home again
Apr. 9th, 2005 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaeclecticSo this is not necessarily going to be the post where I say anything substantive about CHI. In short: I saw lots of good presentations, my brain felt awake, it was good. And I do feel like, approaching the 5 year mark of being in the Bay Area and in this new field of endeavor, I finally have a work/social network worth mentioning. It's not quite where I'd like it to be, but I sure did run into a lot of people I knew there...
On to the vacation part: Thursday evening, Jen and Sacha and I skipped the closing plenary and went to Jen's ancestral homestead and got a tour of the winery and chatted with Jen's dad. Then came back to downtown Portland and had a very late dinner at an amazingly good nuevo South American restaurant.
The following day (yesterday), I woke up early and cranky and wondering why I hadn't gone straight home. Went for a long walk through the Pearl district and along the Willamette river, feeling sorry for myself, contemplating whether I will eventually come to hate travelling alone so much that I'll just give up and stay home. But eventually ended up in the "cultural district" and went to the art museum -- where the three special exhibits were: 1) photos by Diane Arbus, 2) native american art of the Columbia River region, and 3) someone's Pre-Rafaelite collection on loan from a museum in Ohio, all extremely good and wildly different from each other -- and bought a ticket to see a play which turned out to be exceedingly odd but strangely good and perhaps even apropos of my mood-swingy day.
And today I got up (still early-ish due to noisy hotel, but a bit better rested than I've been all week) and went to the zoo. I hadn't been to a zoo in way too long, and the Portland Zoo is a pretty good one. Excellent exercise for the smile muscles. They've done a particularly good job setting up habitat/displays for underwater/abovewater viewing e.g. penguins, otters, and a very impressively sinister crocodile.
And then found my way back & to the airport & came home to my kitties, yay!
And tried to turn on my computer, and got a nasty blue screen with an obscure error code and a suggestion that I try booting up in safe mode and removing any new hardware or software. And when I booted up in safe mode, got the same blue screen again. At which point I decided to try booting up in Linux instead of W2K and here I am, bereft of my usual LJ client software but at least I'm online. But I will have to deal with it eventually... *sigh* Ironically, the only software that I installed very recently was Ghost, so at least I know I do have a current backup!
Maybe I should just face up to the fact that this machine is hitting its built-in obsolescence... ah well. I shall think about that tomorrow.
On to the vacation part: Thursday evening, Jen and Sacha and I skipped the closing plenary and went to Jen's ancestral homestead and got a tour of the winery and chatted with Jen's dad. Then came back to downtown Portland and had a very late dinner at an amazingly good nuevo South American restaurant.
The following day (yesterday), I woke up early and cranky and wondering why I hadn't gone straight home. Went for a long walk through the Pearl district and along the Willamette river, feeling sorry for myself, contemplating whether I will eventually come to hate travelling alone so much that I'll just give up and stay home. But eventually ended up in the "cultural district" and went to the art museum -- where the three special exhibits were: 1) photos by Diane Arbus, 2) native american art of the Columbia River region, and 3) someone's Pre-Rafaelite collection on loan from a museum in Ohio, all extremely good and wildly different from each other -- and bought a ticket to see a play which turned out to be exceedingly odd but strangely good and perhaps even apropos of my mood-swingy day.
And today I got up (still early-ish due to noisy hotel, but a bit better rested than I've been all week) and went to the zoo. I hadn't been to a zoo in way too long, and the Portland Zoo is a pretty good one. Excellent exercise for the smile muscles. They've done a particularly good job setting up habitat/displays for underwater/abovewater viewing e.g. penguins, otters, and a very impressively sinister crocodile.
And then found my way back & to the airport & came home to my kitties, yay!
And tried to turn on my computer, and got a nasty blue screen with an obscure error code and a suggestion that I try booting up in safe mode and removing any new hardware or software. And when I booted up in safe mode, got the same blue screen again. At which point I decided to try booting up in Linux instead of W2K and here I am, bereft of my usual LJ client software but at least I'm online. But I will have to deal with it eventually... *sigh* Ironically, the only software that I installed very recently was Ghost, so at least I know I do have a current backup!
Maybe I should just face up to the fact that this machine is hitting its built-in obsolescence... ah well. I shall think about that tomorrow.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 06:08 pm (UTC)i'm sure kitties are glad to see you
must swing by at some point to grab soda and power cord...
glad your trip was enjoyable...
i myself definitely have a love hate with travelling alone
most of my best adventures are whn i'm off by myself...
but then it seems like whats the point of having best adventures if they're not witnissed... not shared...
otoh if i wait for otherers... well i don't have my best adventures
a tough conundrum.