good times (and great oldies?) [updated]

so, i spent this last weekend in spokane, and after getting off to a bad start, it was pretty much awesome.

i meant to leave friday after work, but that didn't end up going so well. i didn't get out of the house till after 6, and then got about an hour out and realized that i had left my suit behind. and since the wearing of the suit was the primary reason i was going to spokane, i figured maybe i should go back for it. at which point, it would have been 10:30 or 11 by the time i got to spokane, which i decided just wasn't worth it.

instead, i left early saturday morning. other than the getting up early to get there at a decent time part, it worked out fairly well... made good time, and didn't get pulled over. gamed and hung out saturday afternoon/evening, then went out drinking with a good sized group (in no particular order: ben, pat, emily, liz, nicole, paul, josh, erin, kyle, katie-o, brandon, mark, dave, and some guy i didn't know) that night... started out at the globe, then made our way to the viking. by that point though, i was done drinking. started out with a pint of mack & jack's, an african beer that was pretty good. then an irish car bomb (always good), a long island ice tea (new to me, and good) and a wildfire (tequila with tobasco sauce... tastes like burning). i think i probably could have handled another drink or two, but the last time i thought that i spent the rest of the night puking in emily's sink, which neither of us enjoyed very much.

sunday i slept in and goofed around for most of morning, then made my way to the library to put some more work into my guest lecture/presentation for the Holy War in Europe class there at Whitworth. left off for awhile to find some washers and bolts for mark's suit of armor, then went back to work till around 6, at which point i went back to visit some old friends at the phonathon. they invited me to make a few calls for old time's sake, but for some odd reason i turned them down. stayed there till it was over at 8:30, then went back to the library and worked till 9:30, at which point i suddenly lost all motivation. nothing much happened for the rest of the night.

got up about 8 on monday and went to the library, where i worked till about 12 to finish up my presentation. i'm fairly certain that i ate at some point, but don't really remember it. something filled the time until 1:30, at which point i suited up and then helped mark into his suit of armor, which probably put to shame any visual aids the members of the class were going to use for their own visual aid. bwahahaha! anyways, i think it went fairly well. to myself, i came across as somebody who definitely knew what they were talking about (though probably not an expert, which corliss seems to think i am... i guess it depends on how you define "expert"), but had trouble getting it out in a coherent matter. i got most of my information across, but skipped around quite a bit... i'm glad i took the time to prepare some pretty decent handouts, so they at least had something to follow along with. in my defense, you have to take the following factors into account: 1) this was sort of an expansion of a paper i had written for the class when i took it, and it was tricky integrating the new with the old; and 2) i would say that i am a slightly above average public speaker at best, and i had been out of practice for about a year, which probably put me somewhere in the area of slightly below average.

so, this should be enough boring personal stuff to balance out some of my recent political rants and keep the blog on a more or less even keel. the end.

--update--
for those of you interested, the handout is available here. i'm not sure what my bandwidth allowance is, but i'm sure it's fairly small, so if you can't get to it and you still want to see it, let me know and i can send it by email.