Category: Life
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Sailing Through the Desert
I wrote up my experiences at TusCon, but left out the things I saw along the way. And yes, there are things to see and contemplate on a 800 mile round trip through the desert. I only regret that I took no pictures, but navigating my cell phone to picture mode while driving 80 mph…
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TusCon 52 AAR
TusCon 52 After Action Report The ironically named TusCon (a trick on people who misspell Tucson) holds a warm place in my heart because TusCon 4 in 1976 was the first SF Con I attended outside my home town of San Diego. Since this is my blog, I’m going to indulge in about 10 paragraphs…
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Son of SilverCon III
SoS three was just as much fun as the first two. It was a small gathering of smart, well-read folks who loved to swap their experiences and their dearly-earned wisdom. Maxwell Drake was a very gracious guest of honor and gave us portions of his writing courses that he teaches at Starving Writer Studio in…
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Across the Great Divide
This essay will probably be disjointed because it’s about my third year taking the cross-country railroad trip from San Diego to LibertyCon in Chattanooga. It will be disjointed because I’m trying to hurry to finish my second book, hopefully before Son of SilverCon in Vegas in mid-July, so I have little time to make it…
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How Sharon and I “Met”
Sharon and I met in a creative writing class our senior year in college. She told me later that her academic adviser had looked at her askance when he signed off on her choice, but she had never given up on wanting to write, even if she made her living as a Chemist. She came…
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Fun with Error Messages
Kaeley Triller Harms of the Honest to Goodness blog wrote a short essay today about how computers (ok their programmers) can unintentionally miscommunicate. We’re all familiar with how active bluetooth and wifi can send messages to our phones and tablets that indicate a printer or new network device has been detected. Her family was driving…
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A Systems Engineer in the Hospital
I haven’t posted anything for a month or so, and there’s a reason for that as I explain below. Life is slowly getting back to normal…, well except for all that extra time it takes to watch the hit ’em where they ain’t Padres line drive their way to the World Series (fingers crossed). First,…
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The (Rail)Road Home
Last (I promise) installment about my June cross-continent trip. Next onto Vegas and InvisiCon (aka Son of Silvercon). Once I was in Atlanta, the trip home would be straightforward if not exactly straight geographically, and I was soon at the Amtrak station to head for the Big Easy and the Hostel Auberge where I had…
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The Hall of Fame
Before I get into my trip back to San Diego, I should talk about my brief stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame on my trip to Chattanooga. A quick uber got me from the Amtrak station in Utica to the car rental place where I rented a mid-size vehicle, adjusting my Michael Phelps like…
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Sweet Home, Chattanooga
Chattanooga seemed like a very nice town with a “bigger than a small town” but not a “too big for its britches” place, so I had arranged to arrive a day early to explore a little bit. I had nabbed a tourist magazine from the lobby of the Marriott last year and planned on checking…
Musings of a Restless Mind 