I’m finally back from Høstfest.
“Wait!” you reply. Because you’re an intelligent and attentive reader, you seem to recall that I got back a little more than a week ago.
And you are correct, as always. But you know, there’s the physical journey and the spiritual journey. And my spiritual journey lasted through Saturday.
Which is a pretentious way of saying that I wasn’t able to get out of Viking Presenter mode, because I had two – not one, but two – last-minute lecturing gigs last week.
Which, incidentally, explains my blogging silence Thursday and Friday.
Thursday I lectured to a Sons of Norway lodge which happens to meet quite near my house. When I was setting up, I had a (biblical) Job Experience: “The thing which I have greatly feared has come upon me.”
A PowerPoint speaker’s deepest dread is that his equipment will fail him. When I tried to hook my stuff up, it went fine until I tried to use the remote control. I discovered that my laptop was completely frozen up. There was no cursor, and I couldn’t summon one from the depths, however many times I tried restarting it.
So I did the talk from memory, and I charged them half my usual fee, because the only visual they got was a fat man in a tunic. It went OK, but I felt it a smirch on my escutcheon.
At home the laptop worked no better, so I resolved to get a new one. I expect the old one might have been repaired, but I needed one in two days, and I was kind of sick of it anyway. I’d never liked the keyboard action.
So I resorted to Micro Center, the place where the true cognoscenti in these parts do their technology shopping. I selected a new Dell, an upgrade from my previous model.
Then I stayed up till 3:00 a.m., installing software.
Saturday I spoke to the Leif Eriksson Day Dinner of the Icelandic-American Association (and I think, some other groups). The Icelandic Consul himself was in attendance.
And it went great. They were as good a crowd as the pastors I wrote about a while back, which is saying a lot. I spoke on Leif Eriksson, Vinland, and the L’Anse Aux Meadows Viking site. My technology worked a treat. And we had some enjoyable music and a first class cod dinner. I also sold some books and fielded many intelligent questions.
I met a woman who informed me that she’d just had her 700 page book published, which made her now the world’s foremost authority on a very tiny field of law. We agreed that being a world-renowned authority is a solemn burden.
Good times. Tomorrow, back to book reviews.
Whew! Way to go! Things seemed to have worked out wonderfully….
Does first class cod mean it was properly battered and fried rather than boiled in lye to a gelatinous translucence?
It was grilled, and it was exquisite.