Difficult Music

I floated around all weekend inside a bubble of immense relief. On Friday, Diana and I did our presentation at the STC conference. I wasn't expecting much of a turnout, so I got a bit wobbly when around 30 people showed up. My nerves didn't get any calmer after Jerome, the man who instigated all this back in March, saw us rearranging our Powerpoint slides at the last minute and had a good chuckle. We plowed through our spiel, blinded our audience with rhetoric, and got a decent response at the end. Jerome shook my hand and told me I did a good job.

After the conference I dropped off our laptop at the college AV desk and met the belter for dinner at the Pennyfarthing. I hadn't eaten a decent meal in 48 hours. It was ridiculously good. I could have ordered the Family Pack (9 pieces!) and polished it off with no problem.

Next up was Bruno and Mai's party. We played foosball, looked at slides, drank, talked...I doubt even Tom Fun could have extracted more fun from the event than I did.

I spent all Saturday afternoon back at the conference. Despite the hangover, I managed to retain some info from the three sessions I attended. I chatted with some PF first-years, the omnipresent and sterling John Vigna, my boss Elizabeth, and a few others. The conference seemed to go really well. Especially fine was the tote bag full of random stuff that all registrants received. It was a tasteful black IKEA thing (code name "SET"), filled with bits of useless paper for the most part, though there was a copy of Coupland's City of Glass in there...a well-intentioned memento for all the out-of-towners there.