I'm here!

I'm sitting in one of the Sunday supplemental sessions, taking some notes for the newsletter. A bunch of stuff to catch up on, so here goes....

The drive from Eugene to Portland was rather easy, if later than planned. Apparently, the automated wakeup system at the Portland doens't know the difference between 8:30 (when I set it up for) and 8:15 (when the phone call arrived). I decided to sleep in a bit and got up at 9:15, and was out the door by 10, about an hour later than I had planned.

Decided to try and be bad: grab some to-go McDonalds on the way, only to find that there weren't any along the freeway for quite a distance. By the time I found one, it was lunch, and the finding wasn't easy. One sign that said there was one on the next exit turned out to be one in two exits, and I spent not a little time driving around off-freeway streets looking for something that wasn't there.

I took one wrong turn once I got into Portland, and the GPS got me right back on track and to the Hilton without a problem.

Found the Red Sox game on XM; they were killing the Reds, like 11-3 in the 5th, when I ended the drive.

Got in just after noon, but the bag stuffing hadn't started. Spent a couple of hours doing that. The good news: we hit 500 registrants this year.

Turns out Joe hadn't made the reservation for me (a bit of a mixup), and the hotel was booked for Monday and Tuesday ngihts. Fortunately, a couple of vendors had to cancel, their rooms were freed up, and everything got settled. I'm here for the duration.

Took a bit of a break once the bag stuffing got done. Headed up to this little town in Washington about 20 miles north called La Center, where 4 "casinos" are. "Casino" tunrs out to be a bit of a misnomer. There are these two [pairs of small, one-story buldings across the street from each other. Inside, at least of the two I saw, were only table games, no slots of any kind. The first one had just 3 poker tables, so I ended up at the other, played some $4/$8 until 11:30, and walked away with a rather small $44 profit.

Had lunch today with Char and Dave and Sue and got to meet Chris Green from HATT-OT. While others were enthralled, I thought it lunch--I actually had a breakfast plate--was OK. The company was far, far better.