Category: Travel
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 4
Once the main event was over, we spent another couple of days on vacation in Charleston before the long drive back up the East Coast to Mole Hill. There's a lot to see and do in the Low Country, and we could easily have spent another week. The day after the eclipse we spent at…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 3
Finally, the whole reason for our trip to Charleston arrived: the great eclipse of 2017! And it was . . . cloudy that morning. The forecast called for overcast skies and a chance of thunderstorms. Uh-oh. We had picked our rental cottage precisely because it was in the path of totality, so we didn't have…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 2
Charleston is a fascinating city to visit, but in August its most insistently noticeable feature is the heat. I have ancestors who lived in Charleston before relocating to New Orleans, and now I understand they were looking for a place that wasn't quite so hot and muggy. The high temperatures really weren't all that hot:…
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What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 1
Until last week I had only ever seen one eclipse before: the annular eclipse of June 1984, which had a path of totality which passed just north of New Orleans, my hometown. That one was pretty neat, so a few years ago when my wife and I learned about the coast-to-coast 2017 eclipse, we started…
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Convention Report: Albacon 2017
(". . . Featuring ME!") I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of…
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The Ultimate Game World
For more than a year now I've been running a Pathfinder roleplaying game campaign at my local game shop. The players seem to enjoy it, and so do I. Though I use the Pathfinder rules pretty much as published, one thing I do not use is the "official" Paizo Publishing game world, Golarion. I don't…
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PhilCon 2016, Featuring ME!
This weekend I'll be attending the venerable PhilCon science fiction convention, at the Crowne Plaza hotel in scenic Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Here's my schedule of events: Friday, November 18, 8:00 p.m., Plaza III: Utopias That Make Us Cringe — I'll be moderating a panel on utopian societies in science fiction that don't actually seem very…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 4!
Sunday was a light day for me, and for everyone else as the con wound down. Lots of people standing in hotel lobbies having conversations while holding suitcases. My only event on the 21st was a panel on "How To Start A Writing Group" which went extremely well. I was the moderator, and my panelists…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 3!
Saturday was a light-schedule day for me. I had a swim and a reasonably-priced breakfast at the Silver Spoon Diner across the street from my hotel, then went to the convention center to do a reading. I read two stories, "Parsifal (Prix Fixe)" which ran originally in F&SF, and "A Right Jolly Old . .…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 2!
I got up early and had a swim in the hotel pool and a substantial breakfast (the breakfast menu at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown is an exact duplicate of the breakfast menu at the Boston Westin Waterfront hotel, which implies they both buy from the same food-supply company). Then off to the convention center…
The Cambias Digression 