To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

1. Poster sessions are literally science fair for grown-ups. There's a big hall with a bunch of posters up on boards, and their makers stand by them and talk about their project to everyone who comes by. This seems like a much more sensible way to run a conference than the humanities version, where people get up on stage and read a paper they have written at the audience.

2. Many of the scientists my office supports are fun to hang out with socially.

3. I no longer have the ability to walk or stand for more than 45 minutes without SIJ/lower back pain disabling enough to require a 10-minute sit-down, and if I want to do more than two of these 45-minute sessions, I require the assistance of vicodin.

One of these things is not like the others...

Despite that, I took some nice pictures of the National Zoo (not quite a mile from the conference hotel) and the hotel itself. It was by far the swankiest place I have ever stayed, or possibly ever set foot in.

Pictures, including several of pandas Doing Stuff.

This week I started the 3-5-year journey of allergy shots. After about three months of three times a week, I can go down to once a week for a few more months, then every other week, and finally once a month by about the one-year mark.

And the shots are definitely plural, as I get four at each visit, two in each arm. (Good thing I didn't test positive for mold allergies or some of the weeds. I think that would've taken it up to eight.) Thankfully, the needles are tiny and barely pinch, though that's very dependent on the shot technique of the nurse. *eyes bruise from Friday* It's also nice that the building is less than a block from my office, so it's easy to go over on my lunch break.

The biggest annoyance is sitting in the waiting room for thirty minutes after so that I can be near medical help in case of anaphylaxis. It's not unpleasant; it can just get noisy if lots of people are there.

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I go back to skating in a week. It's going to be my last lesson with C before she moves away. :( I guess at some point I need to approach the other coaches I have in mind and see if they're taking new students now.

A lot of the other adult skaters have started taking a drop-in beginning ballet class held by the Nashville Ballet. (There's lots of cross-fertilization between skating and ballet skills, which is the only reason I would consider it, as it's not really my favorite form of dance to do.) I'm tempted, but it gets out kind of late on Mondays, and depriving myself of sleep at the beginning of the week tends to end badly.

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Since I have to use up my banked leave, I'm thinking about a vacation to Charleston, SC, sometime in September. My parents may or may not be coming along. The boat tour to Capers Island looks absolutely fantastic, and there's of course a plantation house with gardens (pick any Southern city and there will be a bare minimum of three plantation houses with gardens within thirty miles), and the architecture is supposed to be very cool. We were originally going to do the Outer Banks in North Carolina, but that lost its luster when I realized how much driving you have to do between the different attractions, and how much of a pain it would be to see some of them, like the wild ponies around Corolla (you have to rent a 4x4).

I hope I don't pick a week when a hurricane hits that part of the coast. That's always a possibility in the spring and fall.

Returned from adventures in the Pacific Northwest! I have 680 photos on my camera card, lots of souvenirs, and my knees are still protesting at five days of wandering around a city, hiking up a mountain, and traipsing around in assorted woods and on assorted beaches, so I think it was a vacation well-spent. A full report will have to wait until I get my photos loaded onto my computer (and also for Ellen to send me the pictures she took of me in front of a windmill, getting attacked by a Dalek, and enacting a Star Trek redshirt's death, because I feel no photoblog of this trip would be complete without those), but for now, highlights:

- Traveling with rowdycamels! Getting to meet and hang out with rivendellrose!

- We won the weather lottery. It was sunny or partly cloudy for the entire time we were there, minus some car travel time and about half of the downward part of a mountain hike (though at that point, we were so glad it waited to start hailing/raining until we were out of the snowy part of said mountain that we didn't much care). I actually got a bit of a sunburn on my nose.

- Seattle and the surrounding areas have amazing food. That was the best I've ever eaten on vacation--or possibly at all--in my life. Every meal was incredible, whether it was seafood, Thai, vaguely-Mexican vegan, crumpets/pastry/fruit from the Pike Place Market, whatever. We got ourselves a cooler and did most lunches as picnics, and even those were great, although possibly some of that was because we were so hungry from hiking or long drives that many things would've tasted good.

- I got to walk through Cicely! It was awesome! And yes, I did indeed buy the t-shirt.

- I drove the entire length of Seattle in rush hour traffic and survived! I also drove in and around Pioneer Square and survived!

- Tuuuuuuuuulips. So many tulips.

- Evergreen trees everywhere.

- We did not die by falling off the side of a mountain. Although I think we came close more times than I would like to think about. There's one section of the trail up to Lake Twenty-Two that has already featured in my nightmares, and probably will continue to do so for some time. I don't think I took a picture, but imagine a very steep drop on one side, a tall, crumbly snowbank lining the other side all the way up the rest of the mountain, and a slippery, ice-crusted, nine-inch-wide "path" between the two. We should've turned back, but as was our constant refrain, "We've come this far!"

- Speaking of Lake Twenty-Two, there will definitely be pictures, but for now, the experience in a nutshell: "This isn't a trail, it's a creek/rock field/eight-foot-high snowbank!"

- While Deception Pass bridge and state park were very nice, Google found us an even better city park in Anacortes on a spit of land sticking out into the sea, where we watched the sun set over the San Juan Islands. (Admittedly, it was a very windy, very cold spit of land. Still.) Also, we got to wander among some very friendly deer.

More to come later. I don't know that I ever quite adjusted to Pacific time, largely because Seattle is so far north that it was still daylight until about 8:30, which was so bizarre for late April that I just gave up on ever figuring out what time it should be. But while I'm not sure it feels like midnight now, after the past several days, it definitely feels like BEDTIME.

Okay, so the thought of the HTML necessary to embed 117 clickable thumbnails of my Los Angeles photos in the text makes the baby Jesus cry, so here they all are in gallery form!

And below the cut is the narrative that goes with them.

( Friday: Beachy things )

( Saturday: Fruit, art, fire, and a movie [vague spoilers for Liberal Arts] )

( Sunday: Bones and stars )

( Monday: A brush with stardom! )

And then I came home, and promptly found that we've skipped the nice part of fall and gone straight to the need-a-jacket-and-real-shoes part. Damn. Perhaps I could go live on the beach?

I've been working on a list of all the places I want to visit before I die. Here's the list. You will soon see a theme, and I'll give you three guesses as to what it is. The first two don't count.

( The List )


Hmmm. Obviously I need to become fabulously wealthy in short order if I want to be able to do all that. Anyone got any surefire stock tips?

Answers to everyone's "top five" questions herein! Wow, you guys asked a lot of questions. Thanks! (You can still ask me my top five anything, and I'll ask you another top five question back.)

Um, these aren't in any sort of hierarchy. Each member of a top five got slotted in as I thought of it, not because it's number one or four or whatever. They're sort of top five groups rather than lists.

vallentine asked about my ( Top Five Places to Visit/Travel To )

serendipityxxi asked about my ( Top Five Characters and Why )

She also asked about my ( Top Five Pet Peeves )

sleepingcbw asked about my ( Top Five Poems in the English Language (excluding epics) )

wildtiger7 asked about the ( Top Five Books I Most Want to Read )

rowdycamels asked about the ( Top Five Things I Want to Do in the Next Five Years )

aervir asked about the ( Top Five Holidays I've Been On )

She also asked about my ( Top Five Items of Clothing )

weyoun21 asked about my ( Top Five Things to Do on a Rainy Day )

By the by, the Chamber Singers are performing in town tonight! I am definitely putting in an appearance, and will have a full report when I return. :)

Here's the second-to-last batch of June photos, these being from the Scotland/Northumbria trip. Go to the usual spot for Stirling, Loch Katrine, Edinburgh Revisited, and Alnwick Castle & Gardens. Those of you who've been waiting patiently for pictures of my Wild Hairy Haggis, check out the Edinburgh album.

I realized I never did any kind of write-up for this trip. I don't intend to do a full one now after a month has gone by, but here's a few things the pictures don't necessarily address:

- It was ridiculously cold for June. Like, highs in the low 50s. Disgusting.

- The steamer ship on Loch Katrine was actually a working steamer that I took a ride around the loch on. Talk about cold. 1.5 hours out on open water, and you're moving as well. Brrrrr. So pretty, though. Loch Katrine is located in the Trossachs National Park, which is sort of like the third point of an imaginary equilateral triangle connecting Edinburgh and Glasgow. It bills itself as a miniature version of the Highlands, and I'd say that's pretty correct. The mountains aren't as high as way up north, I'm sure, but they were spectacular enough for my purposes.

- Much love for Edinburgh tourist shops that took advantage of the 10:30 PM sunset to stay open well into the night, thus giving me something to do on both my nights in the city.

- The train ride down the eastern coast is even prettier in summer than in winter.

- Edinburgh Castle and Princes St. Gardens are also prettier in summer, although the desloation of winter does suit that gray mass of volcanic rock upon which the castle perches.

- The grounds at Alnwick look massive on the map, but are actually not as huge as they seem. They're packed with stuff, though, as the photos should attest. I'm so glad it was the height of rose season when I went there.

Same bat time, same bat place. These are various leftovers from Exeter and Topsham and the Dover pics. Chartwell, Leeds Castle, and Salisbury/Stonehenge should be up tomorrow.

Oof. So I stayed up until 4:30 last night reading Alias fanfic, and I paid for it by having action-packed spy dreams. Except I think all of the spying might actually have involved Jaye and Eric from Wonderfalls, or at any rate characters from a show that's not Alias. There was something about photographs hidden in a ceiling and evil grandparents and someone getting nearly run over by a bus, and there was a lot of running around and jumping off buildings and climbing into underground tunnels.

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( Kent trip )

So, yeah. That was Kent. I took lots of pictures, which I will upload at some point when I get off this Alias fanfic bender (courtesy of the fine folks at Aequabilis).

A few Hyde Park pictures are you know where. Baby swans! Eeeee! There was a guy who had a squirrel eating out of his hand, but I didn't catch it on the camera. Ah, well.