I’m Alive

Posted on December 7, 2015    Posted by      48 Comments

Got back from a weekend in Chicago with my wife. It was lovely.

And how are you?

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48 Comments on “I’m Alive”

  1. Spent the weekend in a luxury cabin in Leavenworth, WA (tourist Bavarian village in the East Cascades, lots of Christmas-themed activities) with my son’s girlfriend’s family. Very relaxing, with some snow (but not oppressive amounts).

  3. Did concerts this weekend at Benaroya in Seattle with my favorite group, The Washingtonians. It’s an honor to perform with people this good. ~siiiiigh~ And then home Sunday night to work most of the night and all today on a deadline chapter. Bleah.

    The concerts were a lot more fun. :)

  4. Chicago, Chicago. It’s a hell of a band. Day off spent with minor maintenance on my car in sunny SoCal. Caught up on podcasts. Entertained the dog. Glad you’re still alive.

  5. Just finished The End of All Things. The rest of my weekend sucked, but that part of it was great!

  6. I are fine. Thanks for asking! Presently involved in a Twitter discussion about the effects of placing Donald Tump’s head in the LHC Atlas detector and seeing what happens to his hair at 13TeV. There is scientific speculation that string theory may be involved in keeping his hair together, which would require a high energy beam to investigate. Not splitting hairs, but…

  8. I stayed in town, attending not one but two supper-style Christmas parties, one was for work. A former poor boy, I’m pleased I did not sweat over wearing fancy clothes…. I had a flashback to the Professor in Heinlein’s Moon (etc.) who did not recognize a brand of food. In my case, I forgot that roast beef can sometimes be red like ham.

  9. This weekend I took a much needed break from job hunting, tax affairs and the generally miserable and mundane tasks that go hand in hand with backpacking and regularly moving countries. I used my weekend to explore my latest new home a little, what a beautiful place Auckland can be when the sun shines!

  11. And you didn’t come collect on my standing offer to hook you up with authentic Polish Food

    My weekend was spent trying to ignore the racist friends and relatives on Facebook

  12. Went to see Mythbusters live in Wichita. Good fun, especially since we got to watch it through the eyes of our ecstatic child. There is, to our surprise, a tourable salt mine and a little gem of a space museum an hour northwest.

  13. Slept, slept some more and finally slept again. working long week day hours make weekends difficult to do more than that. DId get a short hike in as the weather was fabulous in New England.

  15. My husband and I went estate sale shopping and bought a gorgeous antique secretary.
    We used to live near Chicago. Best pizza in the world there.

  16. Took a singing lesson, got a massage, helped my sister train her dogs. There was some laundry in there too.

  18. Spent it at home, quietly, which is delightful in a different way. The Noisy Neighbors were away, so that added to the quiet.

    Slept, ate, fed cats, played video games, watched TV, read.

    Not exciting, but pleasant. I can’t complain.

  19. I’ve done something silly to my lower back over the weekend – it started twinging on Sunday afternoon, progressed to outright bitching yesterday, and it’s now complaining non-flippin’-stop. I suspect at least part of the problem is simply good old “humans are built silly” (our backs originally adapted for horizontal usage, and while they’re part of the way to being fully adapted for vertical storage, they aren’t all the way there yet. Hence humans get back problems), with the rest being that I’m spending a lot more time standing lately than I usually do, due to doing the Christmas baking.

    (My Chrimble gifts for the family this year are biscuits of varying types, due to Financial Circumstances. While it winds up cheaper, it does mean I have to actually do the work, which mostly needs to be done standing up).

    So today I’m going to try my luck with Deep Heat, and see whether that gets the muscles to stop carrying on for long enough for me to get the housework and baking done. I’m also going to be putting a bit of yoga into my routine (Salute to the Sun, to get the muscles moving again) and setting aside a bit of time to lie flat on the floor and let everything fall back into place, to try and fix things up a bit long term.

  20. Mythbusters was in Wichita? Dangit, I would have made the trip if I’d known.

    And yeah, the Cosmosphere is a *very* nice space museum; it actually impressed me as better-done than the NASA visitor’s center in Houston, though the Houston visit was almost a decade ago and they may have improved since. Not quite as many exhibits, but in better shape and the presentation was better.

  21. Hey, I was in Chicago too! Since I live there. The One of A Kind Show was on at the Merchandise Mart, so I spent a day there, went to a fab Christmas party, and did the first round of holiday baking. Then I ate some of the results and took a long nap. Weekends are the best.

  22. Good weekend. Went to a local SCA event on Saturday, got to talk to friends I haven’t seen in a while. I spent Sunday morning helping folks find their numbers for the Hot Chocolate Run for Safe Passage. It’s a fun morning, and walkers, runners and volunteers get mugs of hot chocolate at the end of their run or shift.

    Right now, I’m a little frantic because I’m doing a craft fair in the morning & forgot to get fives & ones for change today. (Not everybody uses cards for this stuff & wifi can be iffy.) I think I have a solution, but we’ll see how it goes.

  23. Well, the doctors failed me again so I am not doing as well as I could be. But I just made arrangements for a sleeper car trip to Chicago over New Years week. CHecking out the activities to see how we’ll while away the days.

  24. Glad that you and Krissy had a great weekend together! Partnerships need recharging from time to time, and that’s a good way to accomplish it.

    I am well, thanks for asking, after a weekend that was a bit more laid-back and relaxed than the previous several were. I got the holiday cards/letters mostly ready to go in the mail, and had a fine old time crafting a single document that will simultaneously delight all my left-leaning liberal friends and relations while causing RWNJ heads to explode when they behold it. Heh-heh.

  25. Travis, Mythbusters is on tour until December 19, in California, Washington, Oregon and BC, should you need a last-minute Christmas present for yourself, assuming they haven’t sold out.

  26. @nananoyz: Most secretaries I know would prefer not to be referred to as antique, regardless of their age. ;)

  28. Spent all weekend in a huge house off of Hoods Canal planning the most awesome bluegrass festival evar.

    (Wintergrass, if you’re curious)

    Played some music, ate too much, and completely overcommitted myself, again. It was great.

  30. I spent most of my weekend collecting bits of plants and then examining them under the microscope, purely out of interest I should add.

  32. My sleep is wonky and I feel unproductive, but then I remind myself that on Sunday I wrote the whole morning and actually completed a project that, honestly, I was not certain I’d be able to finish. Something kind of unprecedented in scope and format for me, too. So I’m treating this as a good precedent/sign for the future.

  33. I’m well, thanks for asking. I’m sitting on the couch waiting for the next band of thunder storms to pass. My plan was to practice after dinner, but electric guitar might not be the best choice of instrument when the sky gets all zappy…

    Mind you, I’m kind of enjoying this storm. Usually at this time of year here in rural Australia even the possibility of lightning has me throwing the go-bags in the car and watching the skies for smoke and embers. But we’ve had heavy rains off and on all day so I can relax and enjoy the light show like I did back when I lived in a less flammable part of the world.

    As an added bonus, the sound of the rain gurgling it’s way into our 22,000 litre fresh water tank is cheerful and thoroughly satisfying in a way that my temperate rainforest metropolis dwelling youthful self wouldn’t have understood.

  40. The grand-niece (who must be a time traveler, since I swear I don’t have that many years on me) wants to be a mermaid, so I spent the weekend fashioning a mermaid-tail-blanket with sticks and fancy string.

  41. Spent most of my weekend cuddling with my (six) kitties. I’m on my way, now, to Chicago for the rest of the work-week. Trying to avoid the news while I travel, necause they’re not considerate enough to provide Trump trigger warnings. Every time he talks, he increases the liklihood of me experiencing PTSD (if I’m not already there.)

  42. Since you ask, Mr. Scalzi, and cute animals are allowed, I’ve been awake since the two dogs suggested breakfast at before 5 a.m., and then Pip (who knows the map and can dog my heels) and I chased 1-year-old Pluto’s uphill escape while I fetched the LA Times from the driveway, and I had to hobble on damaged knee steep uphill for about a half mile, before I could scoop up little Pluto and carry him in my arms while Pip followed, vaguely aware of some cars.
    .
    I wrote a sonnet about schoolchildren in Active Shooter Drills, and a chapter of Rack Breacher and Schlomo Asch, where they figure out why a scroll in the Ark of he Covenant could be a big capacitor.
    .
    The month has ended for me academically (my wife gave one Physics Final yesterday, and to another class tomorrow) with my
    * Fifth International Conference on Infectious Disease Dynamics 2015 .  Poster and paper using science fiction and police procedural to combat Ebola’s outbreak, not in Monrovia, Africa, but in Monrovia, Southern California.
    .
    * FOUR COMPETING THREADS IN THE DISCOURSE ON MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS PEDAGOGY {by Jonathan Vos Post and Dr. Christine Carmichael}
    ICERI2015 , the 8th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation will be held in Seville (Spain), on the 16th, 17th and 18th of November, 2015

  43. I also had a great weekend in Chicago (and environs) with my spouse. Sunday night was the highlight. Glad you and Krissy enjoyed yourselves. Lovely picture of her on the top of this page, by the way.

  45. I spent Saturday in Chicago touring also. We went to see the Christmas Market, and got some of that stuffed pizza. Its not too bad of a day trip from Wisconsin.

  46. Just an FYI I thought would amuse you: I was at the Cincinnati Joseph Beth yesterday (Dec.7) and Karl Rove was there promoting his book on McKinley. He had slightly more than half of the audience you typically have there, and he was done signing books before the store closed at 9, despite finishing his talk around 8:30.
    .

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