Back from Star
Jul. 17th, 2022 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edschweppeI'm back from the All Star II conference on Star Island.
A pretty good week, all in all. The weather was mostly perfect, not too hot and mostly dry. We didn't have any fog to speak of until this morning; there were a couple of brief downpours, one of which graced us with a brief double rainbow. I did get a bit of a sunburn the one day I tried doing loops on the perimeter road; frankly, I was getting plenty of exercise just going back and forth between my room in Cottage C and the main hotel/dining room. I did get some singing in this year; some of which was with the choir, and some of which was the less-well-trained but much louder Chanticleers (aka the wake-up singers), who "serenade" the various hotel floors and cottages with more-or-less-in-tune musical descriptions of the day's breakfast. Apart from that, I did a fair amount of nothing at all, and enjoyed just about all of it.
This year the island has a very strict COVID policy, requiring everyone staying overnight (conferees and staff alike) to be both as fully vaccinated as possible and to test negative prior to arrival; day-trippers don't have to test negative but also aren't allowed in any of the buildings, which greatly reduces the risk that they'll infect anyone. (The on-island staff are being tested on a recurring basis as well.) A fair number of folks had to cancel at the last minute due to testing positive. Despite the disappointment of having said folks not attend, I think overall that policy is a good one.
A pretty good week, all in all. The weather was mostly perfect, not too hot and mostly dry. We didn't have any fog to speak of until this morning; there were a couple of brief downpours, one of which graced us with a brief double rainbow. I did get a bit of a sunburn the one day I tried doing loops on the perimeter road; frankly, I was getting plenty of exercise just going back and forth between my room in Cottage C and the main hotel/dining room. I did get some singing in this year; some of which was with the choir, and some of which was the less-well-trained but much louder Chanticleers (aka the wake-up singers), who "serenade" the various hotel floors and cottages with more-or-less-in-tune musical descriptions of the day's breakfast. Apart from that, I did a fair amount of nothing at all, and enjoyed just about all of it.
This year the island has a very strict COVID policy, requiring everyone staying overnight (conferees and staff alike) to be both as fully vaccinated as possible and to test negative prior to arrival; day-trippers don't have to test negative but also aren't allowed in any of the buildings, which greatly reduces the risk that they'll infect anyone. (The on-island staff are being tested on a recurring basis as well.) A fair number of folks had to cancel at the last minute due to testing positive. Despite the disappointment of having said folks not attend, I think overall that policy is a good one.