Social Butterfly

So, here's my whirlwind week ... well, okay, 3 day whirl out of 4, cuz I took Sunday off. Heh.

NY WRITE-A-THON
What a wonderful way to spend a Saturday, ensconced inside a venerable old library! The Library of The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen (est. 1820) is in a very ordinary-looking building at 20 West 44th Street ... but inside its character really shows. According to a brochure I picked up there, the library once functioned, until the founding of the NY public library system, as the largest free circulating library in the city. And to think I've lived in NYC for 40 years and never knew about it! These days it is still open to the public, but by subscription.

So I spent the day writing and writing and writing till my hand started to hurt (!!) ... and kept on writing anyway. I started with a workshop, there was a break for lunch, and another break for the guest speaker, Chris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writing Month. He was a delightful speaker, very funny and very inspiring. Afterwards, I sat across from him at a table, noting the "I'll sleep in December" sticker on his laptop (NaNoWriMo is in November), and I managed a fangirl hiya and told him how my friend John who wasn't at the 'Thon had introduced me to NaNoWriMo a while back ... and, while I'd never managed to complete the challenge, I vowed that this year would be the year. He grinned, we shook hands, it was a great end to the day. Oh, and I'd raised enough $$ to win a subscription to the Bellevue Literary Journal, which I had a copy of that I read on the way home and found to contain *excellent* work. So I was pleased, and I can't thank my sponsors enough!

SCIENCE SOIREE
Another day (Monday), another Library, this time the Science and Business Library at 34th Street and Madison. This was the 4th and last in a series sponsored by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. I'd been to the first and found it interesting, so was glad I could make it to this last one ... it was about research into birdsong in an effort to understand language (umm ... right). I was mostly annoyed, this time, by the lecture, but by the time they got to the business at hand, I had already been awed: introducing the speaker was none other than Mr. DNA himself, Dr. James Watson! Now I didn't speak to him at all, but I did stand mere inches away from him, and let me tell you that was as much a thrill to this fangirl as was sitting behind Arlo Guthrie at the film festival.

Man, I love New York.

INDESIGN USERS GROUP
Another day (Tuesday) and this butterfly wasn't finished flitting yet. My first Users Group meeting, I was enticed by a chance to meet some fellow users (shop talk!) and to win the new Adobe CS3 suite. So I chatted with some folks, got a Mac techie recommendation (as opposed to using TekServe, which folks there apparently generally considered a pain), sat through a demo of XML (fellow kept saying "now here's the WOW factor ... ooops ... let me try that again"), enjoyed a presentation by a fellow who does a regular podcast (made me wish I had a 'pod' to watch 'casts on), and didn't win a thing, not even one of the books on offer much less the software. And no fangirl sightings. But a worthwhile evening nevertheless.

So now I'm spending the rest of the week resting up.