delta_november

04:49 pm

A year ago I wrote about the final Spirit of the West show in Toronto.  At long last, the official video from that show is online here.

07:43 pm

I am reading Ada Palmer's new book, Too Like The Lightning.  About 100 pages in, it is a science fiction novel that appears to ask the questions:

• What is a nation?


• What is a family?


• What is a gender?


• What is a church?

07:16 pm

I'm packing tonight for a business trip, and have had a little epiphany.  The past couple of trips I have "forgotten" to bring business cards.  Now I get to admit that I just choose not to use them.  "Making it" takes various different forms, but one of them is getting to the point where everybody knows who you are.  There's probably a little passive agressive note in taking someone else's card so you'll remember their name, and doing nothing in return.  It's possible that I'm a bad person.

I have also stopped wearing name badges at conferences.  I feel a little sorry for the student volunteer at the last one who very correctly tried to bar me from the session room.

04:17 pm - Being of sound mind...

One of my chores for the coming week is to update my will, which is a shocking decade out of date.  There are new people who have come into my life, through birth or otherwise. I will add them with joy.  There are also friendships that have fizzled into acquaintances, which I must remove with sadness.  I think it's for the best -- if I died today what had been once intended as a sincere gift might come across as a passive-agressive "See, in the end I loved you more."

07:37 pm

A happy anniversary.  Following up on my post from 6 months ago, J is now one year clear of her last hospital stay.  Still no symptoms, and her pill load now does fit into a little plastic weekly organizer.  We're never going to formally know that she's cured, but this is as good a point to declare it as any.

05:18 pm

09:15 pm

It's been a month since I got back from Utah. Three weeks from now I make my next trip to the USA, to Washington to see a performance of A Softer World with KS. Then, the next week, it's off to the UK with J.

My immediate upcoming adventure is one of altitude.  Some time this week I need to take my plane to my mechanic in Waterloo for an oil change.  I'll fill up my oxygen tank there as well.  This leaves me with half a tank of oxygen that I may as well use in the next few days.  I'm going to take a shot at the fabled class A airspace, which begins at 18,000' above sea level.  I'm going to file an IFR flight plan for FL190, and see whether I can get there.

I have finally been able to do some relaxing with a good book.  Right now I'm half way through Zero History by William Gibson.  Gibson was hugely influential to me in the early 90s through the Sprawl novels.  Somewhere along the line I lost track of his realtime output, which means that I now have a delightful back catalog to catch up on.  I'm finding the characters of Milgrim and Case to be intriguingly similar, from books written 26 years apart.  Both are former drug addicts, forcibly detoxed and recruited by shadowy powers.

01:35 pm

And so, moving forward: in two weeks probabilistic and I will load up my Mooney (now outfitted with crew oxygen) and attempt an IFR flight to Utah.  There I get to spend a week with KS (and about a thousand other people, if we choose to acknowledge their existence).  In September J and I are off to a Steampunk convention in Niagara.  Then in October we head to the UK for a week -- targets include the set of Coronation Street in Manchester.

08:10 pm

J and I went to the Spirit of the West show at Massey Hall last night.  It was an excellent gig -- everything we have come to expect from these folks.
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07:12 pm - New Wheels

I have some new wheels...

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