Baitcon 2005
Hobbit's Baitcon pix. Shot on a Sony DSC-V1 5-mp camera,
resized and postprocessed a little. Each picture is a
link to its larger version.
The redesigned Prius really does hold a lot of stuff.
Pulled in next to another one at the rest stop, and it was too cute to not
get a picture of. Interesting license plate. Handed its owner a flyer
with a pointer to my URL link-farm, of course.
Which is
here if you're curious.
There was a spiderweb entertainingly built across the shed doorway.
Shortly after our arrival, the port-a-john truck delivered. These six
and two bonus ones we didn't even order. Good thing, too.
Because
really, Baitcon is all about the I/O.
We ran around assessing and documenting damage. The sauna light
shroud was cracked; I had to extract it very carefully to replace
the bulb and didn't bother re-installing it.
A brief watch for "flight lines" quickly turned up the first hornet
nest. They were going in and out of a fairly subtle hole in the back
of the shed, indicated by the arrow. Fortunately, nobody was likely
to go near that particular place. Two more flight-lines were later
observed in and out of the roofline of the house itself, and we determined
that the nests were most likely deep inside the walls and that spraying
the external holes wasn't likely to have much effect, even at night.
A job for professionals, most likely.
The deck, which 4 years ago we were told had to remain absolutely
pristine, is now stained by ash-containing leakage from the grill. Not
to mention that the whole structure is warped and falling apart anyways.
There was broken glass all over one end of the porch roof; evidently
the storm window above had been trashed.
Unpack continued, and much work occured.
The back-deck tarp over the dishwashing area got a new type of fourth
fly-point this time, saving having to wrangle a rope from the
higher roof where the hornet nests were.
JB appears to like the redesigned hose rig. Hope it likes him back
just as much..
Liz went up and braved [well, more like evaded being noticed by] the
stinging insects to install a tie-point for the front.
Phil supplied the same old driveway tie-point, but from his new vehicle.
People began arriving, and food-prep started.
The directions web-page said the oval Mink Hollow Lodge sign had fallen
down. We found the parts under the porch. The sign clearly needed to
go back up, so I decided to go out and make a silly rakish Art out of it.
Night fell, and there was way too much poi-spinning.
And mixing continued...
and there was much wearing of glowey-things. This is Phil's EL-wire.
A green laser pointer over ice. Shaken, not stimulated?
People hanging outside to chat...
and inside to play with music toys...
amidst a multitude of silly objects. [Actually I think this usually
rides around in Phil's car...]
Merriment continued reasonably late, and then it was time for sleep.
Phil's dome in Saturday morning's light. Practical PVC art.
View up to the house as I stumbled toward the coffee...
Someone got confused and went in the wrong door to try and stash bags
of garbage; clearly more signage was needed because we really didn't
want people mucking around in certain places. [sheez, do I really have
to watermark this one...]
And of course, mixing eventually started up again. Phil and seph were
refilling the smaller dewar, and I warned them that I'd be climbing up
on the truck to tighten up some tarp ropes.
Once I was up there, why not shoot a sweep of more pictures, partially
to capture the amazing folding-camp-chair farm.
Our host relaxing with a bit of drum-jam
Keith will never wash that mp3 player again!
Lunch! And some of the extra wiring needed to keep it warm.
The afternoon activities contined, including juggling...
or just hanging out enjoying the day.
These little bee-flies were all over the place. They hover really
entertainingly, and really like the thistles gracing the edges
of the lawn. These were NOT the yellow jackets nesting in the rotten
wood in the roof-peak; those clearly had a different agenda and amazingly
enough, never clued in about all the sweet foods twenty feet below them.
At some point I noticed my ladder was missing, and later spotted it
against a tree down-slope a ways. Something odd was going on...
But first, time for a jaunt down to the stream! Unfortunately, fairly
low water this year -- possibly just later in the season.
The hot shower had been set up the preceding evening and was getting
plenty of use.
The main bulk of the dam, including that huge triangular rock it took
about 5 of us at once to move, has been firmly in place for 3 years
or more by now. It's all leaning a bit more downstream every year, as
stuff slowly gets washed out from under it, but still holding.
It's nice how we managed to leave a semi-permanent mark that
survives spring floods on the place. But the pool behind it has
filled in a bit, so this year people started damming up another area
just below where a deeper pool had formed.
Downstream, with Naked Man.
Arty stuff. I think I put up the first rock-stack, but several others
appeared over the course of the weekend. Shayde captured a lot of it.
The walk back up passed through many violently-green fields of these
soft ferns, and amazingly enough, still no detectable poison ivy or
the like. Really nice woods in general.
Upon returning up to the yard, the purpose of the ladder was revealed:
to get a start up that big tree to rig a silk for people to play on.
Someone below appears rather fascinated with Rob's butt...
Phil has a go at some more complex moves
And several newbies [including me] were taught a couple of things.
It's not easy for everyone to reach the stream. Undaunted, a bunch of
people took Bonnie off-roading in her wheelchair down the trail. But
one of the front wheels fell apart during the course of this, causing
many geeks to gather round for the postmortem after they returned.
The reason: the bolt through the caster, spacers, and bearing is too
*short* to actually seat in the nylock part of the nut correctly. It
needs to be about 1/4" longer, and then would have a better chance of
not backing out under a modest level of abuse.
DGlenn takes up most of a large van to get to an event nowadays. Not only
to haul a full-size bass and a bunch of other instruments...
but also a whole *farm* of cameras. These are all his. And it doesn't
even include the old wooden plate camera.
Joelll appeared very briefly, but had to zip off back to a reunion.
Andy painted many people. Already documented at length elsewhere.
I found a cool spider, and played with it for a while -- meanwhile
trying to wrangle the camera with my other hand.
The band started setting up their stuff...
and much jamming happened way before they were even officially on.
Motion-capture experiment. Really.
This is just TOO scary.
The sun headed over the yardarm, or the yard, or whatever ... painting
the faraway hills a nice subtle orange that the camera probably didn't
capture quite right.
Intermission for Platypus Rex was the first ice cream feed, preceded by
our host explaining how it was all going to work...
after which Crash managed deployment and flavor announcement.
...3 ...2 ...1 ...GO! and everyone fell upon the cold stuff in a
massive feeding frenzy.
One flavor that hadn't entered the rotation yet was BRICK, and Val decided
that we should make a non-sugared version for Mom. So we found some correctly
overripe bananas, cooked up these raisins, and mixed up a batch with Splenda
instead of sugar which I thought would be completely vile but amazingly
enough actually worked well enough. Complete guesswork. Mom loved it.
Part of a sleepy "tent city" on Sunday morning
The second part of breakfast was, well duh, more ice cream.
The sangria sorbet didn't really freeze, but remained as perfectly
serviceable sangria.
It began to cloud up as the day went on, and the wind picked up and
started bellying the tarps, as a few rumbles of that classic Catskills
thunder rolled around for a while.
Finally, it *did* begin to rain. Blech.
The kitchen sink
Outside the kitchen, a soggy sandwich. See previous picture.
The rain let up after a while, and a cool mist began to settle in.
The weather wasn't quite enough to prevent reasonable packing, though...
and provided more artsy opportunities here and there. This is sized
1024x768, suitable for wallpaper on generic monitors.
Mom reviews the flavor board as cleanup proceeds.
As the Monday morning clouds broke, there were some really amazing
sky scenes. These are also sized 1024x768.
An' that's it.
