It's all fun and games until somebody goes crazy

I'm back after a week in Denver for my company's annual conference. Us and 18,000+ of our closest friends. I slept for thirteen hours last night. My team and I run the bookstore, and it's pretty exhausting even when the customers are all pleasant. On Tuesday, a crazy woman began verbally attacking one of my colleagues. A different colleague and I politely asked the crazy woman to join us in a private meeting room to find out what her beef was. Thus began a ten-minute onslaught of insults and general hatefulness. I tried my best to calm her down and find out what she actually wanted. I was doing pretty well maintaining my cool, but then she insulted one of my colleagues with a nasty appearance-based epithet, and I stood up, told her I was highly offended, and tried to indicate that I was done meeting with her. At that point she started to cry and apologize profusely. I'm pretty sure she actually WAS having some kind of mental breakdown, so I've just tried to let the whole thing go. (My colleague said when the epithet was hurled and I stood up, he thought for a second I was going to launch myself at the woman, and he was trying to decide how long to let me whale on her before he interceded. Hee.)

Last year at our conference, a woman lost her mind upon finding out that we were out of her size of t-shirt. She actually did start to get physical, pushing the person staffing the t-shirt booth, and we had to call security. Over a t-shirt. I guess when you get 18,000 people together, there are bound to be a few with mental problems.

Here's Huey doing stadium at a 3-day event last week. I hear his dressage was lovely, too.

At last

That's the sky today. And that sound you hear is the entire southern Willamette Valley weeping with relief.

Jumping + water skiing + roller blading = ?

What if the guy on the skates missed a ramp? Ow.

The Bechdel test

I ran across this video on Twitter a few days ago and thought it was really interesting. In the past ten years, with the popularity of Buffy, Sidney Bristow of "Alias," and Zoe of "Firefly," I really thought that the zeitgeist of women in television and movies was changing. Now I see that, if it is changing, it's doing so at a glacial pace.

Today, I found both of these pictures in the same article at TVGuide.com. [Insert inarticulate cry of rage and despair here.]

New Huey video

A harmonious schooling session; the kerfuffle at 4:52 is not a spook but a trip. Huey is famously fumble-footed except when jumping 3' 6" cross country. Go figure.