Has it really been over a month since I last updated this? I keep telling myself that I'm not going to spend so much time away from the diary, 'cause when I do I end up with a batallion of things that I want to discuss, and I inevitably end up forgetting something that I considered utterly vital at one point. However, if I spend all day updating my diary, nothing ever happens that's worth noting. It's a classic problem—the polling problem, actually—in computer science, but that doesn't matter.

Anyway, the first thing of import that happened in the last five weeks was Anthrocon, which went far better than
I feared it would. Being on staff, I think, helped immensely. I even got the chance to help lead two panels with the guest of honor, Lisanne Norman. When the programming director of the con handed me the books and said "Go
read these," I was initially dubious, and the first book took a while to get its sea legs under it, but after that I've found them well worth what I spent on them. Ms. Norman managed most of the interviews herself, but she
said she was glad to have had my help through some of the rougher bits. 

In fact, the only thing that didn't go so well at AC was the room arrangement. The people with whom we were staying brought someone into the room that neither Jessie nor I knew while we were in the shower and then just sat there looking surprised when Jessie and I got miffed at them for not warning us we had company or, better yet, waiting until we were dressed to invite a stranger into the room. Then, they invited a fifth person—another person we didn't know—to sleep in the floor of the room without asking us first. True, their names were on the room and ours weren't, but there's this little niggling thing called common courtesy or so I thought. In the end, we left a check for half the room rate, expressed our disappointment and drove home for Saturday night. We didn't sleep there but one night, so in reality I probably shouldn't have paid more than fifty dollars, but I wanted to meet our "hosts" more than halfway.

They cashed the check and haven't tried to contact me about reimbursing me the extra, so I can only guess they're happy with how things happened.

That one minor scuffle aside, though, the rest of the event was quite fun, even if I did spend most of it running around looking for people and helping out in the Con Ops room. Next year, we're getting our own room and I'm going to try to get the days of the con as vacation so I'm not having to drive to work in the middle of it.

The weekend after that, of course, was the Bash, and that went far better than expected. This year's host and Jessie and I had had some personality scuffles leading up to the event, most of which were successfully resolved
when we had the chance to talk face to face about things. I gave a talk on all the things that nobody had warned me would happen as I transitioned, which went very well even if it did almost not happen thanks to my anxiety
problems—more on that in a bit. The Monday after the Bash is typically a sight-seeing trip, on which I'm almost never interested in going and Jessie only is insofar as it's a chance to socialize with people who're going. We
thought there'd be other people at the hotel with whom we wanted to spend time, but they either all went to Mt. Rainier, or else they went on an impromptu day trip to downtown Seattle, so we spent the day watching television in our hotel room and bitching about the lack of other Bashers. We did get a few rounds of Mao that night, though, which is always a good thing. 

I know I've mentioned my anxiety issues before, and they're no less present now than they were, but the big situations that I feared would lead to my social paralysis seem to be behind me for the moment. I'm not saying I don't want to treat them, but right now I'm going to need to go see my doctor to get any medication to help or find a therapist willing to treat it that will take my insurance. Unfortunately, I have no vacation days left right now,
thanks to the Bash and my surgery from earlier, so now my options are take a day off without pay, try to get my boss to footniblick things to not make me lose any more time, or wait until I get some more vacation time. It's a
crappy set of options, but thanks to how things spilled out earlier I really don't have a better one.

Right now, I'm in a holding action with my own psychoses. Part of me knows I'm copping out and that if I really needed the time off of work I could use my non-vested annual leave, but another part of me is trying to save that for a real emergency since I have no sick time at all remaining until January of next year and there aren't any situations I'm facing in the immediate future that will necessitate me being medicated. I hope.