festing

today i have the honor of attending my boss's festschrift. a festschrift (or "fest" as the "in" crowd calls it) is a celebration of a person's life work academic-style (read: lots of powerpoint and comparisons to freud). so far this "honor" has involved staying up late friday night detatching and folding seating cards with mil, waking up damn early on a saturday (7:15am to be exact), quickly detatching and handing out name tags that were NOT in alphabetical order (why no one thought of doing this before the fest, i do not know...) -- oh, and did i mention that the place where we are having the fest is not air-conditioned?? in 90 degree weather with 150 steaming bodies???, finding out why there is no a/c (to no avail), trying to make a non-working microphone work (makes sense, right?), finding someone who has a key to a storage room that apparently has chairs in it, and most recently, finding a cup of coffee for a speaker (who works at this university and knows damn well where he can find a cup of coffee -- note: he waits until after the lunch hour so he can ask just before my good friend goes on for her talk; note 2: i am not a waitress; note 3:it's 90 degrees out!). later today i get to look forward to setting up the computer and seating cards at the dinner (because why have a dinner without powerpoint?). final note: this event does not end until at least 9:30pm -- that's 13+ hours of powerpoint and freud comparisons. no one is going to want to talk to me tomorrow...

the upshot of all of this is that while i am here festing, mil has been home doing laundry. yay, mil!

btw, dooce now has competition for my favorite blog. this one's got a good camera, adorable dogs, and he lives in france... almost too much to envy...