Wow, is it Sunday already? We’ve been home for a few days now, but it feels like we’re still moving, that’s how busy we’ve been. We spent five days in Sacramento at the California Library Association’s annual conference doing mega-booth duty in the exhibit hall. I was also doing some podcasting so attempted more than once to be in two places at the same time. As has been shown in several sci-fi movies over the years, time travel is very tiring. The conference was a lot of fun, except for the cold I caught right before we left. Popping Tylenol Cold & Sinus tablets kept me semi-snot-free, but a little foggy at times. I tried to avoid hoicking in public as much as possible.

We had to drive as we were taking a – there’s no polite way to say this – SHITLOAD of stuff with us, including a four foot tall stuffed gorilla named Adam, and an equally sizeable tiger named Tony. Also in our humongous rented SUV: four computer trunks, two large projector screens, several boxes of brochures and handouts – oh, and us! Packing the SUV was a Chinese-puzzle-box challenge that took Chuck more than two hours to solve. I took a movie of the final push. Once on the road we could never back up and Chuck had no rear visibility at all.

We came home with less stuff as most of the brochures were handed out and the tiger was raffled off. Adam came back with us, as did all of the computer trunks. A bunch of stuff was mailed so we had visibility out the back! We stopped in Watsonville on the return to visit my aunt, then continued home. By the time we got home my cold had turned into pretty much nothing (yay!). The day after we got home, all of the stuff we shipped caught up with us, which was unfortunate as we had returned the massive SUV and had only the Accord and the MINI to transport stuff to the storage locker. Luckily our neighborhood UPS Store is the friendliest, best place in town, and one of the owner’s dads has a pickup truck and took a load over to storage for us. The MINI once again proved itself up to the task of carrying surprisingly large loads (and now I have bungee cords to tie things down). So by Friday we were officially done with the heavy-lifting portion of the conference. Then it was time to catch up with work, which we’ve been doing ever since.

Meanwhile, Adam the gorilla has been hanging with us for a few days, before he heads to his new home next week. He’s not too much trouble but he is large and our dog has shown an unfortunate desire to rip out his throat so we have to be a little careful where we put him. Currently he is sitting on top of our wine refrigerator. As we have been carting him around basically everywhere we go for over a week now, I started documenting his travels. Here’s the story of Adam, told in pictures.