I did a little last-minute shopping on Tuesday, before we got about 8 or 9 inches of snow over Wed/Thur, then spent Wednesday and Thursday working on a music arranging presentation for Capricon.

I drove to Chicago on Friday. Caz spent the weekend with his girlfriend next door, and the cats got the house to themselves.

They weren't very happy about this. They didn't eat as much of their dry food as I expected (barely touched the food I left out), and Mr. Mark refused to take his medicine and treat unless he got spoon fed.

When I got home, they were all over my ankles, and gobbled their treats.

I read on the couch for a couple hours so Mark could sleep on my stomach, and he took full advantage of this.

I had a good time at the convention. It was much smaller than usual. I'd guess 1/3 as many folks as usual. No kids showed up for my reading, so I noodled on the guitar and acquired a grownup audience. My reading ended up scheduled for Friday, at 6:00 PM - right at dinner time. OTOH, every time I went by the room, there were no kids.

The lady running the room had one funny story for me. One little girl came by when they were scheduled to run some CareBears videos. She was thrilled because she had Care Bear dolls, but didn't know there were any movies about them! She was glued to the screen watching and learning about her toys.

After spending most of the week putting together a video presentation on doing music arranging, I had two folks show up, and absolutely zero interaction. they didn't even leave their cameras on, so I didn't know if I was talking to anyone or not.

This is double hard for me. I'm used to doing presentations and training sessions, but I can always see the audience. I know when they're nodding off, or catching the joke, and I can fine-tune my talk to either skip on to something new or beat this topic to death (again).

My hour long presentation took about 30 minutes. I've got no clue if it was useful to anyone or even comprhensible.

At the other end, my talk on Psycho-Linguistics had more people than I've had at other, larger conventions. Folks were interested, had good questions, and asked how to get Editomat.

Chicago is serious about Covid. The hotel required a certification of vaccination before you could get a room, and required masks in all public spaces. Even the bar we went out to for dinner demanded our vax certication card. I told the bartender it was the first time I'd been carded in over 50 years. He laughed, but I wonder just how many times he's heard that joke in the past week.