zweekin re-vew

This has been a busy and distracted week for me. Wednesday and Thursday I went to Mobile for a conference about carbon dioxide sequestration underground. So a fair amount of Monday and Tuesday was spent making sure all of the logistics were taken care of. Got up early Wednesday to drive to Mobile. Got back from Mobile only slightly earlier than I usually get home from work. (And what was it that made "Mobile" sound so much like "Tokyo" that Dragon NaturallySpeaking picked that as its second choice interpretation of what I said?) Wednesday I tried to stay awake during speeches from about 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Because this was immediately preceded by a tremendous lunch featuring crawfish étouffé, this was no mean feat. That night I was still not at all hungry, even after a 1 1/3 mile-long walk to a local restaurant. The walk would have been a bit shorter, but a friend of mine who gave us directions began with "turn right" when he ought to have begun with "turn left." At least if he wanted us to get there. We went to the original location of Wintzell's Oyster House, a justifiably famous chain of Alabama seafood restaurants.I ordered one of the smallest items on the menu and couldn't even finish that. Thursday, after a larger than usual breakfast, more speeches, and then a trip to a coal-fired powerplant. You can't see much at a powerplant. This is even worse if you can't get up the stairs. Add to that the fact that the place was running, so I could hear almost nothing that we were told. Fortunately, we had already been told the exact same stuff in one of the speeches. It was interesting, and I saw some nice wildflowers. This was followed up with the best box lunch I've ever had and the long drive home.

This week I had the unfortunate realization that something very important had slipped my mind. I needed to get some samples made so that I could describe them in time to write a paper in time to give a talk at a meeting this summer. I am not entirely sure that logistics will work out for me to attend the meeting, but first things first. The samples should go out Monday afternoon.

Several things are going on with the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I think I have now done what I had to do for today. This involved finding some verbiage and writing some more, gathering some information and making a spreadsheet, and other things that usually don't sound very exciting in a blog even if completing them is pretty important. I do hope I have finished everything I had to do, because tonight we're having dinner guests. A group of friends that was originally intended to number about six and actually numbers about nine. It should be fun.

Great weather today. Temperature is in the high 60s (Fahrenheit) and it's the first day in a while I had time to go look at the flower garden. There is no vegetable action this early in the year, because we did not get snow peas planted when we should have. Possibly the very last daffodil flower is in full-blown. Snowdrops are almost gone. We have quite a few grape hyacinths, the Lady Banks rose, a star of Bethlehem as well as a lot of weeds that have flowers resembling miniature Star of Bethlehem flowers, white, pink, and red azaleas, buds (which of course actually has pink flowers when they are open as they are now), poppy buds, lots of green shoots, buds on the seven sisters rose, and other things I'm sure that I have forgotten.