Interim entry
I posted here a whole bunch toward the beginning of WorldCon, mostly about the Hugos, and then switched to Facebook for quick posts-on-the-go for the rest of my trip. My plan was to consolidate and expand those FB posts for writeups here, which I was going to write either on the plane home or over this long weekend. But I got sick, and haven't had the brain/energy to write real blog posts. And now the long weekend is over and I'm still sick, and I have a bunch of other stuff to do too.
So here's a high-level overview of the past couple weeks, and I'll try to fill in more details in subsequent posts but I may give up.
- Had an overall very good time at WorldCon.
- Tuesday the 19th, I took the train to Oxford. Spent about 24 hours there. Admired and took pictures of many lovely old buildings, went to three or four museums (depending on how you count), admired the view from the top of a church tower, enjoyed a raisin scone with clotted cream and jam. Bought postcards and tchotchkes, including the prize of the trip: an astrolabe.
- Wednesday the 20th, I took the train to Edinburgh. Spent about 48 hours there. Admired and took pictures of many lovely old structures (including the castle and three churches/cathedrals), went to a museum, admired the view from the top of the Scott Monument, saw four Fringe Festival shows. Bought postcards and tchotchkes, including several items with pretty Celtic-knotwork patterns.
- Friday the 22nd, I took the train back to London. Spent about 72 hours there. Admired old books in the British Library, saw Matilda, explored the British Museum. Bought postcards and tchotchkes.
- Monday the 25th, I took a plane home. Sometime around Sunday I had started coughing a bit; by the time I got home Monday evening, it was a serious cough.
- Gave a presentation at work on Wednesday, but otherwise have mostly been working from home to (a) avoid making anyone sick, and (b) allow for my having to lie down regularly. It's mostly just been a cough, but with intermittent periods of fever, stomach ache, headache, general body ache, and exhaustion. Canceled two or three things that I had offered to help friends with this weekend because I was mostly too wiped out to interact with anyone or to drive anywhere.
- Have watched a few movies since getting home: Inception, Lawrence of Arabia, and Jamie Marks Is Dead. (I had seen the first two before.)
- Am actively reading or re-reading about five different books: And Now the News, Babel-17, The Door into Sunset, The Dragon and the Stars, and Lyra's Oxford.
- Have done very little fiction-writing in the past three weeks.
- In spare time, have been learning good development practices for creating simple web apps, building on the core provided by php-mvc.
- Been playing Clairvoyance in brief bursts.
So there you have it—my exciting and glamorous past couple of weeks in a nutshell.
