It's rare that I'm a) paying attention closely enough and b) on the ball enough to get myself out to one of the local science fiction conventions. Usually at the last minute people start asking me, "Hey, are you going to be at Whatevercon?" And I have to answer, "No, because I'm a dork," and kick myself for not having responded to the con's programming invitation months earlier.

That's why I have to boast about having actually made it out to Capricon 32 in Wheeling for half a day this past Saturday. Mind you, I still didn't get it together enough to get on any programming, but I did attend. I saw a couple of readings, I went to a couple of panels, and I saw Cory Doctorow's scary/hopeful/terrific keynote address "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation." Then, as these things tend to happen at cons, the rest of the items on my schedule went out the window as John Klima and Holly McDowell and I hung out in the bar with three proseccos and a plate of antipasti.

After a panel examining Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, I shanghai'd Cory and Klima and (welcome) surprise guest John Scalzi back to Chicago for a Mexican food outing with Laura, for whose sake everyone was (of course) willing to make the trek. We shared grilled calamari, and Scalzi ordered a mango shake that arrived in a goblet roughly the size of his head. Family and dog pictures were passed around. Much merriment was made.

Oh, I also ran into Steven Silver at Capricon, who extracted a promise from me that I wouldn't fail to sign up for Worldcon programming. So I'm going to go do that now. I swear.