Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Since October, I've been filling my time with a lot of new things. One of those things that I've realized, as an introvert, is that I still need community.  No matter how tired or frustrated people sometimes make me, I still need the contact, still need to toss ideas around with people, and still delight in meeting new people and getting to know them. So I'm back in a position with our church, and it's as the head of the Pastoral Relations Committee, the people of the congregation who are supposed to help tend to the covenantal relationship between the pastors and the congregation.  It's an interesting job, and I held it for a while when I was moderator-elect, before I became moderator.  I'm oddly comfortable with it, too, as my main function really is to listen.  Listen to the pastors, listen to members of the congregation, and listen to how things are going between them. I've also been joining a few of the small groups, people that are gathering toge

So every year, I make the pilgrimage to the Bay Area to visit Carl, do a round of visits with old friends from Caltech, the old usenet, and from Carl's games from the 1990's. We catch up, eat great food, and then we end the week at BigBadCon, which is now in Walnut Creek at the Walnut Creek Marriott.  It's been there a few years, now, and we've started to really get to know the venue and all the things that are offered around the hotel, which is nice. Part of the reason why this is pretty much the only convention I go to anymore is because we always start with a round of visiting people or catching up with them during a dinner or something. Half the fun is that a lot of the things we do have become something of a Tradition. I flew out on the 8th of October, and met up for Peking Duck and all the good things at Chef Chu's with the old Mountain View crew, who mostly don't live there anymore, and only make it to this part of the area once a year.  It was a sm