Conference Contrast

I attended a conference this weekend for front-end developers. It  would be difficult to overstate how dissimilar the audience, not to mention the material, was from the political conferences I attended two weeks ago.
Nonetheless I enjoyed it and was once again inspired. It may be difficult for many contemporaries to imagine that anyone's calling could come somewhere between conservative politics and front-end development, but that is the course I have charted.

Second-guessing skating on the canal

Following a fabulous weekend at a political conference, I met with S. on Saturday for one more, non-political, night in the nation's capital. Well, mostly anyway - there was a passionate discussion over dinner with S.'s uncle, who shares my passion for politics, but certainly not my party affiliation.
This morning, following a visit with her grandmother, we discussed stopping to skate on the canal, which had uncharacteristically been reopened after having been closed once already, but in the end we elected to skip it and packed up and headed off for the four-hour plus trip home. Once we were on the highway, however, I realized that I had left my overcoat at her aunt's.
After we turned around and retrieved it, on the way back home once again, I made a unilateral decision to not skip the canal the second time past, and I steered us into a parking garage downtown. We walked the short distance to the canal, donned our skates and went for an enjoyable trip, complete with fried pastry, on one of the most spectacular skating facilities in the world. There were no regrets.

Manning Up

This weekend I traveled to our capital city for a conservative political conference. This was my second consecutive year attending the national conference for this organization, and I was enthralled and inspired by the experience. I met many enthusiastic people from different parts of the country and was encouraged to return to my city and take up the torch.