And All the Rest of it

I spent some of the afternoon finishing reading Ken MacLeod's novel The Cassini Division, which I liked a lot and would highly recommend to fans of harder SF (especially if you enjoy Vernor Vinge). For a 240-page novel, it packs a lot of ideas and a lot of plot, and still has room left for some characterization. (I should note that it appears you should read his novels The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal first, although the former is not yet available in the US. They were written before this one. I have not yet read either of them, however.)

In the evening I went over to the house of a couple of the SF3 folks. Once they got their kids in bed, a group of us spend the evening playing The Great Dalmuti. Bill won every single game we played until he headed off to pick up his SO at the airport. After that, I ended up doing better, being the Dalmuti fairly frequently. It was a fun time playing a fairly mindless game. We were up until 2 am playing it.

The next day Pat picked me up and we drove over to a sort of wedding party for a couple of fannish friends of ours. (It turns out they'd gotten married a few months ago but didn't have a wedding as such, so some friends of their threw them a party. Or that was my understanding, anyway.) We had a bit of a mishap on the way over there, ending up in the wrong part of town, though we did pass by a park on Monona in which a large tree had fallen on a gazebo and smashed it flat. Zoiks!

The party was laid-back and fun, held on a house on lakefront property. The lake was quite high, and apparently all the rain had resulted in a small fishkill, as various small fish were washed up on the shore. (I'm not sure how rain can kill fish. Can fish drown?) There were various folks I knew there, and I got to talk with some folks I hadn't had a chance to see much of at WisCon. A fine time all around.

Afterwards, Pat and I went down to Memorial Union Terrace to walk around for a bit, and then we went to dinner. We went to what I guess was an Indonesian restaurant which was pretty tasty. Talked about a variety of things and had a good time.

Sunday I did pretty much nothing. Charlie and Dan spent the day either doing housework, or else playing video games or some such (Charlie's enamored of a Mac kid's game out called Bugdom). I worked on reading Kage Baker's novel In the Garden of Iden, which I would finish on the plane the next day. I thought it was entertaining, though I was not nearly enamored of it as Ceej (though that says more about how much she liked it than anything else).

Finally, Monday I flew back on a noon flight. The flight was uneventful, including a transfer in Denver. Flying sure goes quickly now that I immerse myself in reading!

In San Jose, Tom picked me up as we'd arranged a couple of days before, but Trish was also there, having apparently been unsure whether she was supposed to pick me up. Nice of her, really! But I sent her on her way because I'd parked my car at Apple for my vacation and Tom could just take me there and go back to work himself.

I did a modicum of work in arranging my new office into which I'd been moved over my vacation, but basically I just came home, saw the cats, and settled back into my apartment.

All-in-all? A good vacation. I would have been happy with less rain, since I could have rented a bike and seen a bit more of the city. But I ate at the key restaurants I wanted to go to, saw most of my friends (I did miss a couple, largely due to having to reshuffle plans with Pat on account of the rain), and spent a lot of time just doing what I wanted at my own pace. That's what a vacation is all about, right?