avocado8

Bleah, and Random Blah Blah Blah

I don't think I even had time to mention that we were back from Denver (and that I sort of solved my strapless dress + sunburn problem) before I took off again for Seattle. I arrived home again tonight hot, nauseous, and not wanting to go on another trip again for awhile. (Hopefully the two roadtrips we have planned for later this month won't be as tiring as all the timezone-crossing plane travel I've been doing lately. Also, only one of them involves leaving the Beaner behind—with my parents, with whom I know he'll have a blast—so there are unlikely to be heart-wrenching phone calls at random times of the night.)

While I was in Denver I got news that my friend Jim of The Rittenhouse Review had died. I hadn't spoken to him as often after he moved out of our neighborhood, and he hadn't been updating his blogs regularly, so I was a bit out of touch—and the news came as a complete shock. I stood there with my mouth in a drooly "O", looking like someone had just punched me in the stomach, for several minutes after reading the e-mail from Susie M. I still can't quite believe it. Jim, I hope you're happy and healthy and whole again wherever you are now, and that someone's taking care of Mildred.

As I just got back from Seattle tonight and need to catch up on some of the work I missed over the past three days of preparing two presentations on CSS-related topics, getting incredibly anxious over having to actually deliver those presentations, and then not quite knowing what to do with myself after I gave them (the post-performance anxiety is only slightly less severe than the pre-performance anxiety, but luckily my friend Jeanne stepped in with drinks and dinner at three of her favorite places near my hotel, and we had a fabulous, hedonistic evening of eating, drinking, and gabbing), I probably won't get a chance to upload the few photos I took while in Seattle until tomorrow at the earliest. I did, however, get a chance to upload my favorite photos from the wedding we attended in Steamboat Springs last weekend in the one day I had between trips. The set is here: