Here’s my excuse for an end-of-year greeting to friends and family; hopefully some cool photos will substitute for the usual text blathering.
Dressing Up
San Francisco is not getting a lot of love these days, but it’s still a beautiful vibrant city with no shortage of cool and fun stuff to do. You can fill your time (as one does) with Regency balls, Gatsby picnics, architectural neon tours, baseball games, film screenings, pub crawls, hat decoration workshops, lightsaber practice — all requiring the appropriate wardrobe.
After too many years of recovery from my days of competition costuming, and discovering that many of my old creations no longer fit, I decided it was time to make some new fun outfits. I have to give a ton of credit (and many thanks!) to my friend Agnes for aiding and abetting this process. Several new ensembles were created with her help during a month-long stay in Seattle in May–June. Later in the summer, I attended Costume College in LA — my first return to CoCo since the very first event, back in 1992 — and had fun recreating an Agent Peggy Carter outfit for the WW2 USO-themed Friday Night Showcase. I debuted my new Deco-era lounge pajamas at Mythcon 50 in San Diego as one of a pair of star-crossed alien lovers in the Not-Ready-for-Mythcon Players production (you had to be there). But in truth, all this sewing frenzy really was leading up to my Vintage Nile tour of Egypt in December (more about that later). Here is a selection of my year in costume (yes, repping your local sports team does count):
Cultivating Retirement
Retirement is the best! So much to do and no pesky job to interfere. I kept busy with a variety of projects and activities, from handling the quarterly JASNA NorCal (Jane Austen Society regional) newsletter to serving as a poll worker for local elections to posing my Action Chicks in various picturesque locations around town. I helped my brother Kevin set up a web site for his new graphic novel PULP, and you should definitely buy a copy. Boredom? Nonsense! We have wine tasting in Sonoma, baseball games in SF and San Jose, summer theatre productions around the Bay Area, keeping up with new microbreweries, lunching with friends met in exotic (and not-so-exotic) places, my yoga studio and an indie movie theatre just a few blocks away, and (for those rainy days) working on my Goodreads reading goal for the year. (2019 recommendation: the new English translation of Jin Yong’s A Hero Born from Macmillan. As always, YMMV.)
On the Road Again
My travel in 2019 began with a short January visit to Seattle to attend the Rick Steves Reunion Weekend, where I met up with friends from my 2018 trip to Ireland as well as old travel buddies from the 2014 Turkey tour. (Our Turkey group is famous in RickSteves-ian lore as having had an almost perfect attendance at our first reunion, as well our ongoing efforts to stay in touch — including cross-country visits and more foreign travel together — since our initial trip.) I returned to the “Emerald City” for a longer stay in May/June, when my friends Lorri and Pete offered me the use of their downtown high rise condo in exchange for hanging out with their very friendly cat. Seattle weather in late spring is absolutely lovely. I explored the city’s museums, shops and bars, ferried to see cousins on Bainbridge Island, attended Mariners games, and did a bunch of costume-related stuff (see above). Summer took me to LA and San Diego, for Costume College and Mythcon (respectively). But the year’s Main Event was a December trip to Egypt, after almost two years of planning.