Time for lemonade and Cracker Jacks

So, I'm old again, and having all the attendant feelings about that. Last weekend I had a nice dinner with the family, and on Sunday Phaedra took me and John and Katie to Disneyland to celebrate our mutual oldness (except Katie, who is not old).

I'll give my usual travel mini-observations later, but for now, suffice it to say that the conference went well. The paper seemed to be well-received, and I got to hear lots of interesting talks. Plus they fed us really well.
My biggest worry going in was that, instead of feeling like I was getting back into the scholarly life, I would just feel alienated and out of place, but that definitely didn't happen. In fact, it was a good crowd to be talking to, in that they were all basically doing some kind of cross-disciplinary work, and many of the younger ones in particular had recently chosen (or were still in the process of choosing) between several of the disciplines I am currently considering. And of course they were all very gracious and interesting, and I met plenty of exciting new people. The next (non-international) meeting is in San Francisco in May, so I'll probably try to go that that one too, just for fun. And now I'm off to polish up my draft; man, this is so much more pleasant when one's not doing it for a living.

creepy creepy crawly crawly

Late summer is one of the hardest things to get used to about San Diego. That's when the insects most often strike. Sometimes they come at other times of the year (please don't make me think about those enormous beetles we had earlier), but something definitely happens right around late July or August. The weird thing is that it's different insects each time; once it was these tiny little brown bugs, once it was silverfish (that was fun), and this year it's moths. Freaking moths. I can't explain it...I should talk to Andrew, find out if he's been enslaving the Israelites every year.

At this point I invite you to concoct your own segue, since I'm now going to talk about presidential debates. I have this thing I do, where I plan to watch the debates every election but always end up missing, like, all of them. This last one I missed the first part of, and was considering catching the rest of it, when I finally realized what was going on here. I don't like the debates. Seriously; it's not like I don't know whom I support by now (and if I didn't, I'd sooner look at their records than at their performance in such an artificial format). So if I were to watch it, I'd just stress and get frustrated and scrutinize every last detail in the hopes of anticipating which minutiae are going to shape the subsequent media discourse. Bleh.