So I have now completed my first-ever visit to New York City. Yes, you're all allowed to express shock that I had never been to NYC before...everyone else has made comments. All in all, an enjoyable time was had, despite the annoying (and potentially sick-making) rain all weekend. I made the appropriate pilgrimages.....I saw the Red Sox beat the Yankees in Yankees stadium, including one of the weirdest baseball moments I've ever seen when a ball actually sat on top of the home run ball for a few moments before deciding to roll back onto the field.....I saw the Stonewall Inn, the NY Public Library, the Empire State Building, Times Square, Ground Zero, Broadway, and the Strand Bookstore. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, which was great until le deluge. I rode the subway, I saw a play (November, by David Mamet, starring Nathan Lane), and I discovered the exquisite joy which is Mister Softee ice cream. I also discovered that the Java final I was worried about went even better than I thought.....so, another A (go me). I'm rather tired of school, it's starting to feel endless, and that's not good because I can actually see a light at the end of the tunnel. I just want to fast forward to the end. Ah well.

I'm actually writing this from the luxurious confines of the Bolt Bus...$20 each way with AC, power, and wi-fi......not bad at all.

I think part of what has me tired about school is that I can feel creative juices flowing a bit again. My "I'm going to just run the module for now" DnD game is turning into a campaign with story arc and background and such, I've got some story ideas percolating, and I just don't have the time to devote to either that I'd like. Le sigh.

Well, I've just met one of the new owners of my dragons, and I'm confident I made the right choice. His reaction when he saw them told me that he was indeed a good choice. I packed them and their gear up and shipped them off in a cab up to their new home in Adams Morgan with him. I'm a little melancholy, but I know they'll get more attention now.

So large chunks of our staff are off at our Annual Conference, including just about everyone who generates projects/work for me. This means things are slower than usual. This is both good - I get to catch up on some long outstanding tasks and administrivia - and bad - the pace makes the day go by slowly. Having barely survived two weekends of working a Pride booth, I'm game for a little rest though.

But of course slowness makes me anxious about the impending departure of my dragons. I've decided that since I can't really give them as much attention and playtime as I'd like, I'm finding them a new family who can take them out to play more often. I have a couple of potential adopters lined up and the dragons may be gone as early as tomorrow evening. I'm both happy (I've been somewhat depressed over not really giving them the home and attention they'd like) and sad (they've been a part of our home for almost 4 years).

I hear about hail with thunderstorms all the time, but somehow I rarely seem to actually experience it. I guess i got lucky tonight. We've had some fast moving aggressive storms - aggressive enough to send me scurrying to the windowless spaces in the house due to my thunder and lightning phobia - and the last one actually pelted us with hail. It sounded like an anedless blast of pebbles against the windows, a little on the distressing side actually. Now there's just some quiet, departing thunder as I charge my new laptop battery.

The laptop battery was one of four packages that arrived today.....3 from Amazon and the 4th the laptop battery. All the new D&D books (geek alert!) plus the Octavia Butler short fiction collection and the latest Jaqueline Carey. Now I have to struggle with NOT avoiding all my things-to-do in favor of reading the new D&D Books.

I figured that would be a much more entertaining heading than I'm Getting Married. Though, in fact, that's what this is about. I just have to crack jokes about "collecting the whole set" given that we have a Civil Union certificate, a Domestic Partner Registration certificate, have had a Commitment Ceremony, and now....we'll also have (for what it's worth currently, which is very little legally) a Marriage certificate.

Peter and I are indeed going to tie the know. We're running off to California at the end of July for a long weekend to get married where his Dad lives in San Clemente. It will actually take place on the anniversary of our Civil Union in Vermont. I guess we're both getting old enough that not adding another date to remember is a good thing.

Now of course I'm left to ponder.....will our marriage ever be fully recognized? If we lived in California it might mean something, but barring that is it just a piece of paper? What will it mean to be married for us?

There's always something odd about being back in the office after being away. It's like I'm not entirely sure I belong. Did I really sit here a week ago? Has it been so little time away (and contradictarily, has it been *that* long since I sat here)? Yeah, settling back into routine is just...odd.

I seem to have survived the Great Plague. My potential incubation period passed, so I felt safe coming in to be with my coworkers. The fact that I had two can't-miss meetings today made it an easy decision.

I'm still fine, but with reports as late as last night of folks coming down with The Plague, I decided to play it safe and called into work this morning to say I was working from home. No qualms on the part of my boss, in fact he found it amusing in a weird way. I had left a message on his voice mail and when I called back a while later he answered "Center for Disease Control". Funny guy. He was actually kind of impressed that I had experienced something akin to one of those cruise boat outbreaks we occasionally hear about. Funny people my coworkers.

The weirdest thing about this year's return from Madison is that it was to an empty house. With Peter in Florida helping his Mom with dealing with his grandmother's passing, I came home to dark and quiet and no snuggle. I may be an introvert, but that reconnect was sorely missed :-(

Well, the shuttle from the hotel to the airport is in a half hour, and my time in Madison is winding down. It sounds like there are still some folks just now getting hit with the Wiscon Plague (best guess seems to be Norovirus). I've got my fingers crossed that I'm still good (knocking on wood) and will make it home just fine. If I make it through to tomorrow morning with nothing, it looks like I'll be beyond the incubation period for sure. I suspect the Great Wiscon Plague will be much joked about next year....

So....I'll be interested to hear the post-con news regarding the Great Wiscon Plague of 2008 for real details, but the "stomach flu" outbreak at Wiscon got me thinking about the application of Business Continuity Planning concepts to convention planning. How, as a convention, do you respond to an outbreak like the one at Wiscon...to a weather emergency.....to a situation that come suddenly out of nowhere with the potential to derail your convention. Not the kind of thing that makes one feel warm fuzzies. Ah well. At least I could use this event as a good scenario discussion for the Gaylaxicon 2008 concomm.

So yes, here I am in my post_Wiscon unwind night in Madison. I have Diet Coke and snacks, a laptop and no people. Life is good. Though to be honest, given the casualness with which I approached Wiscon this year I'm not feeling as frazzled as usual. It *was* a fun convention and I saw oodles of people...many of whom bertaed me for my LiveJournal absence so I again promised to try harder with LiveJournal. Many of these folks are good friends who I, unfortunately, don't get to see often enough so it's a reasonable plan. But no writing goals...although I'd love to have time for it, I've come to accept that until the convention is over and the degree is obtained it's not likely.

Highlights of the convention were of course the people, and chatting up Gaylaxicon, and acquiring a new hero - a wonderfully energetic and positive young man who at age 14 has just come out to his Catholic School 8th grade class. He was just plain delightful, as was his Mom. I also spent a fair bit of time networking with other organizers for some of the other progressive genre non-profits....talking 501c3 status, fundraising, organizing, and most of all how to share resources and not keep inventing the wheel separately. I'm energized for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. Yeah, it was Wiscon, have to be energized for something.

I forget sometimes, just how draining talking and being charming all day can be. I was downtown at 9:45 this morning to start setting up the table for Lambda Sci-Fi for DC's pride festival. I left the booth area twice between then and 5:45...once to go to Kinko's at around 10:00 and once to get a funnel cake at around 11:30. The rest of the day was spent at the booth chatting up potential members, smiling, being charming, talking geekness. My little introvert brain has gone fetal. One person even came by the booth looking to say hi to me from LJ (hello dmlaenker, that was kind of cool.

All in all a good, if draining day....with some potential contacts for publicity and programming for Gaylaxicon.

And no...I didn't make my modest writing goal for the week. But no beating myself up too much....I'll just dust myself off and dive in again tomorrow.

Word Count: 100

How is it that I can be so tired and it's only Tuesday morning? I've got a packed week to wind my way through still.

I did make a little progress on the story last night. Still definitely liking the protagonist, the setup, and the atmosphere. About to hit the hard part, for me, direct interaction and dialogue. Some people are assive aggressive in real life...I do it in my writing. I'm a champion avoider of confrontation. My target is 1000 words by Saturday morning......completely reachable, a modest goal.

Word Count - Approx 200 words

The weekend seemed to fly by - we've had houseguests since Wednesday (first bubblebabble and then bitty) and we had social engagements on Saturday and Sunday. I did get to see four movies though....The Illusionist (top notch), The Prestige (quite good, and Christian Bale...yummm), The Assassination Bureau (who can resist Diana Rigg?) and finally Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End (entertaining if a little dumb at the end, much better than #2).

The good news though is that I've got an idea and the first 200 or so words of a new story. My initial thought is that if I can finish it in time, it will head off to an anthology with a deadline fast approaching. But if it turns out as well as it's started, I may actually aim a little higher for my submissions plan. We'll see if the idea and the momentum continue. It did feel good to write again, and I'm really coming to realize that my writing voice really really works best in first person. This is something I may work on, as I'm not so sure first person works for many readers as well as it works for me as a reader.

"Is there some trick to cooking heroin?"

God I love DC....

There's nothing like ending one day with a 2+ hour financial/estate/retirement planning session with a financial planner to discuss portfolios, tax strategies, net assets, etcetera and starting the next with an appointment with ones lawyer to sign wills, powers of attorney and medical directives to drive home ones adultness. Frankly, just using the phrase "our lawyer" in a personal sesnse was enough for it. Must strive to do something utterly childish today for karmic balance.

I'm ready, really I am, to jump back in the pool. It's a short window, but there's a GLBT genre anthology with a deadline of June 15th that I may try to target. Beyond that, a little percolating going on in my head. It's a good feeling.

But you know, I've been out of it for a while - what are the good sources for calls for submissions?

There's something to be said for working in an environment where casual LJ'ing isn't a crime against humanity.

First day back...score...Rob 2 (issues resolved), Work 0 (artificial crises waiting for me). I am...content.

There's a moment after Wiscon is over when it's time to shift back into "real world" mode. I've been thinking about this over the last 24 hours as I'm in the process of doing just that. I don't think it's entirely the people - though they're a factor - nor entirely the shift between con hours and normal work hours - though it's a factor - nor the dress code, the eating habits, nor any of that that is the single hardest factor in shifting. It's, if you'll excuse the use of a business writing cliche', a paradigm shift.

For me, Wiscon is about a state of being where every interaction is an invitation for dialogue, an opportunity for engaged analysis, a thought and verbal exercise in examination of situation and proposal of ideas that one is as likely as not putting together on the fly. For most of us, work is not usually like that. There are moments, for sure, when it is if you're lucky, but few work environments could maintain that kind of work space on a regular basis. I know mine doesn't and I find it the most enjoyable and stimulating workspace I've had to date.

That's the real shift.

Just to bring those who I haven't seen in the past year (which is a smaller number after this weekend)....here's the story of Rob's prior 12 months....

Love my job. Back in school. Turned 40. Lost 40 (pounds). Started Yoga and exercise. Virtually no writing except papers. Death of a dragon (B'tor). Addition of bunnies to household. Trip to Vegas (including winning a poker tournament). Summer off from classes now to re-start things like writing.

Now if and when these things get mentioned, you'll have a scorecard :-)

I managed to miss the last day of Wiscon. I had intended to head over around 11AM, see folks at the Sign Out, and maybe buy one more book (not that I needed it). This did not occur. When I opened my eyes to wake up, it was 2:15PM in the afternoon. Con over, everyone gone. Go figure. Thankfully I think I had managed to see everyone over the course of the weekend, so it wasn't a disaster - but it *was* a bummer. So I spent the afternoon goofing off in my hotel, had dinner and cider at the gay bar/pub across the street from my hotel, and played some poker. I think my bag will still meet weight requirements, as I have about ten books in a secondary bag. I decided I was going to mail order a couple of items for skill_grl rather than buy and carry them, this was probably a good decision given the packing situation.

So...here I am at Wiscon, and I think I'm just about at double digits of people who've commented none-too-subtly about my LiveJournal absence. I hadn't really thought about it in these terms, but I think I've come to understand that once you establish something - like LJ - as a tool of social connection, the absence of that connection will be noticed. Kind of a no brainer when you think about it, but really it never dawned on me. I think we all get so wrapped up in the day to day that we often forget that our friends, many of whom are at a physical distance, aren't seeing what's going on in our lives.

So...I'm back...can't promise I'll post daily, but I will post regularly. I'm also trying to butt kick myself back into writing my own work again (more on that later) and I may subject y'all to regular updates as a way of establishing external expectations that I will, actually, write.