Pizza, Brazilian, & Bears, oh my

So in ABQ, we stayed at a very nice hotel, about a block away from the one the conference was held at. It was cold and drizzly, so the walk was a little uncomfortable, but not too bad, really. Could have been much worse. Unlike most downtowns in major cities, there weren't a lot of people walking around on the street though. So it was a little deserted feeling sometimes. I can see why people at night wouldn't have wanted to go out from one hotel to the next.

Friday night, we were looking for food and on the way to the restaurant our concierge recommended, smelled the lovely smell of pizza wafting on the chilly breeze. We went into the NYPD pizza shop, which had great thin crust pizza, with that basil-touched sweet but garlicky sauce that I like. Andrew, putting those red pepper flakes on one of his slices, fell victim to an old old trick. Someone had loosened the cap and the entire pepper flake contents fell onto his slice. It was pretty funny. The off-duty policeman who was sitting at the "pizza bar" next to us thought it was pretty funny too. Luckily, Andrew doesn't really mind lots of pepper and once you scraped the majority off, it wasn't bad (for him. I would have not eaten it).

The next day, after the conference was over, we ate at this Brazilian place. If you've never eaten at a Brazilian place, it could be an Atkins dieter's fondest dream. You get this mondo salad bar, then these roving meat-waiters bring you 9 courses of grilled meat. From chicken hearts (on which I passed, thank you very much) to steak cuts. Very tasty. The dessert was the best-- this chocolate raspberry cake shaped (because of V-day) like a heart. Yum! I still want more of it.

As for the panels & conference stuff, it all went fine. My paper, which was as I said earlier, a reduced version of my intro chapter to my dissertation, got a lot of laughs. I hadn't realized before how funny parts of it could be. Of course, part of it was my delivery (cause I'm such a great paper-reader.) :) I went to a lot of the panels, and this year we had a significant contingent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer panels. Mostly interesting, although I have to admit in some ways I was very "Buffy'd out" after a while. (To get an idea of what one would write a paper on BtVS like, click here.)

As I said yesterday, the drive seemed much longer this year than it has in the past. It's because of the extra weight of the babies-- the seat began to feel a bit like a rock after a while. Same thing last night at the movie theater, though, so it's really just a matter of time before I need to sit on feather pillows all the time.

So that's the conference. I don't have any really funny or interesting tidbits to share at this point, and I'm trying AGAIN to figure out the issues with our medical coverage. Every time I bring this up, Robotnik mentions Kafka. And yes, you are so very right. But I think, actually, that in this case, Kafka would seem the optimist.