conspiracies, spice girls, naked women

Great weekend! Contata was absolutely splendid, the New Jersey folks (as usual) were wonderfully friendly and welcoming. Jeff reports I missed quite a bit of excitement while I was away, too.
Apparently the Spice Girls were in town and did an interview at CityTV, a few blocks away from our building. Queen Street was shut down, and thousands of young fans swarmed the area. Jeff says he could hear the screaming from our apartment. Also, the French won the World Cup. Jeff was driving our friend Harry (visiting from New York) to our building when they noticed a young couple strolling casually into the parking garage...the woman was completely naked except for a flag draped over one shoulder (obviously in celebratory mode). Another friend of ours commented upon hearing the story that Jeff should have run up to the woman and said, "You know when you have those dreams where you're walking around naked? Well, THIS ISN'T A DREAM!" Our friend Harry's comment: "And I thought New York was a wild city..." :-)

Found out yesterday that the extremely obnoxious drilling noise I've been hearing for the past weeks hasn't been from construction on the floors above my office...they're from construction work being done on the scadding on our building (stonework), and eventually the work will move around to our side of the building, where it will last for weeks. Egads. The noise is already making it difficult for me to work, and sometimes sounds like a drill working its way through the ceiling just above my head. How on earth am I go to keep sane when they're working on the wall just outside my office??? I'm going to start investigating construction-type noise-blocker head-thingies; I'm not going to be able to get any work done otherwise. I'm already turning the volume up on my CD player to try to drown out the current noise and it's not working very well.

Allison will be writing the official con report very soon (she gets her keyboard fixed tomorrow), but Contata highlights for me include: hassling Mark Osier (who was Toastmaster) and seeing his reaction to the MARK OSIER TRIBUTE PACKAGE (thanks to those of you who contributed to this conspiracy! sorry we didn't have a chance to contact more of you), seeing Howard filking! (woohoo Howard!), meeting new friends and getting reacquainted with old ones, sampling Mike Browne's homemade truffles, checking out some of the concerts (unfortunately we didn't get to hear all of them because of having to do prep stuff for our own concert), but did enjoy hearing Gary Ehrlich, Carson Gaspar, Roberta Rogow, Jane Mailander, Steve Macdonald, MarkO, some great mini-concerts on Sunday. Mark pointed out (quite evilly) that I was very silly to have posted our playlist a while back in my blatherings! :-) He had prepared a parody of "Battle On!" to do as an intro to our concert, but unfortunately (fortunately for us, HAHA) didn't have the time to do it. The "untitled" item I had listed in our playlist, by the way, was actually a song that Jodi, Allison, and I had written in honour of Mark, which we ended up singing as an intro to HIS concert.
You can see the lyrics to Parody Man online. :-)
Sherman, we sang the parody you wrote for Mark in open filk, and he was highly amused. Speaking of parodies, Gary wrote a brilliant one of Teenybopper Love! He says he should have it up on his website soon (check out his songbook).
I also had fun talking Pilot-talk with Stevemac, who brought his own Pilot and computer. He hotsynched my Pilot and gave me some very cool apps and text files which I am still having fun going through. More Contata details and hopefully photos.

Had some (unwelcome) excitement on the way home, when Allison's guitar DIDN'T ARRIVE AT THE TORONTO AIRPORT WITH US. :( :( After many frantic phonecalls and talking to airport officials, we discovered that her guitar was never actually put on the plane, and wasn't even registered in the computer as ever having been tagged! Talk about every guitarist's worst nightmare. It was so depressing have to finally leave the airport to go home without her guitar. Good news the next day, though...Allison's guitar had been found in the Newark airport!!!! It came home on the next flight to Toronto, and Allison reports that it was delivered safely to her home yesterday. MAJOR RELIEF. :-)

Anyway, a very fun time and more details coming soon in our longer report. If any of you have Contata reports online, please let me know and I'll post the URLs here, if you'd like.