Boskone?

Cattitude and I need to decide soon whether we're going to Boskone. At this point we have memberships, a hotel reservation starting the Tuesday night before the convention, and tickets from Seattle to Boston on that Tuesday. (This was done with the idea of combining a con with some apartment-hunting or at least research, which is now moot since we have a signed lease.)

If we decide to go, we need to buy return tickets and confirm with the cat-sitter. If not, we cancel the hotel reservation, tell the cat-sitter we won't need her, and probably throw away the BOS-SEA tickets. But that's a sunk cost, it would just be polite to let Jet Blue know if we won't be flying that day.

In favor: the con would be fun; Cattitude (and secondarily I) could do some exploring in Boston, a city I know better than he does but neither of us knows well; and I'd get some time with Adrian.

Against: Staying home would be significantly cheaper, and it would be a week in a hotel instead of our own apartment. We would be without cats and kitchen, and if I have freelance work I'd be doing it without my nice big monitor and keyboard, just the laptop and mouse.

Anyone reading this who is planning to be at Boskone, please speak up. Ditto any fannish Boston-area friends who are sure you won't be, please. Also anyone else who has thoughts or suggestions on this.

further adventures in security questions

I logged in to the TIAA-CREF website today (my retirement funds are with them, because my former employer somehow qualified as an academic institution), and they wanted me to update my security profile.

That turned out to include adding security questions. The list of options this time includes, along with things that seem too easy to look up, and things that don't apply (I didn't go to the prom), several to which my reaction was "I don't know…" I could ask my mother for my maternal grandmother's middle name; I'm not sure there's any way to find out what city my paternal grandmother was born in. What country, maybe (she was born in Russia, before the revolution, and I think my father said it was Ukrainian, but we had that conversation when it would have been the Ukrainian SSR].

Still, I found some I could answer without making up something random and writing it down in the list of passwords (the software would let me put "How-would-I-know" for my grandmother's middle name, and might have accepted "pi=3.141592," but then I would need to remember having said that), and maybe I'll ask my mother for her mother's middle name the next time we talk.

Exercise month in review

I'm happy with how I'm doing right now, in terms of persistence as well as the details of what/how much I've been doing.

( numbers, and sets of numbers )