Here in San Diego

I am in San Diego, which is why I say "here". My trip here was fraught with airplanes, which was kind of predictable, and also not really scary enough to justify the use of "fraught". It was actually more exciting once I got here, because my website stopped working and I had to perform Mystic Database Voodoo, which doesn't even exist.

And now I have discovered that this hotel, while amply equipped with bathroom fixtures, beds, and a heated pool, does not seem to carry Comedy Central. So: no Daily Show and Colbert Report for me!

Here's the spacious Westin Hotel bathroom. Note the expansive counter space, as well as the reflective mirrors. Really, I should have positioned that small mirror on the lower right so you could see my face, but that would have been too much work. Well, moving the mirror wouldn't be too much work, but since I only thought of it after I'd already uploaded the image, it would be too much effort to take a new picture. Actually, it would be easier to just Photoshop my face onto the mirror.

Before I move on from the fascinating topic of this picture, I like where I'm holding the camera down there. It's got one of those movable viewscreens so I can take a picture while looking straight down at the camera like I've got one of those old-timey deals.

Okay. San Diego. Tomorrow, JournalCon registration doesn't happen until the afternoon, so I'm thinking of going for a swim in the hotel's pool (I love swimming but I don't get to do it much in Seattle) and then walking down to Seaport Village. And I might stop by the Star of India and see if I can clamber up in the rigging and pretend to be a pirate. I've got plans!

Then it's basically all JournalCon all the time through Sunday afternoon, when I'll meet my mother for dinner. And then on Monday, I have the whole day free, so I'll probably go to Balboa Park, wander around a bit, and then go to the zoo.

In other news, I made steak on Tuesday night and burned the dickens out of my finger. Ow! It wasn't hurting anymore yesterday, but it did blister up quite impressively. Unfortunately for me, I got bored on the airplanes so I peeled off the blister part, and now I have a red, tender spot on my finger. It's quite sensitive -- when I rub it on another finger, I can feel the fingerprints. This would be a good time to become a safecracker.

Naturally, I didn't spend the whole flight picking at wounds; I also did some reading.

The Penultimate Peril, by Lemony Snicket

This was a good one, although I feel like I should go back and reread the whole series, plus the Unauthorized Autobiography, because I didn't remember all the details of every single Villain. The ending was really interesting, and now I have no idea how Snicket's going to wrap the whole series up.

Psmith in the City, by P.G. Wodehouse

I really enjoy Wodehouse's Psmith books. They're quite early (before Blandings Castle or Jeeves and Wooster), although Psmith himself is clearly a predecessor of Galahad and Uncle Fred. Mostly, he just entertains himself at other people's expense and floats through life without facing any serious problems. He's great. However, the actual protagonist is Mike Jackson, an excellent cricket batsman. And a lot of the Psmith books are given over to cricket descriptions, which feels (to my untutored American ears) deliciously foreign. I never cared much for the Psmith books before, but awhile ago I started reading British Schoolboy Books (like Tom Brown's Schooldays; it's like Harry Potter but without the magic) and I read Wodehouse's very first books, which were in that genre, so I got used to the cricket and rugby sections -- look, the point is that I somehow found a whole Wodehouse series I'd never read and now I get to enjoy it. Hooray!

Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

The subtitle is "How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" so I was hoping this would be an examination of how Shakespeare achieved his status as The Greatest English Poet/Playwright/Writer Ever. You know, examining how he's been considered through the years, how the plays have been performed and edited in different centuries, that sort of thing. But instead, it's an attempt to look at his life and schooling and guess how that informed his work and themes. A noble effort, but I'm halfway through and it's pretty clear that since there's no hard details on what his life and schooling actually were, the guesswork is more sketchy than I'd like.