Tahoe Baby!

We finally arrived arrived at Lake Tahoe yesterday, after taking a detour through Sacramento and Grass Valley on our way up here. Interesting times, culminating in the Emprie Gold Mine self-guided tour. We're now staying at a place called Chinquapin, but only can afford it because of pooling of money between family.

Plans while we're up here include:

• Relaxing
  
• Eating
  
• Sleeping
  
• Golfing
  
• Bowling
  
• Disc-golfing
  
• Relaxing
  
• Spending time with family, including my two nephews

I have two nonoriddles ready but spotty Internet has meant scant time to upload them.

The Smoking GNU has an test event at 8:30am Saturday morning. I'm getting home Friday night. I wonder how much of a contribution I'll end up making.

Geography Lessons and Delayed Puzzles

This morning on Alice, I heard Hooman talking about the Sebastopol Film Festival: "You know where Sebastopol is, right? It's near Napa." I was thinking, really, that's the closest major city? Sebastopol is nearly as far from Napa as it is from San Francisco. Meanwhile, Santa Rosa, the Sonoma County seat is just a scant five miles away and has a population over twice that of Napa. *hmph*

Anyway, since I spent yesterday observing Yom Kippur (no, I'm not Jewish, just... different), no puzzle came out, obviously. I hope to have one out later today. And since I'll be on a kind of vacation all next week, new nonoriddles may be spotty. My apologies in advance for that. I hope to get back to regular schedule by October 23rd at the latest.

Busy Month Coming

It seems like life is going to be going into crazy mode for the next month. And by "month", I mean the next thirty-some-odd days. Next week, we're heading up to Tahoe to spend time with family, which we're all looking forward to immensely. That trip is going to get cut short by a day or two, though, in order for The Smoking GNU to help test in some eerie event, whose test date was changed due to the timing of Fleet Week. But that's okay, because at least the event no longer conflicts with Volkslauf.

Shortly after that is BANG 19: UDC, which I'm greatly looking forward to, but am still trying to figure out why it hasn't filled up yet, when Seattle's version has.

A few days later, I have to decide whether to be an anti-intellectual or unpatriotic, depending on which candidate I want for the biggest charad... er, office in the country. California's electoral votes seem pretty much locked, so I'm not sure what good my vote for that post will do either way.

Shortly after that is some eerie event that we hope to be able to help with to some degree, but we have to see whether the organizers will have us :)

And then things slow down until January I guess. Well apart from 3000-Calories-A-Plate Day and Hope-Retailers-Break-Even Day... but those happen every year.