Responses to recent comments

1. The conference has been going very well, thanks for asking. The weather has been ideal, the location perfect, and there have only been a few snags, and those have been only minor. So far. I very much look forward to getting all the participants onto their flights tomorrow, processing all the receipts and requests for reimbursement, and then not organizing a conference again for a long long time.

2. I do not know what has become of the orange T-shirt. I folded it, packed it, and then took my luggage to the airport, where I carried it on. I did not open any of my bags during the security screening. However, upon arrival at home, the orange T-shirt was not in the bag. This means that sometime during the drive to the airport, or the flight, or the drive home, the orange T-shirt found a portal into the 5th dimension and slipped through. It undoubtedly slipped back out into the luggage of a traveler in an oppositely oriented copy of our universe. Somewhere, in some other universe, a polar copy of me opened her bag to find an extra orange T-shirt.

That's the only logical explanation I can come up with.

3. It is not just hicks who have never heard of the pu pu platter. Or, if it is just hicks, then hicks come from all over the world. Sitting at my table at the Chinese restaurant last night were people currently residing in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Texas, and my home state. Among that group were people who were originally from Russia and Greece, and people who had lived all over the world. I asked, and no one knew what the pu pu platter was, although no one found it quite as hilarious as I did. So if you don't know, you are in good company.

Also, I asked Google, and turns out the pu pu platter is fake Chinese food anyway. So you can feel high and mighty and snobby yourself for not knowing what the pu pu platter would be, because people who know eat at fake Chinese restaurants. My good friend and officemate in grad school was from mainland China. She took me once to an actual Chinese restaurant in the Bay Area. They had a different menu, all in Chinese, for their patrons like my grad school friend, and a completely different menu in English for those of us who only know fake Chinese. There was no pu pu platter on her menu!

Ok. That's it. I don't actually get that many comments. But now you see that sometimes I do actually respond.