We Make Holes In Teeth

22 consecutive hours of breathing space station air later...

... and I'm back in Montreal. Austin was fan-freaking-tastic. The conference - especially as an inagural journey under the command of the folks from CMP - was really damn good. I ate my body weight in conchinita pabil, BBQ sausage, pecan pie and hush-puppies (I'm not talking about the shoes. If you think hush-puppies are shoes, you are a freak.) The talk, near as I can discern, went well. I'll have more impressions on that shortly.

The real story here, though, is that I have established once and for all that one should never, EVER, allow a travel agent to book one a connecting flight via Dallas-Fort Worth. I don't know what kind of fucking magnetic anomaly they've built their 90 zillion dollar boondoggle of an airport on, but apparently it can snatch 737s whole from the sky in completely different time zones and summarily ground them on parking lot -like stretches of tarmac, arranged in sanity-rending tesselations of stalled aviation, like giant iron filings slammed into visible ranks by invisible lines of force.

Good mornin' America/How are ya?

NK and I got back from New Orleans last night.

Because of the accumulation of 'Familiarity' notes that I need to get posted, I'm going to simply interleave the account of the New Orleans Habitat deployment willy-nilly into the game-related discussion. But at least there will be pictures this way...

Take a moment to watch this...

... and then get back to the hard work of repairing the damage:

Hang On To Your Ego

See, this should have been 2002.

We all know goddamned good and well that these things get started in moments of anonymous narccicism, before they are catapulted into the femtosecond celebrity aspirations that we've all come to know and sheepishly cop to.

I'm not worried about that part. Anybody whose opinion I give half a damn about already knows that I'm a pedantic blowhard, so this isn't really going to modify their impressions one way or the other.

The part I'm concerned about is that I may have already missed my best material. I'm not sure - I haven't researched it properly - but I think there may be some kind of rule, be it unwritten, whispered, memed, wikied or branded backwards on the forehead of procrastinators, that says you don't get to retroactively blog. At least not in the sense that one normally would see it appear in real time.

So when I got back from The Expedition in 2003, and some of my hipper coworkers chastised me for sending them 320KB email messages detailing near-death experiences in Thisorthatistan, I should have known then and there that I had fucked up big time.

I'm not going to go into this in depth here. I knew when I registered wemakeholesinteeth that the function of this site wasn't going to be to show all my overeducated pals what a great expatriate I'd be. I have other hopes. And they mainly have very little to do with me and my late-blooming geographical digressions.

It's about entertainment, baby.