Catching Up
Or...The Dragon is itching to blog again

Traveling to a major U.S. city shouldn't take you out of communication with the rest of the world. SURPRISE! Staying at a dump like the Cay Club Condominiums in Las Vegas, Nev., apparently, will. I was less than impressed with the facility. It's supposedly changing its name to Desert Tide so watch out for that name, too, when doing your long-term accommodation planning for Vegas. (It's across the street from The Rio and next door to the place that had the Ricin problem a couple weeks ago. No, I'm not kidding.)

The main beef I had was the absence of wireless Internet, which my boss told me the place boasted on its Web site. (I read it after connecting from a travel site, so I can't be sure that I was on the actual "hotel" site, thus I can't claim false advertising here.) Anyway, when I couldn't log on Wednesday morning, I wished to call the front desk. Lo and behold, there wasn't a phone in the living room. Fine, I can get up from the desk and look in the kitchen. I can look in the dinette area. I can look in the bedroom. Uhhhh...there was no phone in the condo because my co-workers had no phones in their rooms either. So I used my cell to call the front desk to learn that they don't have wireless Internet. When the bizarre little cord that I assume served as the wire connection failed, I gave up.

The sad thing is, once we were on the convention floors (yes, plural; the convention was huge with more than 142,000 in attendance on Friday), I didn't have time to use the computers in the press room for blogging. So ya'll didn't get the daily updates. I apologize.

The convention was exhausting, I must say. I hit the ground running Tuesday with appointments to visit and interview a couple folks before the show closed. Same with Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was all about running around; we didn't have any specific/structured appointments. It was just a Chinese firedrill of visiting booths and finding people we needed to see. Same with Saturday morning. We had a booth of our own for the express purpose of distributing magazines. We spent a total of one hour there (if that) during the course of the five days. The cool thing is the posters of a couple of our front covers will arrive here at my house today and I can hang them in my den. How cool will that be?

I got home Sunday just before midnight, spent an hour in the Ft. Lauderdale airport wishing my luggage would arrive, wishing the shuttle would pick me up, wishing I could get to my car, and wishing I could get out of the Park-n-Save lot. Sigh. Then I spent some time flitting about Ft. Lauderdale wishing I could find I-75. I think I violated the Florida Turnpike Toll Authority at one point because there was no one in the little booth (oops). The readout on the register said "closed" in its ominous green digital print...and the gate was up so I could pass...but as I drove through, slowly, looking for a basket to put my 50 cents in, I realized I saw a red light. Do you know the sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you realize you've probably just done something stupid? Yeah. There it was. But I was so tired that I decided I cared not-a-lot. I'll probably care when I get some ridiculous fine in the mail from Broward County. (That is Broward County over there, isn't it?) Anyway, I'll send them 50 cents and a scathing letter about confusing exhausted travelers. (And then I'll end up in jail, I'm sure, while some drug-runner shoots a cop and ends up free and fat in Canada. Sigh.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. So I got home around 3 a.m. (It stuns me how people lose all concept of driving ability when they run into fog.) I woke up around 11 a.m. and thought, I should blog. Instead, I sneezed blood and went back to sleep. Yes, something's wrong with me. I can't leave the state ever again. :) Leaving the state causes me to collapse in something akin to near-death. I think I'm allergic to air that isn't laced with sea-salt. I need humidity to survive. It's quite reptilian. I managed to get out of bed and go to the grocery store late in the day because, you know, there was no food here. Now I've eaten some of that food for breakfast and I'm blogging as if I'm going to return to normal. How's that for a quick recovery? I like it.

So if you're tuning back in after the week of downtime, thanks for returning. We're back in business.

Today, we have an oh-so-appropriate Word of the Day to make me smile. We also have an excerpt (above) from Choices Meant for Gods for those of you participating in Author Island's St. Patty's Day chat. You'll find the answer to the trivia question posted during the chat in the excerpt. Yay!

We also have the ongoing relaxation contest. You can win a spa package from Arcana's bathing rooms (also from Choices Meant for Gods) if you comment here that you're an Author Island fan (and who isn't?). That's going through April 15, a day when we ALL NEED relaxation. You can enter every day, so comment often.

What else? I'll do individual posts tomorrow about the fun stuff I did in Vegas. There were a couple concerts, you know...

"Some days, I just want the dragon to win."
Tags: Choices Meant for Gods, Author Island