Baked goods, bads, and morally ambiguouses.

See that? That's the face of the earth. Here I am, down here, having fallen off it.

It's been a very busy month so far, and I'm only now starting to take a breath. I had three weekends in a row that were packed to the gills with Stuff, I've been trying to get the Awful First Draft of Provisionally Titled Gate Novel complete so I can stop disliking it, and the busy season has started at work. To top it off, I somehow came up in the rotation for my writers' group again, so I had to cobble together the vague short story idea I'd had into something readable. Still don't know whether I've succeeded in that.

( Weekend 1: San Francisco and Tahoe )

( Weekend 2: Wedding (not mine) on the Cape and lots of fire )

( Weekend 3: Viable Paradise reunion )

Next weekend looks blessedly unbooked, which is a very, very good thing, because the weekend after that, we're hosting a dinner party. The apartment's currently a pit, and I'll be doing some serious cleaning and moving-of-furniture (shut up, wavyarms) over the next few days. I also need to learn how to make a decent mole sauce. Rendering Templars down does not seem like the best option, plus they're hard to find these days. Maybe I can substitute Freemasons; I hear they're recruiting.

All right. Since the usual breakneck pace at work has dwindled to a lull (not unusual on Tuesday nights), I think I can start to put up a more comprehensive Viable Paradise report. I'll be doing a lot of necessary skimming, so forgive me for leaving out important bits. I'll catch those some other time around.

( Cut for brevity. )

So I'm back from Viable Paradise, and am only just now starting to recover. Wow.

I remember when I was in sixth grade (bear with me, this tangent is relevant) I went to what was essentially geek camp -- live in a dorm for two weeks and take classes on biology or creative writing or cryptography. As I was something of an isolated geek (always excepting sigerson's presence), discovering that there were other weird smart people my age was amazing. And when I came back each year from STAR or PULSAR or whatever, there would be this strange despondent feeling. A lot of it had to do with oncoming adolescence, but it was mostly about having found this community and now being deprived of it.

That's not quite how this feels. But it's a close enough match to explain this weird sadness and contentment blur I'm feeling now. I'm not by any scale despondent -- it's not like when I came home to a world in which no one (and sigerson still doesn't count) who understood what I was going through. I've got a lot of really cool friends who do, and who will appreciate the obscene bear jokes and other things I learned just as much as I did.

But it's like I found even more people who speak the same language, and now I can only be in touch with them via email. And it's really about a shared language, now that I think of it -- I'd say something meant as just something obscure and weird (e.g. "I carry the hose") and someone would know what I was talking about.

And now I'm torn. I want to blither on about VP over and over again, introduce the great people here to the great people there and tell stories till the sun sets. But I know that a lot of what I'm trying to convey will be lost, and it can be very tiresome to hear someone going on about Experience Foo when no one else has had Experience Foo. (This may be the result of hearing Dad go on about Central Asia at the slightest provocation...sibs, you know what I'm talking about.)

thomascantor has taken the brunt of this, and he's been preternaturally patient with both my pointless stories and my mood swings. Now I need to do something nice for him.