Mid-week report

I'm quite tired, but also very happy.

FGC Gathering is weird. I had the realization on Monday that the event it's most similar to is summer camp- I had just listened to the This American Life episode about summer camp, from a few weeks back. It's intense, and can be very meaningful, and so hard to describe properly. It can be miserable if you have a few very negative experiences early on; you can make friends who are closer than just about anyone else; and the time passes very weirdly. Sunday and Monday felt like a week, in itself. Now, I'm feeling the pull of the real world, knowing we're going to be home in about 80 hours... but there's potential for another week's experience in the next few days, if I'm not so exhausted that I sleep it through.

Tired? God yes. The beds are awful, it's way too hot in the dorm, the dining hall coffee is brown water. I'm walking a LOT, and trying to remember to take a nap each afternoon. melted_snowball is made of awesome, because he went downtown to River Falls and bought us a window fan and some fruit. Also he puts up with me being a bit spacy when we're tired in the room. But then, I put up with him being the same way.

Sill, this is an amazing week.

A few bits:

Yesterday a business meeting was interrupted by a tornado siren and we all trooped down to the tornado shelter area, which was exciting. All told, it couldn't have come at a better time, because the business meeting had *just* approved a proposal put together by sulle_stelle and jeanne_d_arc and I, about broadening our electronic communications, and the clerk was just finishing the Minute which acted as the record of our discussion, decision, and instructions. Very convenient timing.

Earlier, I got to play with a "One Laptop Per Child" laptop. It's very cute, and looks super-sturdy and quite well-engineered. There's apparently a virtual machine you can d/l from their site, which might be neat to try developing for (it has a user-interface written with GTK and python, which apparently works well enough!) The keyboard is kid-scaled, so adults won't be able to co-opt it as easily. Also, it has anti-theft protections that turn it into a brick if it doesn't get brought to a school at least once every few days.

I'm looking forward to the Marcus Borg talk tomorrow. He's an excellent writer, hopefully a good speaker.

I missed a Bayard Rustin talk yesterday, which I'm unhappy about, but we had a wonderful dinner with a friend from Cambridge MA who we never get to see. There are so many people I'd love to spend an entire week with.

And right now I'm missing my workshop, so I'll go back to that now.