Asymptomatic

On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival's website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.

So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren't going to make it, but we did manage to not "miss the boat". Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.

After dealing with the registration folks and boarding the boat, we were told that our state room was ready to occupy. So we went directly to our state room. What we should have done, is gone to the Phantom auditorium to watch the embarkation show. The embarkation show was a short show put on by the cruise director giving everyone the information they would need to know what was going on on the ship during the trip. Obviously, this was an essential bit of information that we somehow missed, and is really the only explanation I can see for why we hardly ever ran into any of the thousands of people who were on the ship with us....

I know that many people are looking forward to my telling of my vacation, especially about the part where I was dead, but as I was writing it last night (actually, dictating it to the computer, just like this entry) I had gotten 45 paragraphs in thought, "Gee, I ought to save this at some point," and at that very moment, my text editor decided to completely crash on me. So the end result is that you won't be hearing about my trip for a little while longer yet. Suffice to say that I have enough to say about it that I will definitely need to write about it.

In the meantime, allow me to complain about my satellite dish receiver. I've been a longtime Dish Network customer, and when we moved to the new house we renewed our subscription to the service and got all brand-new equipment. One of the weird things about the new equipment is that it's all rental. We previously owned our equipment, now we rent it for a small fee every month just like other people do from their cable companies. It's not a big deal, but if I think about it too much it really gets on my nerves. Fortunately, there is an upside.

Once about every two years, the satellite receiver dies. There's really no explanation for it, although they frequently blame it on electrical surges, which is nigh impossible considering how much surge suppression I put between the power line and the receiver. Whatever the cause, the receiver just starts behaving strangely and eventually won't let you watch TV anymore....

As we drove to dinner today, we passed through a nearby farm field. Berta remarked that within the past week she's seen that field filled with many grazing deer. It got me thinking about how strangely we treat this wild animal.

Deer are fairly large beasts around here. They're not quite as large, but are almost as tall as a cow. In any case, they're no joke. If you run into one with a car, the car can easily be damaged beyond repair. This is in comparison to many other creatures that we have not hunted into extinction or herded for food that still wander wild in the open.

There really isn't a range of animal between, say, stray dog and deer. There aren't a whole lot of stray dogs around either, but if there were, the deer are on average at least twice as large. There are many, many smaller creatures than dogs out in the "wild", as evidenced by the all-too-plentiful roadkill, but nothing between dog and deer size. What puzzles me is that we just take this deer thing for granted....

For our 10th wedding anniversary, Berta and I stayed over night in Philadelphia. The interesting story is less about what we actually did than what we tried to plan.

Mostly, you wouldn't call it a plan. Friday night, we dropped the kids off at Mom's then raced home to decide what to do. It was still early enough to consider flights out of Philadelphia, provided that they were late enough.

We'd been thinking about getting away for a while, specifically to exercise our passports one more time before they expire. Berta has stamps from Mexico, and I've got stamps from France, and we both have stamps and visas for India. I thought it would be nice to be "world travelers" and add another stamp to the book before it was retired.

It's kind of strange explaining these trips we take. It's like we just need to get away for a while, and it's not about being pampered or being extravagant (although the travel might seem that way), but more about just getting away from home. And so on Friday night we simply looked for a reasonably cheap flight to anywhere that wouldn't keep us away longer than the weekend. This is harder than you might think. more

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more