I went through a bunch of old credit card statements today, because ISFiC wanted to know how much they owed me for the storage locker that has been being billed to my card. Suffice it to say that I can now pay my property taxes.

And my next installment of property taxes. The good news about having money sitting out there like this is that you're not tempted to spend it. I think of it as a payroll savings plan. And if I'd had the money invested over that period, it would be worth a lot less. :)

The hole that it leaves in ISFiC's books when it comes out, however, will be a sight to behold. Apparently, we managed to avoid paying me back for three years.

WindyCon is done for the year. I think things generally went well, but am a bit too tired to say anything else coherent at this point.

Maybe tomorrow. (But since I still haven't posted about Saturday and Sunday at OVFF... :) )

Having finished conferring and hobnobbing with my colleague in India, I am now going to join my wife in bed. *sigh*

Well, at least I'm officially on convention time now, because I am not getting up early tomorrow morning...

Because it is two days until WindyCon, I should have expected that the hard drive in my main home machine -- the one with all the interesting data on it, including the Girl Genius presentation that I spent two hours working on last night -- would pick this moment to fail. *sigh*

Fortunately, that hard drive is part of a mirrored pair, so I've recovered the presentation from the working drive and will shut this down in just a minute. Then it's off to Fry's to buy another drive to replace the dead one.

I didn't have the hour to spare, but I surely don't have the data to spare.

It's been more than a week since I came home from OVFF, so numerous details are starting to fade. In some cases, that may be good. :) But let's see what I do remember.
( Con report inside... )

I still owe pictures of the girls and an OVFF report. However, daisy_knotwise was out tonight visiting a friend who is recuperating from surgery, so those will be a bit more delayed.

On the other hand, I got a good bit of actual work done today. :)

daisy_knotwise and I continue to mull over going to GAFilk. The problem is that Gretchen doesn't get to see much of the evening activities if she's having to put Katie and Julie to bed. It would be possible to exchange names in that problem and have me put the girls to bed, but then I miss most of the evening activities, so either way, one or the other of us isn't where we'd like to be.

We were wondering if anyone knew of a responsible young person who would be interested in picking up some extra money by watching the girls in the late evening hours. They're pretty much night owls, so they aren't likely to go to bed before 10 PM in any case.

The existence of such a responsible young person wouldn't guarantee that I could lever Gretchen, Katie, and Julie into the van with me for a trip to Georgia this January, but it would help the odds. :)

We're home again after OVFF, finally having found the cold front just south of Merrillville. I suspect there will be a con report at some point, but right now, there's going to be pizza for dinner and a lot of sitting around being tired.

Of course, this plan has to accommodate the visit by the cleaning lady tomorrow morning...

The dead dog is looking deader, but not quite completely dead yet. I've said for a while that OVFF needed two dead dog filks and that's what happened this year.

And the con's going reasonably well. And I'm going to bed now. :)

The ClearCase check in is done. Our long national nightmare is over.

Thank you for observing all safety precautions. We now return me to our regularly scheduled OVFF. :)

Well, I had to hand merge four files, but I am now VPNed into my machine at home and busily checking in 1117 files. I figure this should finish sometime after noon tomorrow.

In the meantime, I can go to bed, get some sleep, and enjoy OVFF.

I've almost finished rearranging all of the files that I need to move around in our projects so that I can actually do the project that I set out to do. The compile is almost clean and I think all that I need to do is revert a file that inadvertently got the wrong contents in it and make a few changes to fix it up.

Then I can finish this when I get back from OVFF.

Update: It's 2 AM. Remote ClearCase is checking out the 1000+ files that I have hijacked. It's two percent complete. Maybe it'll finish by morning and I can start the check in.

Maybe.

I was up until 3:30 AM last night working on the project for work. Unfortunately, I'm still chunking through files that need one line changes due to my having moved header files between projects.

On the other hand, the fact that I was willing to be up until 3:30 AM working on the project has won me forgiveness for the fact that it's going to be late getting done.

And now daisy_knotwise and I have a few things to do before OVFF. :)

I'm off to the WindyCon meeting.

With luck, I won't need luck. :)

With a lot of help from shsilver, I think we've gotten all the room assignments straightened out for WindyCon. I've added my markup to his and I think we've detected all of the conflicts.

But we have a concom meeting tomorrow, so we'll finish hashing it out then.

We're home from ConClave. We had a good time, about which more later. Since we forgot to turn the heat on before we left, the house was at 55 degrees when we got home. Katie announced that she was cold, walked into her room, crawled under the covers, and went to bed.

Will wonders never cease? :)

Tomorrow, we leave for ConClave.

Tonight, we try to get ready to leave for ConClave. This can probably be done, with a little luck.

We all headed down to Dawn's place for the last SpaceTime Theater rehearsal before the ConClave show. Everything went pretty well -- now we just need to get the show to do the same! :)

Tonight, I'm trying to catch up on various WindyCon related matters. Things like stuff for the Program Book and website.

Wish me luck. I have little girls who want the laptop. :)

After almost exactly a twelve hour drive, we got home about an hour ago. Now we're cleaning up the collateral cat damage, as the door to Katie's room that I carefully closed before leaving wasn't closed when we got back.

Bad kitty.

And now Gretchen is giving the girls a bath while I dig through a lifetime supply of work-related e-mail.

We're awake, mostly dressed, mostly packed, and about to hit the road again.

With any luck at all, we'll be home late today.

Yay! (A sentiment that I'm sure Katie fervently agrees with.)

And we pulled into our motel in Joplin, Missouri around 1:00 AM after getting out of DFW around 6 PM after packing up the table. Katie decided to stop cooperating after about six pages of the inventory list, so daisy_knotwise had to take her and Julie out to the lobby to prevent Katie from randomly packing CDs into boxes. Despite that, we got packed out in good time, given the sheer amount of stuff we were moving.

My Sunday afternoon concert went well with over a dozen people in attendance. And they seemed to have a good time, as did I. :) After it was over, it was 3 PM and -- although the Dealers' Room officially closed at 4 PM -- we weren't the only people who were packing up early. We did make one sale at 3:58 PM, fortunately from the latter half of the alphabet.

We stopped at Braum's for dinner, which was quite successful, save for Katie's refusal to eat any of her dinner until the ice cream was procured. So first, Gretchen and I ate. Then I got the ice cream. Then, after eating some of her lime sherbet (and some of Mommy's German Chocolate ice cream), Katie finally ate some of her chicken strips. *sigh*

Katie naturally decided that she wanted her DVD player during a stretch when there was no good gas station to stop at. This produced a lot of complaining from both girls before I finally pulled off in Eufaula at the Love's where we'd stopped on the way down. And the Phineas and Ferb disk lasted from there to Joplin, so that worked out well.

And now it's time to get some sleep.

Well, we're not going yet, but it is on the list of things to do. My suitcase is packed and I'll run back to the room and get it just as soon as daisy_knotwise finishes rousting out the girls and packing the rest of the luggage. I've been having a good time at the con; Gretchen's had to spend most of her time wrangling children. We're working on what to do about this.

But tonight, we'll start home. And Katie will be much happier.

daisy_knotwise has spent most of the afternoon in the hotel room with a variable number of napping children. The count of children was constant at two, but the number napping seems to have been variable. The Dealers' Room is going to close in a few minutes, at which time I'll go rescue her and we can get some dinner.

I'm thinking that an afternoon in the room with the girls wasn't the most exciting way to spend it.

*sigh*

On the other hand, I was able to watch the Cubs/Cards game reports on ESPN GameCast. Cards won 2-1. :)