If all goes according to plan, this should post while I’m standing at the baggage area in DIA waiting for my bags to be offloaded from the plane, if not moving outward into the greater Denver area.

Which means that I can now add Colorado to the list of states I have been in briefly, not counting entire visits spent inside an airport. (If that were the case, I would add Kentucky, Georgia, and Massachusetts to this list.)

visited 16 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Tomorrow is Worldcon. Woohoo.

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

–T.S. Eliot, from Little Giddings

This one is going into the quotes file.

Anyway, consider this a thread for open musings. What’s on your mind, folks? Comment away, either here or on LJ.

I may have more to say tomorrow, despite the May death march.

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.

Before I get too carried away, there are probably spoilers below here. So be warned…

Yes, just like half the geeks on the planet, I’ve been infected by the game that some call Portal. I’ve been hearing people rave about this game for a year now. Several times I wandered into the store, picked up the Orange Box, sighed, and put it back on the shelf. I never really got into Half-Life, and while I like video games, I don’t have the twitch reflex to be really good at them, so games like Counterstrike have never really held much interest for me. (Where’s the fun in getting smooshed by folks who are much much better than me, I ask?)

Anyway, because of that, I couldn’t quite justify fifty bucks to myself just for Portal, as much fun as the game sounded. So I ran several cycles of sighing over the Orange Box before Tuesday.

On Tuesday, I walked into the local GameStop.

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.

One of my favorite bits in NCAA football is when the announcers break the fourth wall. “Depending on what team you’re rooting for, you’re either really excited or about to hit the reset button.” Even though these days, I’m the team that’s putting up points, the line never fails to make me giggle.

Speaking of NCAA football, it’s a nice salve after my team has had three straight losses, to enter a world in which Cal dominates college football and has won the national championship for ten years running. It’s a good place, even though the game has decided Stanford is a perennial top-15 team, too.

Places not to be in a lightning storm #56: Pumping gas. I’m standing there, and the lightning descends, and the part of me that isn’t exactly concerned for my safety thinks, “Oooh, pretty.” And then, KRA-KOOOOM, thunder splits the day, and I’m suddenly very conscious than I’m standing next to something that could theoretically explode…

That said, we had a wonderfully apocalyptic orange glow thing going on after that thunderstorm. I tried to take pictures, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them and see if they came out. I don’t think so, though. But it was absolutely stunningly *gorgeous* outside, between the fall colors on the trees (yes, my part of California actually has changing leaves — and if I knew where our rake was, I’d rake the lawn) and the orange glow…it was one of those moments where I wish I had brain to computer upload, so I could show you all how beautiful it was.

Got lots to do. Nano’s happening real soon. Like Wednesday night. (Okay, technically, it’ll be Thursday morning when I start writing, but the tradition in Sactown is to get a bunch of people together and start writing at midnight.) The meet and greet went wonderfully well, and I can only hope that the kickoff will be the same or better. That said, the Sactown region has really awesome Nanofolks, and it’s somewhat of an honor to be their ML. And of course, my partner in crime is *also* awesome.

Tomorrow’s a busy day, so I’m going to put this up. I have to scan a bunch of drawings in (but the pictures are worth it), I have to get my next copy of At Ungodly Hours pasted together so that it’ll be turned in on time, which means I have to actually do some writing, and I should probably attempt to get slightly ahead in my classes before November roars in with its demands. Okay, technically, I’ve got two days left in October, but Halloween is kinda a day where not much is going to be able to get done. (I have to drive Mom to a test in the morning, get ready for trick or treaters and the kickoff in the afternoon, give out candy, and then drive out to Dixon.) But yeah, I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, so I’ll go to bed now.

I’ll have it known that sometimes I *really* hate CSS.

Oh yeah, one more thing. User participation moment. If you actually come to retstak.org, you’ll see I keep a quote thing on my sidebar. I could use help in finding neat quotes to populate the thing. So if you’ve got anything cool, go ahead and quote it at me.

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.