conference hotel

There has been barely a moment to step outside the conference - at least, not if one doesn't want to miss stuff that one doesn't want to miss ... but this tree lies between the hotel and Starbucks, and of course made me wish that I'd taken the time - when I did have a few spare moments - to wander around in the kind of glorious fall colors that one doesn't get in LA.   There, the deciduous leaves, for the most part, just get very desiccated and brown and then sulkily fall off when it rains.   Whereas here ...  

I have such fun at conferences - seeing people, above all (though among the papers that I heard today were a couple of life-saving references, quite apart from their intrinsic merits) - and NAVSA always seems like a big party and reunion.   And I particularly like running into people (You Know Who You Are), who tell me that not only do they enjoy reading/looking at "Forms," but appreciate the fact that what I write tends to be fairly short, rather than screeds of polemic.   You can't imagine how much that assuages my guilty apprehension that I should be coughing up intellectual commentary, rather than a daily version of paragraphs from an Occasional Essay.