I really need to dust this journal off! Let me summarize here:
ELECTION: I worked as an election judge for four of the eight days of early voting and for Election Day itself. Same as the Maryland primary -- same-day registration during early voting and provisional ballots on Nov. 8. Fortunately, no giant windstorms and power outages this time around.
CHURCH: We finally have a place to hold in-person worship services! We are meeting on Sunday afternoons at the University Christian Church in Hyattsville. (This started only on Nov. 20.) Despite having the word "Christian" in its name, the church is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is pretty ecumenical. The Hyattsville congregation welcomes the LGBT+ community, and when I drove by it just before the election, I noticed that one of the messages on its outdoor LED sign was "Reject Christian nationalism." I can go along with that.
PHILCON: Even though I would have liked to have gone to Holiday Faire (an annual SCA event), I used the free membership to Philcon 2022 that I won at Costume Con 40. I rode up there with my fussy friend R. in his shiny CR-V. (Before our trip to Cherry Hill, he'd owned that vehicle for about 18 months and put a grand total of 3,200 miles on it.) For some reason, all the people I already knew at this convention were male, and they have been getting steadily more conservative. By the end of the weekend, I was craving the company of female friends.
CHESSIECON: Now this is a convention that is all about female energy. But it was dreadfully small ... *maybe* 120 people. And since it was at that Hunt Valley Inn that used to host Balticon, which is something like 10 times that size ... it felt empty, full of ghosts. The con committee rented way more function space than they could fill with programming, and they didn't sell out the room block, so the committee is now thousands of dollars in debt. Most of the (few) attendees believe that this was the last Chessiecon, sadly.
And now Julia is demanding her nightly treats.
P.S. I am definitely NOT missing the Virginia congressional candidate commercials.
ELECTION: I worked as an election judge for four of the eight days of early voting and for Election Day itself. Same as the Maryland primary -- same-day registration during early voting and provisional ballots on Nov. 8. Fortunately, no giant windstorms and power outages this time around.
CHURCH: We finally have a place to hold in-person worship services! We are meeting on Sunday afternoons at the University Christian Church in Hyattsville. (This started only on Nov. 20.) Despite having the word "Christian" in its name, the church is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is pretty ecumenical. The Hyattsville congregation welcomes the LGBT+ community, and when I drove by it just before the election, I noticed that one of the messages on its outdoor LED sign was "Reject Christian nationalism." I can go along with that.
PHILCON: Even though I would have liked to have gone to Holiday Faire (an annual SCA event), I used the free membership to Philcon 2022 that I won at Costume Con 40. I rode up there with my fussy friend R. in his shiny CR-V. (Before our trip to Cherry Hill, he'd owned that vehicle for about 18 months and put a grand total of 3,200 miles on it.) For some reason, all the people I already knew at this convention were male, and they have been getting steadily more conservative. By the end of the weekend, I was craving the company of female friends.
CHESSIECON: Now this is a convention that is all about female energy. But it was dreadfully small ... *maybe* 120 people. And since it was at that Hunt Valley Inn that used to host Balticon, which is something like 10 times that size ... it felt empty, full of ghosts. The con committee rented way more function space than they could fill with programming, and they didn't sell out the room block, so the committee is now thousands of dollars in debt. Most of the (few) attendees believe that this was the last Chessiecon, sadly.
And now Julia is demanding her nightly treats.
P.S. I am definitely NOT missing the Virginia congressional candidate commercials.