and it was way down in the fall

I've had a lot to blog about, but keep being too busy. So, I'm going to backdate my Texas travelogue so it appears in the post previous to this one, and just keep blogging as though nothing happened. Let's see; what have I been up to? Halloween was fun. Bowieween fell through since everyone else had other, lamer things they wanted to dress up as, but what I am thinking is that instead of relying on Halloween to make this happen, one should just throw a David Bowie costume party at some point. Further bulletins as events warrant. Pollworking was okay; kind of stressful, both because of the turnout and the fact that I was in charge, but it was still all right.
Also, it turns out that, like dang near everyone else I know, I'm going to be in New York at the end of the year (unrelated to the APA). So that's pretty neat.

The prairie sky is wide and high

So, here is the aforementioned "previous post." Unless you are reading these in chronological order, and are probably confused. Maybe you're using RSS or something. Anyways, Dallas! (I wrote down these notes as I went, and it was only over the course of compiling them that I realized they are all about food):


Sunday:

The conference starts tomorrow; my thing is at the end of the day on Tuesday, which is the best time, since it's right before the big dinner. I am pretty ready, though I still plan to obsess over it. I am actually staying at an interesting sort of hostel. For dinner I went to Pollo Campero, which I had never heard of, even though there are apparently a bunch in LA. It's a fried chicken place, but with sides like fried plantains and yuca fries. Also somehow I never realized that yuca and yucca are entirely different things.

James was okay.

(He showed me around Austin, which has lots of interesting places, and we ate and drank many foods and drinks (respectively) and played Supermelee and told terrible jokes.)

Monday:

The conference is feeding me at pretty regular intervals, which is nice, though the fare has not been very Texasy (unless putting prosciutto in everything is a Texan thing). Tomorrow's dinner is at this ranch, though.

Tuesday:

Oof so much food.

Seriously, I was starting to fill up on stuffed quail and chicken skewers, and several unbelievable baby back ribs when we discovered that those were just the hors d'oeuvre.

The paper went okay. It was sparsely attended, undoubtedly because they scheduled us opposite the session on determinism, on top of which half our panel cancelled. Even after the chair rounded up a few people, there were like 8 of us, which is pretty low for this group, but not bad, all things considered (most everyone I know has at some point given a paper with like two or fewer people in attendance). The discussion went well, and the chair and the other presenter and a lot of the attendees responded very favorably and had lots of great advice, so I think it worked out really well in certain respects.

There are rumors of chicken fried steak at breakfast tomorrow.

Wednesday:

This morning, my body realized that it had been running exclusively on coffee and meat for the last three days. I had a piece of chicken fried steak anyways. Also some hominy grits; if, like me, you were not entirely aware of the existence of these, you are not missing much. It was less like grits than like fine-grained hominy.

Passing through the checkpoint at Dallas/Fort Worth, I noticed the dude ahead of me taking his belt off, and I wondered if this was a new security thing. Like, new as of Friday I guess. Then the dude ahead of him set off the metal detector, and then took his belt off too. "Oh right," I realize. "Texas."