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I spent this past weekend in Troy, Michigan, at ConFusion, a favorite SF convention of esrblog's and mine.

This year's theme was "High Voltage ConFusion." Despite the theme, I thought the con was rather low voltage, with a more relaxed attitude about adding items and decorations in keeping with the theme than some of the ConFusions I've been to in years past.

That's not to say that the con wasn't fun, though. There were quite a few parties, at least on Saturday (even though some of those parties were just a bunch of friends, three types of food, a DVD player and a ton of videos). As always, there was a Masquerade (of which I was one of the judges), and two dances. And since the crew of the floating Pirate Party was the Fan GOH, the pirates were out in full fig. They even set up a Pirate suite, all (reasonably convincing fake) Gothic stone tracery windows and flickering (fake) torches, stocked with nearly $500 in gold foil wrapped chocolate coins.

Speaking of chocolate, esrblog and I attended a dark chocolate tasting, instead of running one. This one was run by tammylc, who does this sort of thing professionally (check out her website! http://www.tammystastings.com). We tasted and evaluated 8 different dark chocolates for texture, mouthfeel, aroma, and flavors, and I learned some interesting things about chocolate as well as a *LOT* about how a chocolate tasting can be run. It was great fun, and I may attend another one of tammylc's tastings some time.

But I was feeling too low-energy, this time around, to push myself to do a large number of events. esrblog was away on a trip to the Bay Area and his flight in was delayed, so that he finally made it to the con hotel at about 3:00 A.M. on Friday morning (kudos and thanks again, matt_arnold, for driving out to Detroit Metro to retrieve him). In addition, I had a cold and an ear infection when I headed out for the con (both of which are a lot better now, thank Ghod), and a persistently achy shoulder which will be the subject of surgery next month.

On the other hand, we had a lovely sit down dinner at a very nice restaurant with several friends who live in the area, including treebones, phecda, and dawnwolf, and I got to play India Rails, Munchkin Cthulhu, and a game I had never heard of before called Tuchulcha, which, according to esrblog, was something like Sorry and something like backgammon, but had vaguely Etruscan trappings.

Oh, and I got very good food and lots of sleep. In many ways, it was the perfect convention weekend.