Hi, I'm back.

Overall, it was a good time, even if I did get deathly ill (well, it felt like it) on Tuesday and missed out on hiking and other fun stuff. I was pretty miserable all week, honestly, from this flu/ nasty cold my stupid coworker gave me. Gah. I tried really hard not to give it to people, but most folks were sniffling by the end. I feel so awful that I got people sick. I was also not at my best all week because of the cold, so I probably didn't make the best impression on folks. Still, I learned a lot from critiques (both giving, hearing other people's, and getting) and discovered a lot of very cool people I'd never met before, so it was definitely worth going, even while sick. Even the folks I knew before I went were even cooler than I'd suspected. Everyone was so sweet and kind and generous and I laughed so hard sometimes I ended up in coughing fits. Good people, every last one of them. It's not often you get that big a group together and genuinely like every single one, but it was true for this group. Very cool. I can only hope that everybody saw through the coughing and endless tissues and liked me too.

I'd give a more detailed description of things, but I was honestly too sick and am still really dizzy, achey and miserable. In fact, yesterday, once I was home, scritching my very happy-to-see-me cats, I realized that I'd been acting as if I was much better than I really was all week. I hurt. This is one hell of a nasty flu bug.