Cheap Entertainment!

So now I'm in Missoula at another cheap conference. Sadly, the keynote speaker for this conference could not make it due to a health issue, and I'm not interested in the pinch-speakers so I probably DID pay 25$ for a banquet I won't attend. That's a bummer, but wasting 3 or 4 hours of my life on something that I would find mindbendingly dull just to "use" the 25$ ticket would be worse.

Anyway, the cheap entertainment is not at the conference. I left after my paper and hanging around just enough to be seen and kiss some professional-butt...I mean networking. My friend Jeanne's (Hi Jeanne!) daughter goes to school here and is a very nice young woman. She treated me to lunch in the cafeteria. Then I treated her to a dinner downtown. Then she treated me to roller derby! The roller derby was a double header so for the price of the ticket (which she paid...she's quick) we got over 4 hours of entertainment! The roller girls were great. There were some excellent athletes, and some who were on the team just to use their giant butts to block the skinny jammer girls. The jammers are sort of the quarterbacks or forwards. Then there is a pivot, who is sort of the main guard. Then there are the slammers. Some of these were BIG gals. Big butts. And yet, never once did the DJ play this:



I think that showed great restraint on his part. The jammers tend to be pretty skinny, even wiry. They slip through the bigger gals to get points. I totally want to do roller derby now.

We spent part of the evening discussing great names for roller derby teams.
For the older set: The Menopause Mob (the name my siblings and I use for Mom and her friends...Hi Mom). On that team, my derby name would be Polly Estrogen

Or: The Betty Crackers (we'd wear our tights very low). On that team my name would be The Plumber

Or: The Golden Ragers. My name: Mick Jugger

Or: The Mother Loads. My name: Saggy Maggy

Or...well, you get the drift. I think it was 10$ a ticket (I'll find some way to slip the girl some $$). 4 hours of entertainment for 10$ is a pretty good price. Some of the profits went to boob cancer research too so we not only had a good time, we helped save the world.

In reality...I'm a big chicken, a bad roller skater, and I don't like getting hurt so I probably won't pursue the whole roller derby thing.

Tomorrow morning we plan on going to the conference again....HA! Kidding. I sat through my session, since I was pressed into being the session host, and 1.5 other papers. I just cannot listen to people talk about fragments of fragments of fragments of information in 20 minute chunks. Especially when it comes to the joy of pointy rocks. I just can't do it. Ultimately, the minutea (spelling?) do not help me in my job. Big picture stuff is really where it's at. Big new areas of significance? OK, I can use that. Slight variation in sourcing methodology for chert? Don't care and can't use it. Does it make me self centered that I can no longer sit through those papers? I used to GIVE those papers back when I was in the tenure game. No more.

Anyway, enough bitching about conference papers. It could be worse. It's in a nice building and if I'm ambitious I could put on my name tag and get some breakfast rolls and a coffee. But I'd have to walk quite a ways to get it so probably won't.

Rather than going to the conference, we're heading over to some outdoor markets. It might be a tad chilly, but there will be goodies and interesting people. And we'll be in a good area for some cheap lunch.

OK, it's LATE! Like MIDNIGHT! I'm rarely up this late. Off to bed to rest up for more vacation fun tomorrow.