Done Since last Sunday, 2018-01-21

This past weekend was Conflikt, which is why you're seeing this on a Monday. Not my best Conflikt ever, and I didn't do much singing, but a few good conversations and a lot of terrific music. I didn't do much singing; almost all of it in the memorial circle. (Which was very sparsely attended -- I was the only one there with a guitar. Flame performed a lot more than I did, but I did put in a good performance of "Keep the Dream Alive" at Kat's request. I sang "When I Go" in honor of Ursula LeGuin for my own turn, and sang "The Engineer" after Rick Weiss sang "The Designer".)

... and then, of course, I went and pulled something in my lower back, probably twisting around to pick up my guitar case from behind the chair. Ouch! Took a cyclobenzaprine, some naproxen, and a hot bath. The pain was a lot less this morning as a result, but I took one look at our heavy suitcase and called for a bellhop to load up a cart with it, and hoist it into the van at the other end.

I don't always meet someone new at cons, but I did this time -- Fallon (we-are-spc on DW). I always don't get enough sleep at cons, and this was no exception.

The high point of the con came at the end of Saturday's twofers, when Kat's boyfriend sang his marriage proposal. Kat was crying through most of it -- I know because I was sitting next to her holding the box with the ring. She spent the rest of the con looking somewhat dazed. Colleen and I probably did, too. This means we have two daughters planning to get married.

The trip down was rough, for reasons I don't fully understand except to note that my self-confidence is somewhere south of nonexistent these days. (I appear to be taking this more-or-less in reverse chronological order.) I was somewhere a little north of Mercer St. when I suddenly noticed that I was nearly out of gas -- I'd misread the gauge when we set out. So there ensued a somewhat frantic search for a gas station, which I finally found on Lander, off Airport. At that point, not being confident of my ability to find I5 from an unfamiliar direction in the dark, I set out on First Avenue, which I expected to end up on or near International Blvd. Which it eventually did, but by that time I was a bit frazzled.

So by the time we finally got to the con hotel, the Doubletree, Colleen had been giving me strange directions for a few blocks because she was sure that the con was in the Red Lion. I pretty much lost it at that point.

I did get a little programming done, with the result that this post's filename and subject line were generated with the command "make since". I am getting slightly better at not procrastinating.

( Notes & links, as usual )