Forsan et haec olim legisse iuvabit.

from allbingo's pride month

Open relationship	Support	Unconventional family structure	Validation
Community center	Queer anarchy	Hope	Growth
Gender envy	Friendship	Glitter	Presentation
Inclusion	Queer awakening	*trips over an ace*	Rainbow

And the hazbin hotel fest also at allbingo I'll probably be combining them

Kappa	Jerkass Has a Point	Poltergeist	"the last thing I want to do is spread misinformation"
"sorry starts to lose meaning after a while"	"they clipped your wings"	Berserk Button	Elevator
"today was perfect"	Holding Hands	My Greatest Second Chance	Garden
Embassy	Hooker with a Heart of Gold	Hellhounds	"remember that lesson on boundaries?"

I was planning to go put in my travel expenses but I'm not getting my rental car paperwork until Thursday. I was too tired to think about that last night when I made a decision.

So I did laundry, got some groceries and somehow the whole day was gone.

Did call Capitol One, I was at my limit (Forgot all about being in Louisville two weeks ago and running up a big bill) Paid it all off because they don't deserve any interest after trying to tell me my limit wasn't lowered ever.

Here's my fannish 50 stuff

As a reminder I'm using Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this set of questions

Day 5: Favourite male character - This was harder than it should be. I guess push comes to shove it's still Rupert Giles. I know, I know, why not Spike or Angel. Here's the thing I like all three men almost equally and they all failed me in the course of this show. I think what I liked about Giles was smart didn't mean he was useless in battle like so many other places. His various choices weren't my favorite but over all I really liked him. I very much like Angel too and of course Spike but season 6-7 took care of that.


( all questions under here )


and some fandom recs because I was too tired to do it on Friday. Still exhausted so I'll finish this all up on Friday



I Miss You Hazbin Hotel

Kaleidoscope Hazbin Hotel

Lost And Forgotten Torchwood.

One Step at a Time Stargate Atlantis

The Baby Hazbin Hotel

Settling Into the Future Teen Wolf

Dealing with Frustration 911

If I Should Die Torchwood

Rescue Mission Stargate Atlantis

This was the first morning here that I was awoken by noise, thunder I think at 6 AM and I did fall back to sleep only to wake up an hour later when it sounded like a drawer slammed in my room. It didn't of course and I'm at the end of the hall so not sure where it came from.

Even waking up early I was late getting out of here in the pouring rain which wasn't fun especially since there was no time for breakfast. Worse I forgot my list of addresses in the hotel but luckily GPS can also find things by name. I did get to Union Station in time and they had the same coffee shop chain as here so I did get breakfast after all.

The Gangster Tour wasn't as expected. In spite of all my worry I was the first person on the bus. The driver and the tour guide were both in 1920s period dress (okay for men that's just a suit (pinstripe) and fedoras. It was a mix of the guide's patter/info dumps and a tv screen with a news reporter, Johnny Holiday's (our guide) brother or his girlfriend so it looked interactive. Really nice info about John Lazia and Tom Pendergast the underworld crime boss and the political boss respectfully. Pendergast apparently never found a thing he couldn't turn into graft (like literally everything his cement business was involved in) and yet oddly he was also a friend of Harry Truman even after his corruption (Pendergast's) was exposed. Learned a ton about various buildings (including places Al Capone partied and where Pretty Boy Floyd was in theory involved in a massacre outside the Union Station. It was almost a 2 hour tour so worth the money.

After lunch in the Union I headed to the Steamboat Arabia museum (which is closing down at the end of the year) but it is in some artist market district with nothing but food traffic and zero parking other than on street which was never going to happen. After circling around for several minute (and thinking I could try tomorrow morning) I gave up and said fine, WWI memorial museum it is...right back at Union Station but up the hill.

SO...every road to the parking garage was closed. After circling it three times I gave up and since it was still raining off and on I decided no zoo. I went back to the Nelson Atkins art museum. I could have gone to the Kemper Modern art museum but I think it was 20$ and I am not a huge art fan.

Revisiting the other museum is good call. Found a whole wing I missed the first time. Found my hotel mate there too. I rode up in the elevator yesterday with a lady who liked my Huskerdust shirt. Found her again at the Red Lotus Asian restaurant (in the casino) and found her again at the museum. Told mom watch me see her again tonight.

And I go to the sports bar at the casino and who's there, my hotel mate sitting with an African American woman at the 6 seater table, the only thing open in the place. She said sit with us. She's Marta (Mexican American from CA) and Melinda is her table mate, retired today. They were also happy to see me because the two trainee waitresses kept ignoring them but responded to me. On our way out, Marta said she wondered if there was a racial component in addition to the two waitresses being new to the job and bad at it and got better when I showed up. Yeah...probably

Slot machines gobbled my money and I came back and after fighting for days to get my room to cool off, now it finally is (and almost too cold) and looking outside the street lights look like shower heads its raining so hard. Figures because I'm driving towards home tomorrow. And ooooo that was big lightning. Gonna be a fun night

Seems like this post needs Husk as I'm now at the casino/hotel (and have already had cocktails and lost money)

So I got to sleep in some today because nothing opens before 10 AM. I checked out of the Sheraton and rolled out for Independence MO. Now if I knew this nearby town was so stinking cute I would have picked a third place (or at least planned to take the horse drawn carriage thing).

I went to Vaile Mansion It's a gorgeous home (that popped the dream bubble of owning an old home when I saw the 1.5 million dollar repair bill it's working on). Vaile was a lawyer/vinter whose wife (as these stories almost always go) died moving it here and he never finished the third floor billards/ballroom. It went to a lady lawyer next, his friend because his family tried to break his will giving it to a girl's college. It took so long to break the will his family was out of money and sold this house for a buck.

And SO much like Marietta's The Anchorage, they kept it up as a sanitorium for the wealthy and then a nursing home until the mid 1980s and unlike The Anchorage it didn't sit vacant long.

This place is filled with chocolate marble fireplaces, every ceiling is a painted mural. Sadly all the original furniture is gone (sold to pay that lady lawyer) but they tried to replace it as close as possible (the auction list was in the house so they knew what was there) There were tons of hair memento Mori in the house from the hair museum which I had wanted to go to but couldn't find times. Turns out even though the webpage is still there, the museum is not. The owner died in her 90s after covid and her daughter has sold off all the hair pieces. I didn't want to leave this place.

From here I went to the historic jail
. It's in that stinking cute down town and what fun was this? It's thought the limestone prison was built in the 1870s but they're learning it's probably the 1850s and the brick part is 1907. They have a little one room school house that was moved there years ago and every 1st grader in their school district goes there for a field trip to do class like they would have then. Sounds fun. The brick part of the jail is a little museum of local h istory (I need to look up what the priests of pallas was).

The jail was interesting. I was getting the cold, ghost chills standing there only to find out I was directly under where they dropped the prisoners to hang them (not a lot of hangings there mind you but still). Jesse James' brother had been imprisoned there but he was so well liked/folk hero status that they let him Al Capone that prison cell (before Al was probably even born) filling it with his personal stuff and he had it to himself. Most of the people were jammed in there 3 to a cell.

However during the Civil war, they had up to 11 women jammed in per cell. Most of my civil war travel (which is min.) has been in the north. Until I was in Louisville and now here, I didn't realize that the Confederate sympathizers had their land grabbed and they were imprisoned if they didn't leave. Tried to get my dad a book on this but the only one they had was a skull buster that even I couldn't see the print. Did get me a ghost book and some true crime book because I need books and make good choices. Also the kid running the cash register saw my Hazbin purse charms and he was very excited.



From there I went to the John Wornall Majors house but I missed the tour and didn't want to wait 40 minutes for it since I wasn't feeling it. I did walk around and read the placards. I did appreciate they were honest about the house's entrenchment in slavery (also ditto the jail which was built by slaves)

But since it was only like 230 I didn't want to go to the hotel because I couldn't go in for another 2 hours so I went to Nelson Atkins Art Museum. Turns out if you have a handicapped tag you don't have to pay the 20$ to park. Woot. So I sprung for the Alphonse Mucha exhibit which I really wanted to see (but if I had to pay for parking it would have been a 45$ ticket for it all)

The Mucha thing was SO nice but since my camera has a light (not a flash) I couldn't take much in way of pics because the docent was right up my ass. The flash is off, I swear. Wanna see?!? So I didn't get a shot of this but I'm putting it here, they had a bronze light fixture of Sarah Bernhardt's head he'd designed. To be honest I know very little about Sarah and had NO idea that she played several male roles including Hamlet.

I'm also not sure I knew just how much of Mucha's work was for calendars and ads. They had a whole room with 60s-70s rock album cover art inspired by his work (Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd) and I didn't know about the Slavic Empire set of 20 paintings he did at the end of his life that were hidden from the Gestapo because they inspired Slavic patriotism

From there I went to the main art area (the whole wing was closed where Mucha was except for that) This is the largest art museum I've been in I think. It was one little room after the other. I was so happily lost in this place. It was getting on 430 so I hit the gift shop wondering why people were still checking in when everything closes at 5. Had a gorgeous mucha umbrella and scarf (45 and 75$ respectively hard pass) and went for the car only to realize Wait it's thursday! It's open until 9 so I go back up to the second floor that I hadn't had time for. But there is art in here from Egypt to early 20th century (I assume the rest is in the Kemper modern art museum)

I head off to find the casino. I didn't realize it was SO far to the north west. I'm sure it wasn't super far (I remember google directioning all of this so I wouldn't make a bad choice) My GPS tried to murder me in a roundabout repeatedly. Americans suck at round abouts. I pulled out, no one was there (I have sensors on this car soo I know that there was no one there) and this guy comes whipping around SO far he nearly hits me and the guy in front of me while he's blowing his horn like he's not the idiot. When the GPS tried to make me go around a third time I said fuck it, I'm going straight and you find me another way there. It did and I have no idea how it didn't figure that out from the get go.

The argosy is done up like a roman street. Nice room, fancy bathroom BUT the shower is designed for wheelchairs so water runs everywhere, the rain shower head is the only one that works and so far I can't get it to be hot water. eye roll. I hit a little jackpot put it all back in and now I'm quite tired. no pictures yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Today was only a half day. We used to do two full days of workshop but not only was it a lot so many faculty had to leave half way through the last day to return to work (and some are still taking their suitcases with them on the bus today) so a few years ago we went to this.

Workshop #1 was definitely one I wanted to go to but I'm not sure if my students would go for. It's about scrapbooking your successes in class and/or using it to outline a tricky problem you think you've conquered (also I loved the study tip of quiz yourself, highlight what you know, look over the unhighlighted stuff and self quiz again). I could at least give it a shot (for credits)

Workshop #2 was all about gaming and not only that unlike all the other gaming ones he put links in to make your own game resources AND other games for sale. I'm really gonna need to check that out.

Workshop #3 canceled. AGAIN. I went to my second choice which was to build a brachial plexus from pool noodle vertebra and pipe cleaners. It was fun but I don't go into that level of detail.

It was only 1 when I got back to the hotel. I went to the American Jazz Museum . Didn't think I'd get there because the road to it was closed but I got there. And I got lucky. I'm not sure if they do this all the time or if it's all the time but they had high school bands playing the whole time I was there. Yay! The museum chose depth over breadth. It's 90% about Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald. They have it done up well, lots of interactive reading things, plenty of ads and other stuff on display. I knew that KC was big in Jazz but I didn't realize it was more important (or at least AS important) as NYC and Chicago. They had a mocked up Blue Room (that does concerts almost nightly). I didn't know much about Soundies, basically music videos that you could find in the 30s=40s in nicklelodians and things that like and there was a Columbus OH lawyer John H. Baker who gave his collection to this museum. they have literal miles of footage this guy preserved and tons of archives (and i suspect no space to expand the collection)

When I left it was after 3 and since most things close up at 5 I decided now would be the time to go to Elm Wood Cemetery Neat, rather small cemetery with cool stuff. I missed Leannah Loveall's grave (a famous madam) and my phone is crap so I couldn't use find a grave or download the map. (turns out she's not on find a grave but now I've seen the map. I can always go back)

Came back saw one of my compatriots and she told me there's a freaking Hallmark museum at the end of the block. I could have come and did that. Ah well (might still try to go)

Also thought about what someone told me about the roof pool here. From my room I could see no steps, just ladders but she had mentioned a tunnel. I couldn't see a tunnel so I trundle over and there it is a little room with the towels and a tunnel and there are steps doing to the tunnel (I can't do the ladder) I run back, get my suit and put in about 40 minutes of water aerobics. I'm the only one there.

Indulged in Jack Stack BBQ again, turkey and lamb ribs this time. They were amazing. packed everything up. Tomorrow I go to the casino (because the price of this place is going to shoot way up).


What I Just Finished Reading:
The Antique Hunters Guide to Murder - this was pretty good

What I am Currently Reading:

The Faraway Inn - a cozy fantasy (portal) set in Vermont. I'm enjoying it.

Our Sisters Keeper - a very weird own voices black magic setting in the 1920s, has some serious creepy vibes


The Gay Disaster Detective Agency - one of my arcs. I usually like Lev AC Rosen but this isn't working for me.

The Death Card - currently struggling to get into it


The Kindness of Strangers - another arc and I'm not sure this is going to work for me


What I Plan to Read Next: some of my looming arcs

the conference portion of the con is over and now it'll be two days of workshops which are always so invigorating. I almost wish this was the end of July/beginning of August so I could roll into the new semester all fired up.

We had the celebratory cocktails and it's usually appetizers but today it was make your own ramen bowl. Wow. (kimchi and spicy tofu were so in my bowl). Expecting not much, I had already ordered dinner from a BBQ joint (highly recced) it had a menu like none I've seen. So beef burnt ends and beef ribs with a pool of smoked beans it is. Delicious. I mean I don't usually eat meat but when I do go carnivore, it gets ridiculous.

Finally met my mentee who didn't much need me (as expected) as he's a retired family practice doc just moving into teaching. got a mug from holt anatomical. Didn't win a single door prize. Didn't murder any kids but the urge was there (they were screaming in the halls until 130 in the morning and several other Hapsters did complain. I had to turn them in when I went to heat up my lunch. they had trashed the microwave, food and wrappers all over the floor. You know, I've BEEN a kid at a hotel with school functions and I never did this

I did find a few things that no one but me will be interested in but I'm putting them here so I remember. A study contract for students (how long to study, what days, what's in their way), having them do a group eportfolio of their dissections, collaborative testing before exams to build confidence, using the guess who game to do histology quizzing (and others if you build it) and gee I've already forgot a few.


I watched a giant chunk of The Pitt (they had the whole season on) today. It is easily the most accurate medical drama I've ever seen and there was some real ptsd on a few of those scenes for me. Shudders. And then I saw The Bride (part of it) WTF was that? Easily the worst movie I have seen in years. Also thanks for the multiple sexual assault attempts in it.

dinner


new mug


It's music monday 30 weeks of music. This week's prompt is # 27 A song you discovered from a tv show. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

( There are SO many TV shows that introduced me to so much music )





here's the whole prompt list

( All under here )

very nice hotel room, too tired to say too much more.

I basically missed the cocktail party, did manage to sneak in for a gin and tonic and got upstairs to my online Abney Park concert.

Dream Imagination is also here in the hotel which is a steam contest for first grade thru college so this hotel is PACKED and packed with kids.


I did not sleep last night but as I rolled like a hot dog on a quickie mart heating rack I know how Ezio Asha and Liliana's novel ends

but i'm falling asleep and 6 AM comes early so..

It was an interesting ride to Enterprise. The guy I've been talking to picked me up and we were talking, got onto the topic of writing. He's doing a post apocalyptic thing where he wants to subvert the toxic masculinity you often see in dystopic fic and queer it as well (the character is a bi man) and he is a Huskerdust Hazbin fan. I'm surprised he was so comfortable to tell me about a queer story here in deep red southern Ohio. Maybe in the fall I'll try harder to get a SF/F/Horror writers group going at the library. Maybe there is more of us than I know.

The car is a Jetta. I haven't been in a Volkswagon since my mom's 1970s Bug. I had to dig out the owner's manual three times before I got home because shit wasn't where I'm used to it being in my Japanese cars. Also how to tell I haven't been in a car in almost a decade? Within an hour I bashed my knee into the steering column, knocked my skull into the top of the door, jabbed my elbow into that same door. I'm already over the Jetta and they gave it to me with no damn gas. Why is the gas tank on the wrong damn side?

I drove it to my coffee shop, went inside. Not one seat open and six people ahead of me in line. I leave, go to Kroger for road snacks (forgot my toothpaste) go back. It's still jammed but I get at seat. WTF? It's just a random Thursday morning. Are people taking off already for Memorial Day? I'm there trying to write and hoping my book will come at the library before I leave tomorrow. It didn't.

Come home, did laundry but didn't do much else. I don't have to leave until later tomorrow because Evil Little Dog has work and I don't want to be sitting in her driveway waiting. I have a list. I feel like I'm going to leave something.

At 4 pm I get an email. Book is at the library. Head desk. Well now I can get my toothpaste and the book tomorrow (I have to go to Jackson to get to where I'm going)

I took a swing at that not-likely shot at the demon anthology curated by V. Castro. It's worth a shot and I really like that story. I did edit the Appalachian one thanks to ELD's beta but I also shelved it for now since that open call seems hinky.