I did the sensible thing on Wednesday morning.  I slept.

Whatever the people at Florida Hospital did, it worked. I slept just fine Tuesday night, but I didn't wanna push it, and so I spent most of the morning sleeping. I wanted to make absolutely sure that the pain in my guts wasn't going to come back, and it didn't. It was 70 and sunny outside, and I think the cleaning staff was porked off that the "Do Not Disturb" tag never came off my doorknob, but I wasn't going anywhere if there was much chance that the flaming baseball would reappear under my sternum. It didn't.

By around 1:00pm, I felt well enough to wake up, peel the remaining sensor tags off my chest, legs and stomach, and take a shower, which I seriously needed. If you've ever endured serious-ass pain, you know that one aspect of it is that you start sweating out all sorts of weird compounds in your body, and you reek afterward. I felt much better being clean, so I put my wabbit sweatshirt on and went over to Lotusphere.

You know what? Thanks to Twitter, I don't feel like I missed a whole lot of anything on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had my new 9700 with me at all times, and anytime anyone said anything about a session, a lab or a BoF, I read about it. And a lot more. I walked into the show and felt like I hadn't missed a thing. But of course, I'd missed everything. Remember that one of my goals this year was finding a new job, and Tuesday is a critical day for things like that. I'd missed it all, either lying in my room in pain or lying on a hospital bed. So, I made the best of it, and made the rounds on the showcase floor. It was a good show for a lot of the vendors, and for some of them it was a terrific show. Even so, at 4:00pm on Wednesday, one hour earlier than in previous years, it all shut down and the Disneybots waved everyone away from the escalators.

I have to thank the FaceTime folks for my flashy sign again... it was most cool and it's a dang useful thing.

We all milled around in the lobby for several hours before heading over to the Wednesday night gathering. If there was anybody I forgot to say hi to, I apologize. I was being good and trying not to do anything that might bring back the flaming baseball. Still, just like every year, there were far too many people to keep track of and too much fun stuff going on. We all ended up on the buses in good spirits.

For the first time in years, nobody was allowed to drive over to MGM/Disney, now called "Disney Hollywood Studios." Realistically, I couldn't figure out the reason, except that just as they did years ago, the IBM/Lotus staff wanted to applaud us all in. They did.

The 9700 was good about taking pictures. I did have my Sanyo FH1 with me, which is still a terrific camera, but the difference in quality between it and the Blackberry in low light wasn't as great as you'd think. I found myself pulling out the FH1 less and less. For HD video, though, it was just fine. It's funny, though... this year, we never came close to creating a crowd at MGM. There were years when we jammed the place, and this year, it was as if we rattled around with no spot ever getting to a critical mass. And, as always, it was far too soon when it was time to go home. A bunch of us decided to just walk back along the path rather than wait for the buses. Against my better judgment, since it was getting kinda cool out and my lungs don't handle that well any more, I joined in, periodically cajoling the marching mob into whistling "The Colonel Bogey March."

I never got to sing at Kimonos.

Thanks again to those people who know who they are for being the friends they are when they were needed. I got home safe and, still pain-free, went to sleep.

To be continued, y'all...

No extraneous blabber available.