Sunday, June 23: Wrapping Up

General Assembly has that odd quality of simultaneously seeming eternal and being over too soon.

I just finished my write-up of the Ware Lecture for the General Assembly web site. (A marvelous talk about the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi: scary, informative, and refreshingly sensible. That's about a thousand words less than I just wrote about it.) It was my last commitment, and having everything done feels wonderful. And yet, I suspect that for the next week or two, ordinary life will seem a little dull without a few thousand Unitarian Universalists to bump into.

There are so many things I didn't get around to talking about: Portland, for example. Other than some light showers today, the weather has been marvelous. I'll have to come back sometime in the rainy winter so that I can see why I really don't want to move here. From the convention-center side of the river, the view over the city center to the wooded hills behind is idyllic.

I love the food here. The local beers are fabulous, and when will I ever again have the option of smoked salmon hash for breakfast?

Free light rail between the convention center and downtown—how cool is that? I haven't been in a car since I drove to the Manchester Airport Tuesday. All week I've been gloating every time I walk past the "Parking: $15/day" sign at my hotel.

But you never get done talking about everything there is to talk about. At some point you just say, "I gotta go."

See you next year? Hope so.

Reported by Doug Muder; edited by Pat Emery.