Sorry for the silence - it's the strigiform feathers

Went on vacation the first week in May, kinda. My company had it's national HR conference on my daughter's birthday. Rather than missing either, the family came along, celebrating the first year mark in the hotel pub. Some interesting travel tidbits. 

Hotels 1: If the hotel's web site says that the room has a refrigerator and when you get there you can't find it, a call to the desk will cause them to immediately roll a fridge into the room. We didn't expect this. 

Hotels 2:If the hotel has been told by the conference to put things in your room while you're at a scheduled function, they will do so without knocking. Putting the do not disturb sign up will slow them enough to knock, then open the door to more properly hear you tell them to go the hell away. The first one caught my wife in bed with the baby asleep; the second while she was nursing. I didn't want the books from the speakers that much, guys. 

Birds: Along the way we visited the Carolina Raptor Center. This is a facility dedicated to the healing and reintroduction into the wild of wounded birds of prey, and they keep any birds that are not able to hunt on their own. Lovely grounds, friendly staff and beautiful birds. Mind you, they're beautiful in the same way that well made swords are - focused to a sleek lethality - but I have always liked them. Did you know that a barn owl's huge eye sockets serve to funnel sound in to the ears, and that their ears are lopsided to help it better triangulate on distant sounds? I'm so using that to explain Formain giants at some point. 

Sourthen Debutants are lovely in ther Prom Dresses. Some of their dates, on the other hand, were wearing backwards facing baseball caps with their tuxes. Sigh. 

Charlotte by Night: I have already run a Vampire 1 shot set around Carlotte, and the city is top of the list if I decide to go back to the game at some point. Not only does it have the lovely option of the prince actually being named Charlotte, but the city didn't really exist until after the civil war, so I can dodge a lot of issues there. Plus, the 4th Ward is full of refurbished Victorian houses and carefully maintained side streets just off the city center. There's a very helpful (if boosterish) history of the city at the Levine Museum that I'll be drawing on if the time comes. 

Have somewhere to be: we adopted a 5-6 hour driving day to keep the wee one from going mad. This worked fine when we got on the road at noon and could begin nighttime rituals as soon as we stopped, or when we got moving at 7 AM but had plans in place (Hi

adoxograph) for the afternoon at our destination. Sitting in Hazelton PA for 5 hours with nothing to do is a recipe for disaster. 

In any event, we're home now. Hope to post my version of Spider Man 3 later - it's better than what we saw last night.