Amanda Frederickson's Blog: Musings - Posts Tagged "pudding"
Second Weekend of Doom
Pudding, Cornelius.
If you’re familiar with the play Hello, Dolly! you might remember that the code word for “adventure” is “pudding.” I have definitely been getting a fair share of pudding lately.
You might remember from the last post that amid the “pudding” of Otakon weekend, we discovered that our hotel was booked for the wrong dates. The first weekend of September was the wrong dates.
Neither Nee-chan nor I could afford a random vacation, but the booking was non-refundable and neither of us wanted to simply lose the money. We also realized that both of us hadn’t yet had a vacation “just because” in our entire adult lives. Any weekend trips have always been for a purpose (like a convention). And it was non-refundable. :p
So, we ended up with a random Baltimore weekend. I had a plan. Remember that little fairy tale I read out loud from? I was going to finish it. I’d already added more pages, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know how it would end. I would do some writing at the hotel like a Famous Author and have another short story finished.
Right.
Pudding.
It was a good thing the hotel let us check in early. For one thing, we found out it would cost nearly another night’s stay to park the clunker in the hotel’s garage. Poor baby. Baltimore just doesn’t like the rust bucket. We decided to park out of town and use the light rail again. After discovering that you aren’t allowed to park at the light rail lots overnight (which makes sense) we found an out of the way spot to leave the car (with permission from the lot’s owner). *For the record, I don’t recommend this, but we were desperate at this point, and it was that or go home. We then walked down to the bus route that would take us to the light rail.
I got some reading done during the nearly hour-long wait for the bus. The one that breezed straight past. Silly us. We thought that “Bus Stop” meant that the bus would stop when the driver saw us standing under the sign.
Finding out that there wouldn't be another bus for yet another hour, we walked nearly two miles to the light rail. At least our luggage was at the hotel. And we didn’t get run over by any cars. That was a bonus.
We finally made it back to the hotel, hot, sweaty, and exhausted. The air conditioning in our room was pure heaven. We decided to call it a day and camped out on the Disney Channel for the I Am a Princess weekend, featuring Brave. It was definitely nice just to crash out and relax.
Saturday was gorgeous, and perfect for checking out Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. We had lunch at the food court in the Gallery, which has a whole bank of windows looking out toward the harbor and the masts of the USS Constellation. We made it all the way down to the Barnes & Noble at the converted power plant (which is awesome, by the way, if you ever have a chance to see it) and picked up a new book. We didn’t manage to make it out to Fort McHenry though, which was sad because this month is the 200th anniversary of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner.
Funny enough, the Baltimore Comic Con was going on. It came as a bit of a shock because 1) I didn’t know Baltimore hosted a Comic Con, and 2) the tiny “crowd” around the convention center was so small and well behaved compared to the bursting-out-the-seams Otakon mob that I’m used to. (No cosplay photoshoots on the artwork, for one thing.) We thought about getting passes, but passed. It still amused me that even without Otakon there were costumes.
I wrote seven pages that evening while lightning cracked the sky over the city. Even Nee-chan did some writing. (My nefarious plan to infect the world with crazy writing people is working!)
Sunday, we left Baltimore awash in a sea of purple (for the Ravens football game) and after we missed our stop because the doors wouldn’t open (despite mashing the button) and then the train doors tried to close on me, we made it through our trip on the light rail. Thankfully the bus didn’t breeze past us this time. If it had, I don’t think either of us would have lived to tell the tale since we were carrying our bags.
The clunker survived the weekend without being towed, broken into, or stolen (thank God) so for all that things hadn’t exactly gone to plan, overall the weekend hadn’t been as scary as… well, as I was afraid it might end up. Even with pudding.
When we stopped at a McDonalds for lunch/dinner, I wrote five pages.
Weekend total: 15 pages. On Otakon weekend I wrote 20 pages, mainly while waiting in lines. They’re good numbers, but not the epic reams of productivity I hoped for. And I didn’t finish the story. The story is nowhere near finished. In fact, it became obvious it would be a lot longer than I thought; less a short story and more a novella. Yet again, I failed to set a reasonably attainable goal.
Dang it.
For all that, though, I still wrote more than I would have at home (between one and three pages a day) and it was nice to get out of the house and hang around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for a weekend. Complete with costumes, no less. :)
If you’re familiar with the play Hello, Dolly! you might remember that the code word for “adventure” is “pudding.” I have definitely been getting a fair share of pudding lately.
You might remember from the last post that amid the “pudding” of Otakon weekend, we discovered that our hotel was booked for the wrong dates. The first weekend of September was the wrong dates.
Neither Nee-chan nor I could afford a random vacation, but the booking was non-refundable and neither of us wanted to simply lose the money. We also realized that both of us hadn’t yet had a vacation “just because” in our entire adult lives. Any weekend trips have always been for a purpose (like a convention). And it was non-refundable. :p
So, we ended up with a random Baltimore weekend. I had a plan. Remember that little fairy tale I read out loud from? I was going to finish it. I’d already added more pages, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know how it would end. I would do some writing at the hotel like a Famous Author and have another short story finished.
Right.
Pudding.
It was a good thing the hotel let us check in early. For one thing, we found out it would cost nearly another night’s stay to park the clunker in the hotel’s garage. Poor baby. Baltimore just doesn’t like the rust bucket. We decided to park out of town and use the light rail again. After discovering that you aren’t allowed to park at the light rail lots overnight (which makes sense) we found an out of the way spot to leave the car (with permission from the lot’s owner). *For the record, I don’t recommend this, but we were desperate at this point, and it was that or go home. We then walked down to the bus route that would take us to the light rail.
I got some reading done during the nearly hour-long wait for the bus. The one that breezed straight past. Silly us. We thought that “Bus Stop” meant that the bus would stop when the driver saw us standing under the sign.
Finding out that there wouldn't be another bus for yet another hour, we walked nearly two miles to the light rail. At least our luggage was at the hotel. And we didn’t get run over by any cars. That was a bonus.
We finally made it back to the hotel, hot, sweaty, and exhausted. The air conditioning in our room was pure heaven. We decided to call it a day and camped out on the Disney Channel for the I Am a Princess weekend, featuring Brave. It was definitely nice just to crash out and relax.
Saturday was gorgeous, and perfect for checking out Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. We had lunch at the food court in the Gallery, which has a whole bank of windows looking out toward the harbor and the masts of the USS Constellation. We made it all the way down to the Barnes & Noble at the converted power plant (which is awesome, by the way, if you ever have a chance to see it) and picked up a new book. We didn’t manage to make it out to Fort McHenry though, which was sad because this month is the 200th anniversary of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner.
Funny enough, the Baltimore Comic Con was going on. It came as a bit of a shock because 1) I didn’t know Baltimore hosted a Comic Con, and 2) the tiny “crowd” around the convention center was so small and well behaved compared to the bursting-out-the-seams Otakon mob that I’m used to. (No cosplay photoshoots on the artwork, for one thing.) We thought about getting passes, but passed. It still amused me that even without Otakon there were costumes.
I wrote seven pages that evening while lightning cracked the sky over the city. Even Nee-chan did some writing. (My nefarious plan to infect the world with crazy writing people is working!)
Sunday, we left Baltimore awash in a sea of purple (for the Ravens football game) and after we missed our stop because the doors wouldn’t open (despite mashing the button) and then the train doors tried to close on me, we made it through our trip on the light rail. Thankfully the bus didn’t breeze past us this time. If it had, I don’t think either of us would have lived to tell the tale since we were carrying our bags.
The clunker survived the weekend without being towed, broken into, or stolen (thank God) so for all that things hadn’t exactly gone to plan, overall the weekend hadn’t been as scary as… well, as I was afraid it might end up. Even with pudding.
When we stopped at a McDonalds for lunch/dinner, I wrote five pages.
Weekend total: 15 pages. On Otakon weekend I wrote 20 pages, mainly while waiting in lines. They’re good numbers, but not the epic reams of productivity I hoped for. And I didn’t finish the story. The story is nowhere near finished. In fact, it became obvious it would be a lot longer than I thought; less a short story and more a novella. Yet again, I failed to set a reasonably attainable goal.
Dang it.
For all that, though, I still wrote more than I would have at home (between one and three pages a day) and it was nice to get out of the house and hang around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for a weekend. Complete with costumes, no less. :)
