'Zoo Day 4

The Pseudo Session Saturday night kept up the current trend of truly excellent spoof papers. Unfortunately, it's hard to describe them in a way that conveys the humor. One involved evidence of a conspiracy involving rabbits. Another demonstrated that the Life of St. Guthlac actually showed the first martyrdom of a do-it-yourself house buyer. The capstone piece was a detailed presentation demonstrating the complete lack of any evidence disproving the proposition that Geoffrey Chaucer has been reincarnated as Bruce Springsteen. (Chaucer's blog was raised as clear evidence that he is still among us -- although, despite the evidence at said blog that Chaucer was present at the Congress, he did not appear in person to debate the thesis of the paper.)

I usually skip the Saturday night dance, since it isn't my kind of scene, but I was still hoping to bump into a few people that I hadn't seen yet, so I decided to go. I did meet up with some friends and we hit the dance floor with some bransle steps (done to rock music -- but a four-four beat is a four-four beat, after all). A little later a beautiful woman hauled me back to the dance floor for something more free-form, thereby demonstrating two eternal verities: 1) I don't know how to dance modern dances; and 2) you don't need to know how to dance modern dances to dance modern dances.

At some point early Sunday morning I discovered that the little cough I'd had all day wasn't just from excessive singing Friday night, but was some sort of cold that was now developing into a sore throat. It isn't too bad, although we'll see if I feel like going in to work Monday morning. (The problem with getting colds due to travel stress is that it always looks suspicious to call in sick right when you're supposed to be back from vacation.)

For Sunday morning sessions I went to the Bayeaux Tapestry group (including some great analysis of errors and back-sides of the embroidery), then the paternosters session that xrian was presenting in, which went very well. (I even came up with a semi-intelligent question for one of the other presenters.) The day was rounded off with the usual DISTAFF post-Congress lunch at a local member's home with much textile geeking and networking. I'm writing this up at the Kalamazoo airport, but don't expect to be able to post it until I get home, since I don't see any point to paying good money just to get wireless at the airport.