...and just about caught up on sleep enough now to write something semi-coherent.

The last couple of nights in Michigan were kind of a frenzy of making time to hang out with people I care about and hadn't seen enough of over break, meaning that I was getting about three hours of sleep every night.

On Thursday, I got up at 8 (blech) to get driven to the airport. Once on my plane, I read "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman (from the 2007 "Year's Best Fantasy and Horror"), then drifted in and out of sleep until I touched down in Florida.*

I had just about enough time to look open-mouthed at the palm trees and do the usual mental adjustment from winter to summer before getting whisked downtown to teach the first day of my Intro to Philosophy Class at Miami-Dade College downtown. Under the circumstances, I'm sure the lecture ended up having a severely stream-of-consciousness quality to it, but the students seemed entertained enough.

(Better yet, I visited the UM bookstore and they do have all four of the books I requested to assign for my UM Intro class, including the Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick titles.)

That night, since I was on the organizing committee for this weekend's Grad Epistemology Conference, I got to go out to get free food at a restaurant on 8th Street--that's the "Little Havana" neighborhood for non-Miamians--and the next night at "The Rusty Pelican," which is a seafood restaurant short on vegetarian options but with a breath-taking view of the water in Key Biscayne out the window. In between, of course, there's been the conference itself. Like last year, I didn't actually do much other than be the commentor on one of the papers--i.e. I had to talk about it for about three minutes and raise some objections to it--although before the conference, I did spend a lot of time reading through some of the submitted papers to recommend some for inclusion.

Speaking of Miami and Philosophy, btw, there's an article in today's NYT about Colin McGinn and the Book He Didn't Like.

Oh, and my housemate and I are hosting a beginning-of-semester party at our apartment tonight. Anyone who's in South Florida right now, who knows where I live and who has, for whatever reason, not yet been invited through other channels yet, should definitely come by.








* ...which is not a commentary on the quality of the story, which was excellent and has really been lingering in my imagination for the last couple of days.