Turn out the lights, the party's over

It's that odd quiet time at Kalamazoo, late Sunday when almost everyone has left. Only a few of us stragglers who are taking Monday flights remain. My paper this morning had a bit of equipment-fu. Somehow, somewhere in the process of setting up my projector, the fan got turned off. (I figured this out in retrospect.) So I'm just getting into the meat of the presentation when the screen goes dark. The presentation pauses while I fiddle with things and finally give up and do an unplug/replug on the project. It comes back on (as I'm continuing with my explanations), goes for a couple of slides, then blacks out again. At this point, I give up and just continue without the visuals. It threw me a little bit, but the audience didn't seem to mind too much. The ironic thing is that there was a projector there in the room that I could have switched to (and which the other presenters used) but that would have taken more time to boot up and confirm the operation of. And one of the whole points of using my own projector (aside from " 'cause I can") was to dodge any possible issues of Mac compatibility. *sigh*

The whole textiles and clothing track (both DISTAFF and other sponsors) seems to have gone very well (at least the ones I got to) and was, as usual, packed to the gills. The decompression at the DISTAFF post-conference lunch was also delightful, but now that I'm back at the dorm I'm feeling exhausted.

By my calculations, I should allow 4 hours to drive to Chicago (it was 3.5 hours coming due to construction, but I'll be hitting some rush hour this time), plus 2 hours for check-in etc., plus an hour for the time-zone difference, which means for a 10 am flight I need to leave Kalamazoo at 3 am. This pretty much means I go change into tomorrow's clothes, do all my packing, set the alarm, and then lie down and get whatever sleep I can. If I'm lucky, I'll have enough brain power tomorrow to start putting together my collegium class on the trip home.