Pre-launch.

Before we could go on our trip, there were a couple of last-minute details to take care of first.

For one thing, what's a road trip without music? I wanted to put together a mix CD for our little adventure. Here's the playlist and cover art:

Lautsprecher - Omnibus
cut.rate.box - Behind The Wheel
Fear Factory - Cars
And One - Deutschmaschine
See Colin Slash - Slut
Iris - Annie, Would I Lie to You
Covenant - Call the Ships to Port
The Crüxshadows - Tears
DJ Quicksilver - Ameno (Era)
Helium Vola - Omnis Mundi Creatura
Lords Of Acid - I Sit On Acid (Remix)
London Suede - Everything Will Flow (Rollo's Dub)
Snake River Conspiracy - Lovesong
Razed in Black - I Want Candy
SPF1000 - Haunted House (Disney Remix)

(I'd almost decided against including that last track, due to my disappointment over not getting to see the Haunted Mansion, but to hell with it -- I'd built the playlist around it, and I felt like it would fall apart without it.)

I burned the disc, tossed it in my CD player, and it didn't work. Burned three more useless copies before calling retcon for help; we'd recently upgraded my desktop machine, Nailbunny, to run Windows XP, and I figured something had gone horribly wrong. Riff came over to run diagnostics, but it turns out my playlist was just too long -- new CD players, like the one in Riff's car, can handle a disc with nearly 80 minutes of music, but my antiquated little boombox couldn't, is all. The disc was fine. Oooops. He and treebyleaf headed out on other errands.

I finished packing, and kespernorth arrived to take charge of my keys and my cat. He gave me a ride over to Riff and treebyleaf's apartment, so the three of us could head to Rustycon for Riff's dance. We'd screwed up our scheduling, you see -- our original dates for our trip overlapped the con, so we had to shuffle things so that we'd be leaving the morning after the dance.

If you read my comments after last year's Rustycon, you'll remember some of the problems I had with the con's information design and unhelpful staff. Well, I got almost as bad a runaround for tracking down tape to put up flyers, but I will admit the con's signage has improved -- I could actually find things this year. As a result, I think the dance was a little better attended this year than last year. Seemed like it to me, anyway. Still a little dead, but I don't think there were that many people at the convention overall. Riff did his usual excellent job.

I had a major fashion emergency during the dance -- a tricky little dance maneuver that landed me gracefully on my knees managed to not-so-gracefully tear a huge rip across the back of my new pants. Completely irreparable. Dammit, I liked those pants. I retired to a chair on the edge of the dance floor and explained the situation to treebyleaf, who went and grabbed my jacket so I could tie it around my waist while we went off in search of a more permanent solution, which ended up being the loan of a long black skirt from our friend Alé. Maybe not my typical convention attire, but perfectly workable. Cute, even.

Dance got done around 2:00 AM, if I recall correctly. "So, DJ Retcon, you've just pulled off another successful dance at Rustycon -- what are you going to do next?" "I'm going to Disneyland!"

We went back to their apartment and crashed for the night. (We'd talked about the insane possibility of leaving directly from the con, but it just wasn't an option, not with the dance equipment to deal with.)

Next: Going coastal