...In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight...

(Free shirts tonight! Meet me at Coral.)

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More recap of January. So what happened after animelosangeles closing ceremonies? ( Well, we packed up... )

We're planning to buy equipment for various departments for next year, such as Beltrac stanchions like the ones you see at banks and airports. The trick will be to figure out how many we need! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

While the convention was loading out, we steadily lost our volunteers. There was about a dozen diehards who helped load the truck in the rain, and then unload it (in the rain) at the clubhouse Sunday night. I've got a list somewhere, we'll figure out some little perk to do for them. (Maybe custom t-shirts? Boxes of chocolates? Those are the first two things that come to my mind, anyway.)

( There were a handful of people that hung out late, off to the side... )

A very late night, and in the morning Jarod, Christian and Tadao met me at the hotel to go with the truck to the clubhouse and then down to the storage place.

We were very tired critters by the time we finished up at the storage place. And Jarod still had a run to south O.C. to make -- he went home to bed, and did it the next day. And myself?

Oh, I had a grueling drive ahead of me. I had a few things I had to get done at work that evening, ( and then I had to hit the road to San Luis Obispo to be there for a meeting Tuesday morning... )

Horrible drive, bad planning/time management on my part. Mom and Dad were staying at our house by then, and were very unhappy about me heading out like that, and I don't blame them. So from time to time I called in to let Dad know I was still alive and moving north.

But there was a problem with that plan -- my cell phone was out of juice. ( And the charger was packed in a box somewhere... )

So, I spent three days in SLO. G. was there, Keith, and a couple of the Indy guys that I'd met back in November, and we tried to wrap our skulls around the requirements of FIPS 140-2. (And what's expected to be in FIPS 140-3 when that's approved.) If you care about that kind of thing, go look it up; it's a Federal Information Processing Standard that has to do with security and encryption and keys and whatnot. It's our job to care about it, so we were all there.

( San Luis Obispo has parking meters downtown.. )

Our hosts provided us with coffee every morning. This is the huge carton-o'-coffee that Starbucks sells, it helped get us through the early morning meetings.

( We ate lunch at F. McLintocks twice, where we saw on the menu that one of their appetizers was Turkey Nuts... )

After that, we went our separate ways. I walked around town a bit, bought some jewelry for library_lynn, and found a used record and game store, "Captain Nemo/Cheap Thrills." It had these really cool murals on the walls, very nice.

( And once again I found myself in a music store without my lists... )

Anyhow. Left SLO, headed home, had lunch in Santa Maria. I was wondering if Mayflower Moving and Storage had their headquarters here, until I realized that the logo I kept seeing wasn't quite the same. Mayflower's ship logo has three sails, left-to-right. This ship has three sails, top-to-bottom. I guess they'd rather people assume the city is named after the famous ship Santa Maria rather than the saint... that the ship is named for. (I'm reminded of Lancaster, California, which is named after Lancaster, Pennsylvania and not the original Lancaster that the Pennyslvania town is named for.)

And when I got home, I went to bed. By the weekend, I was sick with another throat infection, and a week after I recovered from that I got the flu. No fun. More about the rest of January later...