Thanks to the wonderful Michael Swanwick we have our daughter home safe and sound, after an odyssey that included living in a freezing cold dorm for three days without power, hot water or proper food, waiting three hours for a bus to Philly, almost deciding to take a taxi here but then having two of the four people pull out, making it financially ( Read more... )

I sort of do. Ben is stuck in Hartford, CT until he can get a flight to Philadelphia tomorrow. We ended up booking him on a flight that's actually supposed to be going to Buffalo but that stops in Philly first--don't ask me why, but it's $69 cheaper than the alternative. Ben's idea, not ours--he wants to minimize the expense of getting him home. ( ( Read more... )

Wouldn't it be nice if Sandy were just a small garden snake with the Sight who liked hanging out with a British boy wizard and making pithy remarks only he can understand ( Read more... )

Okay, rain, enough is enough ( Read more... )

Our Boston adventure has been unnecessarily eventful so far. (Kicking back? What's that?) First the reservation for the B & B was fubared. I thought it might be my fault, but I looked back at the website that listed the B & B and allowed me to make a reservation, and it wasn't me. The website had me enter the dates were were checking in and out, ( Read more... )

Well, it really looks like Irene is determined to cut a swath on up the eastern seaboard. In fact, at first I thought I'd made the incredibly bright move of planning a mini-holiday to Boston when it was expecting to be hit by a hurricane and now it seems much more likely to affect Philadelphia ( Read more... )

You know, with weather like what we've had lately (torrential rain*, flooding, tornadoes, etc.) it becomes more and more difficult to convince certain people that the apocalypse probably isn't happening this weekend ( Read more... )

Yesterday and today went very well, all things considered. I was scrambling to get all of my work done because there's just so much I can get done in a given amount of time, and then, of course, I discovered for the third year in a row ("discovered" not really being the correct word here, as you will learn) that the Penn bookstore closes early (4 ( Read more... )

Well, I had the worst idea ever today. It didn't seem that cold (about 39F, but not much wind at first) and it was bright and sunny this afternoon, the first of my two days off this week, so I decided to ride my bike to the grocery store so I could put the groceries in my bike panniers and ride there and back in about half the time it would take me ( Read more... )

I love the fact that Yahoo put the email I received from MIn Subcrew with the subject line "dpizprbry dadd ckwwjjl aqvixsnzkmea rlufz mcapqj" in my Inbox while the email I sent MYSELF last night, backing up the files with my Infinitus presentations, was put in the spam folder ( Read more... )