After finishing the Humbling Socks, I cast on a pair of red socks to take on the trip to Winnipeg.  For one reason after another, they were not as far along as I'd hoped when I started out that day (the 12th) and the trip was the usual mix of expected and unexpected, but I knit every time I could without annoying others or making my fingers too ( Read more... )

Yes, the trip report is late.  That's because I went to the eye doctor first thing this morning (no wifi) and then got my eyes dilated, and after that....the day was a blur.   Until now,  when the trip report will be truncated by tiredness (sorry ( Read more... )

It appears that Twittinesis has gone the way of the dodo--can't get a view of the website and it's not copying my tweets to LJ anymore.  Sigh.  Something that actually worked the way it was supposed to...now doesn't.

Anyway--I'm back from Balticon, where I had a great time, not only at the convention itself but on the train trip there and back.   ( Read more... )

Monday evening I got on the train to San Antonio (from Austin), got off that train and about 30 minutes later boarded the next, the Sunset Limited on its way from California to New Orleans.   Hit the sack and woke (briefly) when the train left at midnight.  A good trip to New Orleans, marred only by upset stomach from something eaten before the ( Read more... )

Today I drove down to San Marcos to talk with a class about The Speed of Dark.  Their professor had come to my Book People event and talked to me, then invited me a little later.  I hadn't been to that campus since I was in graduate school, when my studying-buddy and I drove there from San Antonio--we were looking at research projects.  (Note to ( Read more... )

The trip up was amazingly beautiful--from the train, esp. the lounge car with its big windows--we could see a world of snow-covered hills and pastures and creek woods...it looked very northern.  I'd never ridden a train through snow before.   A lot of us on the train were commenting to one another how glad we were not to be driving--especially when ( Read more... )

My first train trip and my first airplane trip both came about 60 years ago (same trip, actually...we flew the segment that no train covered.)   So there's a depth of experience going on here...and I liked riding on both trains and airplanes.   But right now, a comparision of train travel v. air travel makes train travel the clear winner in my ( Read more... )

Less than half an hour ago.  Hurray!

Tired now and will return to normal posting intervals tomorrow or the next day or when I wake up.  (Yes, I slept fine on the train, including an extra nap after breakfast this morning.  But still...)

Tuesday: Natural History Museum and dinner with a friend at Keen's, up in the room with clay pipes displayed on the ceiling.    The Museum was everything and more that I'd heard/read about it.  Dinosaurs and elephants, o my.  Poison frogs and loud frogs and flying frogs and nearly-invisible frogs.  The spider-silk fabric, the dioramas, the ( Read more... )

I left St. Louis on Monday morning, for Chicago, and had a lovely trip on the train up, though the train was a bit late arriving in St. Louis.  The reason was tracks washed out in San Antonio, Texas, where that train originates...severe storms, and it took Amtrak a few hours to find buses to haul the passengers by road up to Fort Worth, where they ( Read more... )