hybrid craft beer bar and—yep, you called it—video arcade,” (Inc.) ← (the article I mentioned a couple times tonight, by the way!) which boasts a lovely selection of beers and 80’s arcade games, as well as a really unique and tasty assortment of sandwiches and such!

    The evening flew by in a constant stream of great conversations. I got to chat with Matt for a while about a variety of things, including libraries and NASAtweetups/socials (by which he seemed quite intrigued!), so he gets my seal of approval! Talked for a bit with a couple from Lancaster, and Robert from North Carolina, and at times all the separate conversations sort of merged… occasionally taking odd turns… at some point the “fun fact” I learned on the radio this morning — that if you spin a monkey at higher than 145rpm its brainstem separates from its spinal cord D= — was actually relevant (re: Felix Baumgartner’s jump)! Towards the end of the night, I discovered that the guy I’d been sitting next to lives a 10 minute walk from my house! It’s that sort of small, crazy world!



    Heading out, I gave Chris (who wore the awesome penguin costume yesterday) a ride to the train station. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the roads we were on suddenly veering off unannounced or disappearing altogether, resulting in a depressingly impressive number of wrong turns and wild guesses, a surprise detour to New Jersey, and the “scenic tour” of far too much of Philadelphia!

    Thank goodness, we had plenty of time, so managed to still get him to his train and home! He said he’d owe me a beer next time he’s in town, but really I owe him one or three for how absurdly long it took to get there! (I promise I actually have a decent sense of direction! Just not tonight apparently!) But hey, we had a fun little adventure?! All’s well that ends well!

  • So, WordCamp Philly! (Part 1)

    Last night, thinking about my previous post, I wondered if there was some sort of consolidated calendar or website listing all the conferences, conventions, concerts, tweetups, meetups, and other random events and gatherings which draw the geeky masses, and for lack of a better search term, googled “nerdy events” (true story).

    I haven’t found such a listing yet (let me know if you know of one), at least as I had imagined it (maybe I’ll make one myself?), but in the clicking around, I discovered that WordCamp Philly was:

      a) a thing that exists! (a conference about WordPress!)

      b) tomorrow! (by which I mean today, since I made the discovery of it happening “tomorrow” yesterday — it happened today. Though technically, now it’s tomorrow so it really was yesterday… (ow.))

    My job is largely working in WordPress, and this blog is WordPress, so a conference all about WordPress is clearly relevant for me both professionally and for fun. I suspected, and soon confirmed, that this was something Jason, of Stranger Studios, (who built the WordPress-powered websites I live in at work) would be involved in, too. Since by some crazy random happenstance I happened to discover WordCamp Philly’s existence just in time, I decided to go check it out…

    And boy am I glad I did! I accidentally overslept this morning and wasn’t sure if it would be worth going clear across the city for an event I’d miss the first two hours of, but the lovely chica manning the twitter account assured me I’d still be able to register whenever I got there, and it would be worth showing up, even late, and it only cost $20, so I figured, what the heck?, and went!

    I missed the opening remarks and the first two sessions, but that still left me with five to attend (with four good options in each time slot!) chock full of great, useful, and often immediately applicable info and instruction! The presenters in the sessions I attended (and sounds like the rest of them, too) not only really knew their shit, but were pretty much hilarious — a delightful blend of snarky and silly and professional — and some of them were in Halloween costumes!

    I learned how to create basic WordPress themes from scratch — in rhyme from The Cat In The Hat. Day = made.

    (That session was also “penguinbombed”…) 😀

    The attendees were a pretty top-notch crowd, too! I had expected it would be mostly Philly-area folks — you know, being “WordCamp Philly” and all, and since there are apparently WordCamps all over the country and in a bunch of others too — but there were tons of out-of-state-ers, including guys from California and a surprising contingent of folks who live or have lived in Hawaii, and even Amber from Amsterdam!

    There was even after party, which I wasn’t really planning on going to… and then was planning on just checking out briefly… and then was planning on leaving at a reasonably early hour… but it surprised me with how enjoyable it was (being as I’m really not a crowded party person), both due to being my kind of crowd (I like these people! Even en masse!), and excellent planning (rented out the sizable upper room of a pretty nice bar, with darts and shuffleboard and pool to play, and provided plenty of tasty food and a couple drink tickets). Kudos to the organizers, on the afterparty and the whole event! (Yes, even my reaction to parties is nerdy!) I will definitely be back next year!

    Now, sleep.

  • The Return of Marian Call

    Last summer I finally got to see Marian Call live. Twice! And thus confirmed she is a super-awesome musician and person. I grabbed her two existing albums then, and the new double-disc set soon after it came out, and enjoyed them periodically, but I didn’t have a CD player in my car, and don’t really listen to music much anywhere else, so the only time I’d really listen to anything but the radio is when I’d hook up my slightly spastic phone to both the charger (since it liked to spontaneously turn itself off and refused to turn back on unless it was plugged in, even if fully charged) and the cassette adapter, which I usually only bother to do for longer drives. So Marian Call = roadtrip music.

    But now that my new car has an actual CD player, I busted out the Something Fierce CDs to try it out… and just kept listening to them… flipping back and forth between “Vol. I: Good Luck with That” and “Vol. II: from Alaska”, interrupted occasionally only by NPR, for weeks. And my commute is 45-50 minutes each way, so that’s not just a few times through. I know pretty much every word on both discs – and there are a lot of words!

    You’d think I’d get sick of it after a while, but I don’t! I get tired of certain songs at times, but there’s enough variety that I can just skip a track or two and I’ll find something that feels fresh and better suited to my mood. And some other time, that song I was tired of will be exactly what I want to listen to! And a few songs, I could (and sometimes do) just listen to on repeat over and over again, because they’re just perfect. I won’t color your perceptions by saying which, or even attempting to describe it. Just listen for yourself. →

    Okay, that’s a cop-out. I tried to think of how to describe her music and just can’t. (Without resorting to some rather odd similes, anyway, typically involving food.) Some of it’s silly; some of it’s sad; some of it is sassy. Some is hopeful, some soulful, all lovely, occasionally absolutely beautifully baffling. Overall, it’s kind of like she’s singing a book… biography by anthology, maybe… of herself, but not just herself… You can see now why I wanted to not attempt to describe it! It’s just damn good music, okay?

    (I eventually did throw another CD into the mix – her earlier release, Vanilla, plus more NPR. One of these days I’ll find the rest of my CDs…)

    Anyways, she’s out touring again, and stopped in PA last Saturday to play at one of my favorite local places, MilkBoy Coffee in Ardmore!

    Allison Hutchinson opening
    Marian accompanied by Scott Barkan on guitar
    Pardon the grainy phone pics… the battery on my good camera was lower than I thought!

    Vahe Sarkissian and a couple friends wrapping up the night

    It was a great show! Allison and Vahe (and friends) are also very talented, so a lovely evening of great music overall! And my Dad came out and enjoyed it, too! And I even made a friend, since we happened to park next to each other and be heading to the same place, and he was wearing a Captain Hammer tshirt. 🙂 So, lots of win all around!

    I had offered our couches for Marian and Scott to have somewhere to sleep in PA, since as of a few days prior, they did not. So they followed me home, and we hung out a very little bit before everybody was too exhausted to be social, and my sneaky little dog peed on one of her bags and had to be banished (again, sorry Marian!), and then there was sleep. I actually ended up having really crappy and minimal sleep, but they apparently slept quite well, which is good, because after a bit of breakfast, they were back on the road! (Thanks for stopping by!)

    They’ve got shows coming up around New England and southeast Canada over the next week, and then they’re off to Europe! So, if you’re in one of those places, be sure to check out MarianCall.com and find one to go to! (And if you’re not in one of those places, check back periodically, she’ll probably come near you sometime soon! She does that.) And wherever you are, November 13th is the global (re)release of Something Fierce, so there’s going to be a party… on the internet! Prepare for awesomeness.

  • MarsRoadtrip Part 1: Mars or Bust!

    Two tweetups in one week? Yes please! 😀

    Okay, so technically one was a “Social” – NASA decided to start letting Facebook and Google+ followers in on the #NASAtweetup awesomeness, so they changed the name to #NASASocial – but Canada’s was still #CSAtweetup!

    Two days after Thanksgiving, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” rover on an 8.5 month journey to our dusty red neighbor – a journey we knew would end, one way or the other, around quarter after 1am (EDT) Sunday night/Monday morning. In June, as we spacetweeps suspected/hoped, they announced there would be a NASAsocial for the Mars landing, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (where Curiosity was built)! I registered, of course, but didn’t get selected.

    I don’t know if it was the plan all along, or if they were just overwhelmed by the response, but a couple days later they added 5 more NASAsocials, all at the same time (Friday, August 3rd) at different NASA centers! (The first multi-center NASAsocial!) Soon, the Canadian Space Agency announced they’d have a tweetup too, during the landing and the following day.

    I, of course, registered for everything, figuring I’d probably worn out my welcome/luck by now and wouldn’t get in to any official events, but was fine too since there were epic #RogueTweetup plans in the works…

    But then I got one of those lovely confirmation notices… from Canada! So the question was if I could get my passport renewed in time! …and then, I got ANOTHER confirmation notice, this one from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio!

    Cue a moment of panic as I tried to decide which I’d rather go to – be part of the first multi-center social, or be in a space agency for the landing itself? (Surely I couldn’t go to both… two tweetups for the same landing?!)

    But then the “Why the heck not?!” sector of my brain kicked in with the realization that this wasn’t exactly trying to be in two places at once (there’s a whole Saturday in between!), and neither NASA nor CSA had said anything to the contrary, so theoretically, I could do both… It was just a matter of sorting the logistics.

    Sorting the logistics

    I looked at flights, but then remembered I’m not quite old enough to make rental cars a viable option, and the thought of trying to mooch rides between airports and hotels and space centers in two different cities (countries!) when I wasn’t sure who I’d know where, plus getting home from the Philly airport at the end (since my family’d be on vacation by the time I got back)… well, it sounded like it would be less exhausting/stressful to just drive!

    A quick consultation with the GoogleyMaps confirmed each leg of the journey would be a full-but-reasonable-day’s drive (about 8/10/8 hours, respectively), and I like driving and traveling alone… plus, I mean, what’s the difference between my typical work day, in which I spend 8 or 9 hours sitting in a chair staring at a screen, and spending those hours sitting in my car staring out the windshield?!

    So I declared it a plan, and surprisingly, though they didn’t see the appeal, neither parent tried very hard to dissuade me. My dad informed me that my uncle’s house is within a reasonable commute to NASA Glenn, so I called him up and made plans to crash there for the first stop, and thanks to recommendations from CSAtweetup’s lovely organizer, Magalie, I found a nice and very reasonably priced hotel near CSA HQ, so I had the “somewhere to sleep” thing covered.

    The only other question mark in this nutty plan was whether I could get my passport renewed in time for Canada to let me in at all, much less to a secure government building… an extra $60 and applying in person will get you a passport pretty quickly, but the earliest available appointment was Monday morning the week I’d be leaving, so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out, the Philadelphia Passport Agency is seriously on their game!

    I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get there, park, find it, and get through security, so I left plenty of cushion time… and ended up arriving at 9:05, when my appointment wasn’t until 10. Despite warnings that they wouldn’t let you in more than 15 minutes early, and you could be waiting several hours regardless of your appointment time, they let me in right away, checked to make sure I had everything I needed and gave me a number, I waited about half an hour, had my “appointment” (through a bullet-proof ticket window), and was walking back to my car before my scheduled appointment time, assured my passport would be ready to pick up on Wednesday morning! (which it was, and the return visit took all of 3 minutes.) Solidly impressive for government bureaucracy!

    Passport in hand, I *finally* felt free to get excited! I loaded up the iThing with music and audiobooks, threw some clothes and my toothbrush in the car, and roadtripped the heck out of Thursday!

  • Hey look, I found a Tyler!

    That other time we knew each other.
    I haven’t seen this goof in… four years!

    He’s from California (now living in Portland, Oregon), and we met in Minnesota, where we had two weeks training with a organization called CTI, which puts together bands and sends them to do music ministry in various countries for a month!

    So, then his team went to Honduras and mine to Taiwan, and we were all together again briefly at the end, but that was it!

    Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, vaguely keeping in touch, twitter, facebook, and bloggery, I heard he was planning a cross-country train trip!

    He didn’t end up stopping long in Philly, but he had enough of a layover at 30th Street to meet up and have lunch! What fun!

    Perhaps we should hang out more than once every four years, though, eh?

  • A Tale Told in Tweets – featuring Lisa and John Scalzi

    A day that did not start out particularly well:

    • I was bummed that clouds had kept me from being able to catch a glimpse of the Transit of Venus in person Tuesday night.
    • I was extra upset because I didn’t realize it was the day Enterprise was to be brought by barge to her new home on the Intrepid, and so couldn’t make it up to New York in time to watch!
    • Enterprise was damaged in transit and that made me sad.
    • When our office intern came back with lunch, mine was not what I ordered/wanted, and kind of lame.

    It was just one of those days… but they I saw this tweet:


    https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/210429187503296512

    …One of my favorite authors heading for my city (and terrorizing fellow train-goers)? That has potential. 🙂 So I asked what was bringing him to Philly…


    https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/210430530502664192
    and, of course


    Lisa saw this exchange and expressed envy, which was followed by the following sequence of tweets:

    Me: Cooooome to me! I will bring you to @scalzi!

    Lisa: [this one mysteriously disappeared, but was something along the lines of “Waaah work til 5.”]

    Me: Screw work, leave at 4! Plenty of time then!

    Lisa: …do you think I could make it? With the traffic?

    Me: Yes, the sooner the better, but if you leave by 4, you’ll make it.

    Lisa: I’m in, let’s do this thing.

    !!! *gasp* I seriously never expected her to agree. We play this game a lot. But she’s “responsible” and busy, so she hardly ever goes along with my crazy drop-everything-and-come-hang-out-with-me-schemes! But this time…


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210462664634286080

    And she did! We both bailed out of work early and converged on a random shopping center parking lot not too far out of the way for either of us, joined forces, and headed downtown! While I drove, she tweeted:


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210491275626029059

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210492024036655105

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210492371673153536

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210495668387721218

    We found our way to a parking spot, the bookstore, and the little corner of the 3rd floor where Mr. Scalzi was reading a new secret short story. Which was awesome. But secret, so that’s all you get to know about that.

    Then he read an excerpt from Redshirts, which is not secret, because you can buy and read it, but I’m not going to tell you about it, because you should buy and read it!

    The scene he chose to read was chock-full of witty banter, so rather than read the back-and-forth himself, he brought out a surprise special guest!


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210507538091868160

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210508265606492162

    This was followed by some seriously entertaining Q&A time, during which he mentioned that there will probably be more books in the Old Man’s War series, which makes me ridiculously happy!

    He talked a bit about his writing process and style, which are both devoid of superfluous details. I hadn’t really noticed as I read his books, but thinking back, you do realize that there’s not a whole lot of description, whether of the characters appearance or their surroundings or whatever, unless its actually relevant to the story. It works for him style-wise, keeping the plot moving rather than lingering amid pages of endless adjectives, but it’s not like he’s leaving things out – it’s not even in his mind. He tends to figure out the particulars only as he needs them, rather than planning everything out in advance.


    He hung around a bit to meet folks and sign books… the bookstore gave half of us panic attacks when they apparently ran out of copies of Redshirts – they thought they had more than that, but couldn’t find them for the longest time! Finally one of them found the other box of books so the rest of us could buy ours and get them signed. Though I had been one of the first few people to get down to the register, I was one spot too far back in line and had to wait for the second batch, so by the time I got my copy and got back upstairs, we ended up being just about the last people to get our books signed. But that was actually okay, because we didn’t feel quite so rushed as those sorts of lines tend to be.


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210534597111459841

    Scalzi’s good people. (By the way, he blogged this too!)

    So, yay random awesome things happening!


  • Marian Call at the MilkBoy

    Now, I should like to point out that when one of your jobs lives in the interwebs and can be worked on wherever, whenever, and the other is retail with no predictable schedule or ever more than a week or week.5’s notice, and your social life is more likely to include coffee shops and board games than bars and… well, whatever the “partying” sorts do, weekends are apt to pass more or less unnoticed.

    Obviously, sometimes I do weekendy things on the weekends, but neither the schedule inflicted upon me nor the ways I choose to fill in the blanks make the fun stuff any more likely to occur on a Friday or Saturday night than any other time in the week! (Particularly since most of the time, I’m not entirely sure what day of the week it actually is.)

    So, for me to have 4 legitimately weekendy weekends in a row is kind of impressive. And! This fourth weekend of awesome featured another awesome Marian Call show!

    Crazy, several years of waiting/trying to get to one of her shows, and now I swing two in eight days!

    This one was rather closer to home, at the MilkBoy Coffee just over in Bryn Mawr! I used to go to the MilkBoy in Ardmore all the time when I took the train home from school, (since it was just across from the train station, and I’d walk over for a coffee and a warm place to sit until my Dad came to get me,) but I’d never been to the Bryn Mawr one before… and frankly didn’t remember it existed, so it’s a good thing I checked the address!

    Marian Call

    Sassy Marian Call

    Brian Ray

    Once again, I helped with the selling of stuffs, but it’s a tiny place and she didn’t bring much this time, so I was mostly free to just enjoy the show. And once again, a great show, complete with Jayne hats, the TSA-friendly rainstick, typewriter percussion, a feather boa and kazoo, and lots of witty, geeky, folky, jazzy goodness!

    This one’s not a very good photo, but it just makes me giggle!

    Another great show!

    Afterwards, I was invited to join Marian; her very talented guitarist, Brian Ray; their host for the night, Donna; and another couple, for drinks and “Nibbles”, as the menu called it, at the conveniently located Verdad Restaurant and Tequila Bar next door.

    That’s a place I definitely want to get back to – can’t speak as to the tequila, but the sangria was tasty, the atmosphere lovely, and the food was friggin fantastic. I had a Black Truffle Flatbread, which was smallish-but-not-unreasonably-so for the price, and absurdly delicious. The kind of thing you force yourself to eat slowly so the flavor will be in your mouth longer. Mmm… and everything I didn’t taste looked delightful too!

    The highlight of the evening, of course, was not the meal, but the company! Marian is just as lovely to chat with as to listen to her music. Donna, it turns out, is from the same town as my family and works with the Bethlehem Mounties(!) on social media. Somehow a conversation about shoes revealed that Brian and I have both been to and loved Taiwan! All in all, a seriously fun evening with a group of seriously fun, intelligent, snarky, very nice people! Can’t wait ’til the next tour swings our way!

  • Karaoke with Xander!

    Back in February, I finally got around to watching of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix, and of course, being a Joss Whedon creation, I was quickly hooked and watched all 7 seasons, and started following cast members on twitter, including @NicholasBrendon (who played Buffy’s best guy-pal, Xander, as well as Garcia’s boyfriend, Kevin, on Criminal Minds!) Not long after, “his webgirl” Jacqui, who does most of the tweeting, announced Nick would be doing a karaoke meet-and-greet in Philly in June, while he was in town for the Wizard World con, and it sounded kind of awesome so I got a ticket.

    Duet

    Like CSTS Philly last weekend, when the night finally arrived, I didn’t really feeling like going out, but I had actually paid for this one, so I definitely wasn’t missing it, and it too was lots of fun!

    It was even smaller than I expected. They rented out the second floor “Fuji Bar” of the Fuji Mountain Japanese restaurant in center city, which was one small room, and there were maybe 30 people there, including Jacqui, Nick, and his twin brother, stuntman Kelly Donovan! They were super friendly and entertaining, singing with each other and other folks. I sang… something… can’t remember what now… but then at the end I sang “Piano Man” with Kelly!

    Good times. 🙂 I ended up leaving with a ton of leftovers… most of which I realized when I got home were sushi, and went to waste with no one else home to eat them that night, but the tempura was yummy!

    Nick and I
    Kelly and I

    Also, as our shindig was ending, Mercedes McNab, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, and Clare’s sister showed up. I thought I recognized them, but I didn’t want to bother them, and I wasn’t totally sure until I saw this conversation on twitter:

    Hehe. 😛

  • CSTS Philly

    Kicking off what promises to be a fairly epic month of smaller-yet-geektastic adventures in between space shuttles (yes, that’s a valid notation of time in my life lately!) was CSTS Philly last night.

    For those who may not know, CSTS = Can’t Stop The Serenity, in which browncoats from all over the world gather in their respective cities to watch the movie, generally goof around, and raise money for Equality Now, a charity Firefly/Serenity creator Joss Whedon supports.

    It’s been happening and growing every year since 2006, and I tried to go the last few years, but never could, for one reason or another.

    Finally, a year arrived when I knew about it well in advance, yet remembered when it got closer, and had no other obligations that night! Of course, when the day actually arrived, I didn’t feel like going anywhere, but Marian Call (who made an awesome album inspired by Firefly and BSG) was coming to play in the area a couple of weeks later, and I had told her I’d take some flyers to put up/pass out there, so that filled in the missing motivation my inner lazy introvert ate, and it turned out to be a really fun night!

    There were refreshments, trivia, raffles, and live music by Sean Faust. At one point he asked if anybody in the crowd could sing, and nobody volunteered, so after a minute I did, and ended up singing “The Hero of Canton” (also known as Jayne’s song) with him, though I didn’t know all the words to the verses, and once folks realized that was what they were being asked to sing, others quickly picked up the slack!

    The main organizer, Matt, called me back up on stage a little later to announce the Marian Call show, which was awesome, and a bunch of people took flyers. We watched Serenity then, as a “Special Hell” screening, in which the audience is encouraged to talk in the theater, adding emphasis and snark a la MST3K, which definitely added an interesting layer to the always wonderful ‘verse. Definitely glad I went! I even won a couple of the raffles, coming home with the book finding Serenity (edited by Jane Espenson) and a copy of the “Done the Impossible” DVD!

  • The grey skirt: a tale of sheer bullheadedness.

    Mom likes to talk at me when I’m trying to work. A month or two ago, she was asking if I wanted to go see Mary Poppins in Philly with her and Daddy.

    At that moment, I really didn’t care much either way, because I:

    • was trying to work.
    • am mostly indifferent to the alleged allure of Broadway/Philly-wanting-to-be-Broadway shows. I like plays and musicals well enough, but I just don’t get that excited to see a story I already know acted out, unless I know some of the cast.
    • don’t plan that far in advance if at all avoidable.

    But they need to get out more, and I like to encourage them when they’re willing to go into the city for fun (they both work within the city limits, but seem to have an aversion to going downtown otherwise, which they like to deny/blame on each other) so I said, “Sure, why not?”

    I figured for the price of the tickets, it must be a nice venue, worthy of dressing up a bit, probably digging the dress slacks out of the closet. But yesterday, mom feels compelled to point that out.

    “No jeans or sweatpants.”

    Of course, I took that as a challenge.

    The show was tonight, and I babysat earlier this afternoon, so I was wearing sweatpants, and if you add my extreme fondness for this pair of sweatpants to yesterday’s “just because you’re 22 doesn’t mean I trust you to dress yourself” comment, there was no way I was taking off these sweatpants.

    However, contrary to my mother’s opinion, I do know how to dress properly, and do know better than to go into a nice theatre looking my usual around-the-house hobo self.

    Paradox resolution: the grey skirt.

    The grey skirt is long. Floor-skimming long, and heavy enough that it drapes nicely even over a not-nicely-draping extra layer. And it’s shiney-ish and pretty– perfectly respectable evening-out-wear, paired with the black tank I was already wearing, a nice black cardigan, and cute black heels. Also, perfect sweatpants camouflage. o/

    The show was pretty good too, by the way. 🙂 (And there were totally people wearing jeans.)