Still here. Still going. Getting ready for HOPE XI and trying to get everything buttoned up and bolted down at work before flying to the other coast for same. That all hell appears to still be breaking loose all over the world isn't helping matters any; I'm certainly not sleeping all that well, consequently.
Rehearsal of my talk for HOPE started today. I really suck right now and need to get this one banged out before I present. At least I've finally stopped writing and rewriting the slides and settled on the text.
To preface what I'm about to write, I never thought that I would have missed so many details pertaining to what happened a few days ago. Shortly before the wedding, Lyssa gave me a piece of advice from her friend Michael: stop every few minutes to take a mental snapshot of what's going on around you, so that you'll have more to remember from your wedding. I didn't really do that until after the ceremony was over, and thus much of what happened was lost to the peculiar entropy that steals moments of our lives from us as we grow …
Time's getting down to the wire and there's no escaping it. The wedding is now two solid months away and Lyssa and I are scrambling to get our plans in motion. Last week the invitations came back from the printer, the directory of local hotels came back from Kinko's (I'll mirror them here to make it easier), and the custom printed stamps that my mother had made up for were put to use. Last week, parts of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent writing names and addresses, stuffing envelopes, and sticking things together. I spent a goodly amount of Friday …
This weekend just passed, Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I journeyed northward to the state of New Jersey to join friends and colleagues at Saloncon, a one day convention (sort of) that celebrates the finer things in life, such as dressing well for the sake of dressing well, refinement, politeness, and a chance to show off all the nifty things that we've been building in our basements all year. I say that the convention is 'sort of' one day because the festivities actually began on Friday night with the steampunk meet and greet at the hotel's sports bar and ended on Sunday …
Between getting back home from a field assignment late on Friday night, recovering from two weeks on the road eating way too much takeout, and stuff happening at home, I haven't had much time to do anything in the way of writing. I can honestly say that it hasn't been a boring couple of weeks, but there's a lot to be said for sitting at home engaging in a high impact workout (read, my glutius maximii striking the couch at -9.8 m/s^2 once a night for five nights) to unwind.