Up at eight, despite traditional urge to sleep in on Saturdays, as there are a million things to do today. The San Jose Rubberama Stamp Festival starts at nine, and I want to water the garden, prepare my bulb containers, and make a grocery list before heading out. The cats help me with my morning ritual: Natasha walks across the paper as I try to read it, and Keiko tentatively dips one paw into my coffee before I've even had the first sip. I hiss meaningfully and they scatter.
On the road at ten, having forgotten the map, but positive after recent junkets to San Jose for jury duty that I can find the Park Exhibit Hall. I drive by it twice before realizing the gaudy orange and purple building is the Exhibit Hall and not, as I assumed, the Museum of Technology which is also gaudily colored and one block down the road. Into the hall at ten thirty, out at one, dazed, footsore, and happy. I have added to my medieval and Christmas collection, talked to all the vendors who recognise me from the San Francisco show this summer, and purchased a peacock feather stamp that I have been coveting since the last show for use with the burned velvet technique. I have also invested in an overpriced but useful piece of plastic which will let me place images exactly where I want them, a necessity for masking images and doing heavily layered pieces. I have been coveting one of those for the last ten years.
I spend a judicious seventy dollars in two and a half hours, including parking. Some people spend that at one booth alone. I am relatively picky, and capable of resisting most stamps, but I see others with full baskets lined up at the cash register and I know for a fact they are dropping hundreds of dollars in the same two and a half hours. People in line chat, admire everyone's stamps, compare techniques and products. I like stamp people, in general, although I couldn't pick one out of a crowd. Well, maybe I could, if they were also crafts people in which case I would recognise them by their homemade sweatshirts decorated with puffy paint, appliques, and iron-on designs. Stamp people are often into crafts, although I myself am not, and over the years stamp shows have increasingly offered beads, paints, ribbons, spangles, specialty tools, and a wild variety of paper unsuitable for stamping. The biggest line I see at this Rubberama is at a company that has one table of stamps and four tables of folksy crafts items. The second biggest line is for the cafeteria.
Home again, with a stop at the grocery store for party food since we are invited to Spike and Tom's tonight. They are showing The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which I have never seen. We are instructed to wear appropriate clothing. I interpret this to mean drag so I dress up in cowboy gear and paint sideburns on my face. John wears my long, red wig, which looks rather dashing if you ignore his thick, wiry beard. Everyone else sports boas and glittery eye makeup. There is much quaffing of good Australian wine in honor of the movie which we all enjoy very much. Guy Pearce is delightfully underdressed in it.
Much later, getting into bed, I notice the time and feel horrified at how early it is. "It's only 11:30, how can we possibly be this tired?" I demand sulkily. I don't want to be such a geezer.
"I changed the clocks," John says. "It's really half past midnight."
Daylight savings is over. I see Orion to the east now when I walk Dixie in the evenings. It'll be dark by the time I get home tomorrow. No more puttering in the garden after work. Autumn is really here. Good thing I have plenty of rubber stamps to play with in the long evenings to come.
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