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For now I’m skipping Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which I will write more about later. Short version reads, “The con was cool, we read a lot and watched TV,” but this doesn’t quite do justice to the full version. Sorry about this skipping around a bit, but I will try to come back to the missing days later. We packed our bags in the morning, including the extra bag we bought at Fry’s near our hotel, and packed the art items in padded envelopes and cardboard with tape. We considered packing the glass thing, but thought it would be safer to carry it with us, and the matted print was too big to go in the suitcase. But the suitcase held the jewelry box and the wood block for the glass thing rather well. During this time I also called voicemail at work and changed my message, and forwarded my cell phone business line back to my desk for that true “on vacation” feeling (though the personal line still works - as always LJ friends can still reach me by alpha pager here.) ...

Looks like I haven’t written much of anything since the 10th. Shame on me! I have decided not to write a novel this month, due to that it’s only five days from deadline, and I only have 234 words out of 50,000 done (that’s 0.6%) and I would need to erase those words to make the work compatible with the outline. Defeat. Oh well, I will continue writing when the mood strikes me. ...

Writing on Wednesday Nov 28, but this actually happened over the weekend on Sunday Nov 25. I don’t think we went to any of the sessions on Sunday. We got down to the con area about 11-ish and walked through the art show area. We found 3 things we wanted to buy: an engraved-glass art piece, a jewelry box, and a print; total damage was about $110, not bad compared to what we would have done going to the actual auction and bidding on things in live mode. We hustled our treasures back to the rented lair. ...

Writing on Tuesday Nov 27, but this actually happened over the weekend on Saturday Nov 24. I went and hunted down breakfast in the restaurant again. We arrived a little late for the first session, but not by much. The first session was Writing for Smart Kids and the panel was Gilden, Wrede, A. Turtledove and Smith. A. Turtledove turned out to be Harry Turtledove’s teenage daughter, who served as the “typical young adult reader”. The general consensus seemed to be that an author shouldn’t talk down to a young audience, or try to dumb down the material… kids are smart. I can’t actually think of anything they said you should do differently for a Young Adult audience… hmmm. Pat Wrede was asked “What inspired you to write X?” where X was some book she had written that I didn’t recognize, and Pat then gave her Rant about how Inspiration is overrated, and that a writer’s life is 90% Perspiration and 10% (or less) Inspiration. Another writer, Mel Gilden, took a moderate stance and said that all the little ideas that you string together to make a single work also count as inspiration. ...

Writing on Tuesday Nov 27, but this actually happened last week on Friday Nov 23. We got up around 9 am and I went down to the hotel restaurant and got breakfast to go, and brought it back up to the room. We finally got ready to go, and went down and presented ourselves for registration. Once equipped with name badges, we wandered the dealers room and the art show. I bought the ceremonial Jewelry for Miche (this one in the shape of five spiderwebs chained together to form a necklace, which should look good with the Corset bearing spiderweb patterns. ...

Writing on Monday Nov 26, but this actually happened last week on Thursday Nov 22. I got up at the usual time and I let Miche sleep in. I paid all the bills. Then I wanted to get some better headphones for the trip, so I went to Fry’s, but found it closed. (We had never heard of an electronics store that was closed on Thanksgiving before, so with tears in our eyes, we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to get headphones… we didn’t find one… *) ...

Writing on Monday Nov 26, but this actually happened last week on Wednesday Nov 21. Meeting this morning, and I was a little late due to picking up Bruce at the car place. Bruce and I talked about the latency problem and how strange it is that he and I seem to be the hardest-working guys in Netops aside from Shawn, and how our production network kind of sucks. I spent the day catching up on email and tickets, and creating a vacation-responder for my email. We successfully arranged for someone to come look after Sophie’s medication while we were gone. I also arranged a van service to pick us up at 1 pm thursday for the ride to the airport. ...

Writing on Monday Nov 26, but this actually happened a week ago on Tuesday Nov 20. Many things happened at work today, but the most remarkable was probably the fact that we had a “bad response time” event (which had actually started on Saturday night). Many people looked at it and fussed over it; Bruce’s observation was that it was between the front end and the outside world, since Gladiator showed no change in back-end or total round-trip time. This was confirmed by Queryint logs which showed backend performance much better, not worse, starting Friday afternoon. My only guess is that it was a problem with one of our ISPs and could we try switing to the other ISP, at least in New York. This was not done, and no real progress was made until after 5PM when Bills called an emergency meeting with me and Brett. ...

Writing on Monday Nov 26, but this actually happened a week ago on Sunday Nov 18. Secret entry. Argument started off with me complaining to Michelle because I feel like I do more than my fair share of chores around the house and that I am not appreciated for it. I said that I wished she would make dinner once in a while. I said that I felt like the chores were broken into two groups, the “things Greg does” and the “things Michelle and Greg do together”. I expressed that I didn’t like coming home from work, after 8 hours of me working and her sleeping, and getting “drawn in” to the things she felt “needed to be done now” because she has just got up and is feeling energetic and wants to include me in something. I said that I understand why she doesn’t want to carry laundry up and down the stairs (because of her knees) but that probably means she could be helping more with other stuff like dishes. I also said that I think she leaves messes and trash around the house and that I usually end up cleaning up after her, and that I felt that asking me to do little things that I don’t usually ask her to do (like, can I get her a coke or water while we’re both sitting there at the computer) is unfair to me, because I very rarely say no (which would be rude), and yet I don’t ever ask those things of her (probably because I feel it would be a bit rude). ...

Writing on Monday Nov 26, but this actually happened a week ago on Sunday Nov 18. I had a big argument with M today. I’m not going to write the specifics here, since it’s kind of personal and not really resolved. We got invited to dinner with Christine in Berkeley. I was sort of navigating by memory, which didn’t work well, since I had only been there twice by two different routes, and neither matched what Chris was telling me on the phone. Then as Chris was trying to guide me through the streets by speakerphone, I decided to back up and try to turn a different way, and backed right into someone else’s car! It was a very light tap and I was pulling over to the right to talk to the guy, but he just honked at me like he wanted me to keep going. I turned right and stopped and it didn’t look like he was following me, so oh well. We eventually made it to Chris’ house. ...