Apologies for the long silence. I have been working my butt off. It's the usual end-of-project craziness, except that since this is by far the biggest documentation project I've ever worked on, there are more and different kinds of crazinesses than I've ever experienced before. With any luck, it will all be over and done in a week and a half, and we should all get a bit of a breather when everything is done.

I'm also getting a bit of a breather now. I turned over my manuals to be edited on Friday afternoon, and my coworkers chased me out of the office. ("Why are you still here?" they said. "Go home. Get some rest." My coworkers look out for me.) I was meeting Daniel and an out-of-town friend for dinner in Palo Alto, so I went over to University Avenue, and wandered around window-shopping for an hour or two, and then I had some coffee and wrote a little fiction. (What a concept!)

Then I got a call from Daniel, saying that his car had died somewhere in Sunnyvale. So, I let the restaurant know that we'd be about half an hour late, and zipped down to Sunnyvale, picked him up, and zipped back to Palo Alto.

So, I think we'll be buying a new car soon. (Well, new to us. Daniel's planning on getting a used Honda or something else similarly trouble-free.) This is not that big a deal, since Daniel's car is a 22-old Volvo station wagon, and we didn't expect it to pass its next smog check, and so we were planning on replacing it soon anyway.

But, at any rate, we had a nice dinner with a good friend.

Yesterday, we dropped in at BayCon, the local science fiction convention. We decided to just do a one-day thing, since I'm really feeling too tired to do the full convention experience. It was fun. I went to a particularly good presentation on the Cassini-Huygens Saturn mission. I can't give a particularly cogent summary, but let's just say that there are some really wild things out there on Saturn's moons - stuff that we just don't know how to explain, and that's really cool. (Also cool - the NASA/JPL scientist who gave the presentation is also an avid costumer, and gave the entire presentation while decked out in this amazing midriff-baring silver lame confection of a dress. Smart and sexy. Mmmm.)

We had dinner with some friends at a near-deserted Indian restaurant near the Doubletree hotel, where the food was decent, prices were reasonable, and the service was amazingly slow. This latter defect at least provided time for ample conversation, which spanned the topics of history, space exploration, politics, and, of course, the exchange of book recommendations. I really need ot catch up on my reading.

After dinner, we tried to go to the masquerade, but the masquerade hall was full. So we sat in the foyer outside and watched the participants come out to get photographed. The costuming at BayCon was really good this year - there were some amazing costumes. The most impressive was the guy who wore a bikini bottom thing covered in some kind of electroluminescent ribbon which lit up in shifting multi-colored patterns. (Another bystander said admiringly, "Those are the gayest pants ever.") The two people who dressed up as Lego versions of Darth Maul and Qi Gon have got to get some kind of award for best in-joke costume, as well as amazing costume construction. I hope somebody puts photos up on the web so I can link them. Some of these costumes were really unbelievable.

Also cool was the goup dressed up as various characters from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just because they really got the look of the costumes right, and it was neat to see them all as a group.

Today, I have spent mostly lazing around, doing nothing in particular. Which is really great. Time to get back to it, I think.