1. I won’t be at Baycon this year. It’s not the con membership — I earned that, which is why it’s driving me nuts to have to do this. It’s all the extraneous numbers around going. I might be able to eke out the tank of gas for getting over there and back, but I definitely can’t afford the hotel room nor the costs of feeding myself over four days, so I’m simply declaring that I’m not going. The 2011 Baycon doesn’t look so great either, but that’s a function of too many cons in 2011 (Corflu, Baycon, Westercon, Worldcon — the order is Corflu, Worldcon, Westercon, Baycon in terms of attendance) — and if my finances don’t get squared away soon [read: full-time job], my attendance at any of those is likely to fall through. It’s been a rough few months.
2. I’m taking an Intro to GPS class as part of my attempts to become a mapmaker. (Yay GIS!) This means that I’ve been issued a GPS unit for the duration of the class. Then I figured out that my cellphone has the right tools to run as a GPS unit. This means that nearly eight years to the day after first signing up for the site, I made my first Geocaching find. You may all proceed to laugh now. That said, it’s been teaching me a bit of patience as the GPS unit will get jumpy when you’re close, and you need to stop and let it settle before you can find what you’re looking for. Also, a bit of serenity, because sometimes, due to whatever reason — cache no longer there, GPS unit being unusually flaky, you not having a clue what you’re looking for, or even just you being a bit impatient — you won’t find what you’re looking for. In those cases, sometimes it’s best to take a deep breath and come back to cache another day.
3. It’s kinda interesting that the last bit is something my therapist and I are talking about. Maybe the message is starting to sink in about not worrying so much, particularly about the things I can’t control. Even a couple of my coworkers have commented that I seem a little happier.
4. Of course, happiness would be better served with a better job (or at least a full-time one). So, with that in mind, I’m beginning to poke around, starting with getting my federal job application done and in. We’ll see where it goes from there.
5. If I owe you an email or need to mail you something, my computer is currently down for the count, and my work computer isn’t exactly set up to handle some of the stuff I need to do. So please be patient while I work on backing up my laptop and shipping it back to IBM to get fixed.

And right now that is all the news that is news across the nation. We now return you to your regularly scheduled life now in progress.