Ithaca

The conference I went to was nice, and I think useful. Since this is not a work journal, I won’t go into the actual content of the conference, but it was well run and the accommodations were nice. Meals were included during the conference; we ate in a dining hall, and the food was pretty good. The milk dispensers had labels saying that the milk was produced and processed on campus. :-) I stayed in a dorm room for cheap. (This has to be just about the best deal on a conference my employer ever gets, barring the conferences that are completely underwritten by vendors.) The room was fine, but bathrooms were in the hall, and it was peculiar to have to put clothes on to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

I took a couple of DVDs with me in case I wanted to watch something in the evenings, and I ended up watching Cube, a low-budget Canadian sf/horror film which I really enjoyed. I liked it so much I ordered a copy. I’m looking forward to the sequels.

(I had borrowed Cube through GreenCine, a small Netflix-like service based out of San Francisco. cathijosephine’s experience with Netflix inspired me to join a fixed-fee video rental service, and I figured if I joined a different one, she could show me stuff GreenCine didn’t have, and I could show her stuff Netflix didn’t have.)

I got to meet Dave Farley, who is the author of Dr. Fun, the first regular comic written for the Internet, and a friend of my co-worker Colin. Alas, I didn’t get a copy of his book.

By far the highlight of the Ithaca trip was a hike along the Taughannock Gorge to see Taughannock Falls after a picnic Saturday night. As you might imagine, I got lots of photos. Some will hopefully be up on the web soon.

The drive back to Boston was as pleasant as the drive out to Ithaca, and quicker, because I took a wrong turn and therefore didn’t come back the way Yahoo! Maps told me to.

More soon...

California with cathijosephine

My trip to California with cathijosephine was lots of fun for me, and I think it was useful for her, although she didn’t get everything out of it that she had hoped. (She did see her doctor, but he was understandably reluctant to do very much, since she’s here and he’s there.) I enjoyed meeting her family, and they seemed to be on very good behaviour with me around (as a “human shield”). I enjoyed their company, and they took me to see the gorgeous, gorgeous mountains of the western edge of the Mojave Desert. (Her family lives in a very rural inland part of Los Angeles County.) Wow, that is beautiful country! I got to see lots of Joshua trees and a pine forest. And cathijosephine and her family fed me very, very well, in ways that I don’t feel I can speak to my cardiologist about.

I hadn’t realized quite how rural the setting she grew up in was. I knew her family had pigs and chickens growing up, but lots of people in Kona keep chickens, and a few keep larger animals, while still living on a city street near other houses. There are a couple houses on her parents’ lot, and some trailers and sheds, and other than that it’s mostly desert and fields out to the horizon, with mountains just beyond it. Really gorgeous. (Yes, I know I overuse that word.)

Anyway, while cathijosephine thinks I was doing her a favour by letting her fly me to California, I had a fine time and I was really, really glad I was able to go with her.

On the plane, we got to read a lot (Terry Pratchett for her and Patrick O’Brian for me) and watch some Eddie Izzard, and cathijosephine gave me a refresher crocheting lesson (of which I’ll probably need a few more before I get it down).

And it was really nice to see harlequinaide; he picked us up at the airport and we had lunch with him before he handed us off to cathijosephine’s mom, and it was good to hear his stories. Many thanks to him! It was a good way to start the trip.