5/30/09 Maker Faire and injury and a kidnapping.

I woke up on maker faire day bright and early. I got packed up and then checked in with the Ria. While she was getting ready I decided to go rest on the couch and ponder for a bit.
My back apparently decided it wanted to stay on the couch longer than I did, because when I tried to get up it hurt to walk, and for a brief period I was holding the wall.
Thankfully Miss Ria is a massage therapist, and she made things better. They still hurt a lot, but at least I could walk without holding onto walls.
We left for maker faire without the exact parking directions, so we called our friend Jen in Massachusetts, and got her wonderful husband Cole who helped us by reading off directions from the website. Cole Rocks in lots of ways.
Maker faire was quite the interesting event. I did not get pictures of the moving soda bottle sculpture that was probably my favorite thing, but I did get photos of a lot of other interesting things.
The driveable cupcakes were pretty high on my list of cool things.
then there were mechanical giraffes,
Giant tesla coils.
and odd seemingly flyable contraptions, or maybe just shaded sky chairs
But mostly we were there to see and support Brent and Evonne and the lightening temple.
They have been working with a group of design an build an interactive muscial station where people can work together to make music. That day they were working on playing it through the tesla coil, but eventually they will have play loudly through the coil and have people do performances with electrical wands around it I beleive.
You can see the idea for the final product here http://lightningtemple.wetpaint.com/
And you can see Brent standing by the interactivtaion station here
(don't feed the Brent)
I loved playing with that thing. you and five other people can play beats and sounds and syncs that go together. It was lots of fun.
I also met Evo who is a very cool woman to know.
I think I told her later in the day that I wish I had met her on another day as that day I could barely stand up, and so I had NO energy, even though I was in this place with all these cool ideas, and interesting things, and had I not been injured I would have likely been bouncing from place to place to see everything. I kind of spent the the diet pepsi and mentos show squating on the ground to avoid pain so I missed it.
Thankfully after that Miss Ria came to my rescue again with a massage. She also likely put something in my back back into place, because about 20 minutes afterwards I regained the ability to stand up straight. However that was pretty late in the day by that time, so I still didn't see too much.
I did have a really good conversation with Brent about how he uses the lightening temple to build community, and he talked about teaching people tings they want to le4arn about technology and holding respect for people.
There were lots of people who worked hard on this but Brent has been working like crazy and ignoring things like sleep. However since I spetn most of the day sitting and watching I was able to catch this shot to prove that even Brent's need sleep.
So as our afternoon wound down Ria and I had been able to make plans to have dinner Audrey, a friend of ours from college. Audrey had also lived in Rochester for part of the time I was there fro grad school. Audrey is an amazing woman to know, and she made my time in Rochester so much better, so I was very grateful that i got to see her. We had dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant.
I love the shot above, but I figured I should take a good one.
So we chatted away and the original plan was for Ria and I to go to the house where Brent and Evonne were staying and sleep there, and then Ria would take me to the airport in the morning, but the Audrey asked if we could come to her house and spend time there. She wanted us to see her people, and was totally willing to welcome us into her space. That is a very Audrey thing. I remember when we were in Rochester she took me one weekend to her family's retreat/camp space, and wandered around in nature and came back and listened to Steve Miller band and talked about life. I knew this night would be different, but that in Audrey's presence there would be warmth and life would be good.
Ria really wanted to spend time with Brent and Evonne, but we figured there was no reason I couldn't go, all we had to do was move my stuff from Ria's car to Audrey's, and Audrey would drop me off in the morning. SO that is how I got kidnapped (not really) to Albany CA.