Back from Worldcon

Home again.  I'm only beginning to catch up on sleep; the idiots doing construction near my house made a horrible crashy thump a bit before 7:30 this morning that my earplugs weren't enough to block.

It was a fun convention.

My concert went okay.  I had less voice control than I should have; I really need to do more singing to keep in shape.  The starting notes that I'd carefully worked out beforehand to make sure that everything was in a good range... didn't work at all.

My children's programming adventure, helping kids to make sock puppets, was mostly a waste of my time.  We almost always had more adults than children there, and I generally felt that I wasn't getting into things -- I didn't have any strong inclination to interact with these completely unknown-to-me kids.  My greatest contribution came when one child burned himself with a glue gun ("I know how to use a glue gun.  I'm from London, we're all about glue guns there.") and after I got tired of him running around and yelling about it, I decided that I was going to make an ice pack for him and repeatedly nagged the "panel moderator" until she okayed it.

I was too tired for my Saturday-evening open filk, and abdicated from my "moderator" position a bit after midnight.

Only half of the panelists showed up for the Sunday-morning "Realism in SF" panel.  We all agreed that though realism in SF was important, it was hard to define, and that the suggestion in the program-guide description (that SF had a "duty" to do realistic portrayals of things like global warming) was silly.  Once we got that out of the way, we had a good discussion.

The Monday-noon workshop on filk song writing went well enough despite everyone seeming to be running out of steam.

A few pictures:

Googly-eyed brownies for the Making Lumiere party

cadhla  giving safe shelter to a couple of baby plush giant squid

My Winslow-cultist plush giant squid

Someone else's picture of me with the squid and its hat

Job offers

Since I updated my resume on monster.com a couple of months ago, I've had two messages left from people/organizations who were "interested in my resume": Investors Group, and AIL Canada.

In both cases, "interested in my resume" appears to translate to "we noticed that you posted a resume and may therefore be assumed to possibly be desperate.  We'd like you to devote a few solid months of your life and several thousand dollars in training to become a 'consultant' for us, commission-only, selling financial stuff to other people as a full-time career, working seven days a week, with no commitment on our part".  Of course, they don't actually tell you any of that stuff up front, only after you've been through a few interviews to butter you up and break you down.  Or so I gather from googling the company names and noting the similarities between what other people describe and the messages that I've received.

I am strangely uninterested by such offers.

Or, to put it otherwise, I regard such creatures as parasitic, verminous slimeballs, preying on the ignorant and desperate.