Dear Charitable Phone Solicitor

Yes, I am on the national "do not call" list. Yes, you are legally exempt from the restrictions of the national "do not call" list. But why in the world would you want to waste your time trying to solicit money from someone who has already expressed hostility to phone solicitation? Just because you can? If the ethics don't bother you, at least pay attention to the economics!

No love,
HRJ

An Tir Trip Report

So one of the major premises of this trip was that back when I did my PNW road trip last fall Liz was off gallivanting in France and she was one of the core of people I'd wanted to see on that trip. And the second major premise is that over the years I've made an assortment of trips up to An Tir with the plausible excuse of teaching some classes (in a wide variety of venues), which have been extremely enjoyable, and xrian wanted to come too, and then Liz said, "Well there's this local event the first weekend of February that we're running Ithra classes at ..." and the next thing you know we had plane reservations.

So we each did several classes at the Dragon's Laire A&S event. I reprised my "Embroidered Clothing Before AD 1000" and "Survey of Sewing Work Containers" (the two I had to sweat over re-creating the slide-shows for), and then got some enthusiastic converts for the Birka wire "embroidery" presentation and lab. (Given how many Viking enthusiasts there are up there, I was a little worried that it might be old hat, but evidently not.) Finished up with a nice little feast. I think xrian rather enjoyed the whole "touring rock star with groupies" aspect and seemed to be surrounded by enthusiastic fans all weekend. I kept getting assured second-hand that I had groupies too, but as often happens I guess they were too intimidated to hang out and chat with me (although my classes were all very well attended).

Sunday was for "use the out-of-town visitors as an excuse for a shopping party" and we went to a local yarn/spinning/weaving store (at which I picked up a couple pounds of wool top to finish up the spin-directional cloak project ... one of these decades ... without first considering that it wouldn't compress small enough to go into my suitcase) followed by a leisurely lunch at a truly excellent Indian restaurant. (How excellent? Well, in addition to the delicious food, when the time came to pay the bill for our large and amorphous party, they just had each of us recite our dishes to the cashier, who toted up individual receipts.)

My return flight had significant overlap with the Superbowl, which seems to be the most direct explanation for the plane being only one-third full.

My An Tirian friends are under standing orders to find me not less than one excuse-to-come-teach per year.