Edmund Schweppe

I had a fun time, even though Star has given up on being COVID-free. There were no announced cases on-island last week, and apparently most (if not all) conferees tested themselves prior to arrival. I did stay masked up indoors in public areas (and ate my meals outdoors). I also carried my little Aranet CO2 monitor around. Even indoors, most of the time, CO2 levels were down in the 450-600 range. There was a *lot* of wind most days, with not very much rain, so the windows were kept open almost all the time.

I'm still not pleased that the island management decided to give up on being COVID-free. I wasn't the only person on island masking up for some or all of the time; there were a few other conferees, and even a few staff members, masked up most of the time.

The mainland weather was hot and humid all week; that meant that the island weather was cool and humid. (Advantage of being surrounded by sixty-plus-degree Atlantic Ocean water.) There were a couple of quick downpours, but overall the week was dry.

Of course, this week is also going to be hot and humid on the mainland; alas, this time *I'm* in the middle of it. Sigh.

Got my registration request in for this summer's edition of the All Star 2 conference on Star Island.

Something to look forward to, while I await the next snow event. (Supposedly three to four inches in my neck of the woods by tomorrow evening.)

I'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.

The 2020 Star Island conference season is cancelled, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I just received the following email from Joe Watts (the SIC CEO) and the Board:
( Read more... )

I cannot say I'm surprised. While there's plenty of nice empty rock on Star for a few hundred conferees to spread out, the same cannot be said of the ferry, the conference halls, or the dining room. And evacuating people off the island once they fall ill is a challenge at the best of times, which this year will not be.

This doesn't make me any less sad or disappointed. Just because this is clearly the right decision doesn't mean I have to like it. And, frankly, this sucks.

But I will be back. Next year, or the year after, or the year after that.

As threatened promised earlier, I've put some of my photos from this year's Star Island trip up on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/edmundschweppe/sets/72157655684432790

are now up on my Flickr site.

I'm back from another wonderful week on Star Island. The weather was nearly perfect, with enough of an overcast on the boat days to keep from frying on the docks, and with near-constant sunshine during the week itself.

My volunteer job was to lead the "Chanticleers" - a self-selecting and quite motley crew of conferees who parade throughout the hotels and cottages of Star every morning, rousing their fellow Shoalers with a brief weather report and a summons to breakfast in song. (For certain values of "song", at least; I think we did awfully darn good for that early in the morning!)

Photos are up[1] on Flickr in the unimaginatively named All Star II 2012 photo set. Alas, the one thing I neglected to bring along was my tripod. Between that and the surprising sunburn I picked up Sunday, I didn't spend much time playing with my new camera.

[1] Or at least they're on their way up; iPhoto is taking its own sweet time to update Flickr, for reasons I cannot fathom.

For those who might be interested, here are a few pictures that I took last week at Star Island:
( we cut because we care )
They were taken with my Adorable Overhyped MP3 Player (also known as an iPod Touch), but came out okay nonetheless.

(The "full" photostream is here on Flickr; more Star photos are available here.)

Fun was had by all. Especially me.

Now commenceth the grocery shopping, laundry, catching up on various and sundry online communities, etc. Photos still need to be weeded through prior to inflicting them on an unsuspecting universe.

I've made it back home from a wonderful week on Star Island. I managed to do very little and enjoyed almost all of it. The food was good, the speaker decent, and the weather was mostly great. (The excessive heat on Tuesday being the exception.) The ocean was cold, which was a good thing on the hot days. I reconnected with folks from previous years, and started on new connections. The closest thing to work that I ever did was to help pour beer at the evening social hours. Next year, I'll try for something different, though; I couldn't participate in most of the adult chorus rehearsals because I had to set up the beer tables at the same time.

Now it's time for showers, and Internet, and other bits and pieces of mainland life.

Back to work Monday, alas.

Well, let's see:

1) We finally got a snowstorm to leave some of the white stuff around here (instead of continuing to dump on Baltimore and DC). Much prettier looking than the combination of grimy plow leavings and bare patches that I've had for the last few weeks.

2) Season 3 of Shadow Unit is underway.

3) I've put in my request for this year's Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference. I missed last year's conference due to the unhappy timing of certain events at the Current Paying Gig; however, those events are not going to recur this year. The Great And Powerful Oz Has Spoken.

4) I've also mailed off my registration for the All-Star II conference on Star Island. Between Star and 4th Street Fantasy, the summer should get started with a bang.

...

Hmm. Looks like four things make a post. Or at least this post. Works for me!

I finally went through the pictures I took last week on Star Island, and some of them came out pretty good - at least, for the pocket-sized camera I was using:
( cut because we care! )

Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24829405@N00/sets/72157621357577675/ for those who might be interested

... having had a wonderful week at Star Island.

Alas, now things like laundry and grocery shopping await. As well as going through pictures to see which ones are most worthy of sharing with the Interneti ...

I'm back from my vacation on Star Island, a conference center run jointly by the UUA and the UCC off the New Hampshire coast. The weather was beautiful - no rain (except for the briefest of sprinkles on Wednesday), easterly winds the first few days (which brought fog, but also let the harbor warm up all the way to 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and westerlies the last few (which brought low humidity and tremendous visibility).

There's a lot of music at All-Star II. Many of the conferees bring guitars and other instruments. Two folks (one a player with the Boston Pops, if I heard right; the other a member of the Marine Corps Band) brought trombones. We also had a fiddler (who also brought a set of harmonicas), a ukulele, a couple of flutes, and a lot of singers. So there were lots of impromptu singalongs on the rocks, or on the Oceanic Hotel porch, or in one or another of the smaller buildings - in addition to the "organized" singing as part of chapel services and the various talent shows. Not to mention the many musical talents among the summer staff, affectionately known as "Pelicans" or "Pels."

Another highlight, for me, was a tour of neighboring Appledore Island, home of the Shoals Marine Laboratory. The tour was led by Sarah O'Connor, the curator of the Vaughn Museum (a small museum on Star) - who, it appears, is better known to the LJ world as hakerh. (waves)

The downside, alas, was that I knew almost nobody in the conference. This was my first time at All-Star II, and most of the other folks there had been going for years if not generations. However, those same folks know full well how out-of-place "new Shoalers" can feel, and several folks made sure they took me under their wings (so to speak).

One of the traditions that all Star conferences have is an one-size-fits-all-occasions chant. You hear it as the first boat arrives at the island dock; you hear it when the conferees beat the Pels at softball (or the other way around), you hear it whenever the spirit calls forth the need to cheer. The first three lines are always the same - the last line varies to fit the occasion. The last time you'll hear it - as the boat pulls away from the pier, taking the conferees back to the mainland - it goes like this:

S-T-A-R! S-T-A-R!
Oceanic! Oceanic!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
You will come back! You will come back! You will come back!

I'm thinking there's some truth in that last line ...

Back in the days when I hung around alt.callahans (before AOL! became a synonym for "Me, too!", but after the Net was no longer flat), folks who were going to be offline for an extended period would announce the fact by posting a message with either the ABEND (Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation) or ABVND (Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation) keywords. Generally, if you were doing something you wanted to do, but it caused you to be offline, you chose ABVND; if you were doing something that you were required to do, ABEND was the term of art.

I'm about to go ABVND for a week.

Tomorrow morning, I'm off for a week-long conference on Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I'm looking forward to it - this will be the first really vacationy vacation I've taken in I don't know how long - but Star is Off The Net. Electricity and water are generated on-island. While you might be able to get a cell signal, you shouldn't count on it.

And no Internet access for the conferees. Which makes a lot of sense; a big reason to go to Star is to get away from the modern hyperworld for a while, and get back in touch with reality.

However, this will be the first time that I've spent a week completely offline since there was offline to completely spend a week. Back in my submarining days, of course, we'd spend weeks or months at a time under radio silence. But that was in the pre-Internet era of human history.

So ... if you don't hear from me next week, it's not anything you said. Play nice while I'm gone, now!