Things I can heartily recommend

After surviving the rest of the conference (there was drama involving a competitor going out of business, a salesperson picking a fight with a client right before they're supposed to speak at a different conference so I had to write a new presentation from scratch, and Marketo going down right before we sent out the Gartner report that just dropped, ironically half an hour before the Marketo keynote, all happening in the margins while I was trying to actually pay attention to panels), my employee (is there a word besides "direct report" that's not so stuffy? "Boss" is easy to use, there's no equivalent going downwards) and I went to the Cirque du Soleil show "O". (Wow, holy run-on sentence, Batman. I'm too tired to revise.)

Anyway, "O" is freaking amazing. It's the water one - the floor is a giant water tank with movable platforms that raise and lower to change what's pool and what's not and the relative depths. So you'll have people just rise and lower out of the water. The aerialists will do their thing and then just...fall. Splash. There are fire dancers kicking 2-3 inches of water around. All kinds of amazing diving, including flinging people three stories in the air to do their somersaults and the dive in. At one point, the floor raises up and all the rescue divers are lying there in their scuba suits, flopping pathetically like fish on land. There's a whole act going on at the same time, this is just in the background. Then without comment, the platforms lower again and release the divers back into the water. Anyway, it's just jaw-droppingly cool.

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Completely other recommendation - so pre-Vegas, last weekend, Chuckro and I went up to the Catskills for the weekend. Now, there was a whole plan. Our kitchen is being remodeled after a slow leak warped the floor and covered the inside of the cabinets with mold. As mentioned earlier, we ended up losing a day because of contractors. So we headed up Friday. Because of timing, I ditched our Friday plans. We get halfway up and get a call - our food tour for Saturday has just been cancelled because they're predicted to get a foot of snow. We would have been skeptical but we were already driving through sleet. In the end, I just cancelled our dinner reservations (which were an hour north of us, in Hudson, which we would have passed through post-food tour but were no longer going to) and we gave up on all plans.

Which was fine. Because I'd rented the cabin at Wing's Castle, and it was FREAKING ADORABLE. It was just so pretty and peaceful. When we got snowed in, they dug us out. We read and I wrote and we basically just lounged around all weekend and it was glorious.

If you're looking for extremely eccentric Catskills B&Bs, I have to recommend this place. This couple spent 45 years building themselves a castle from scratch. It's completely insane. No architecture degree or building experience. It's actually really pretty and incredibly charming. The inside looks like an antique dealer exploded. There's a tower room and a dungeon room. There's a moat you can swim in during the summer. There's random armor and an underground passageway and a Buddha room full of candles. Dragons embedded in the stonework. Amazing view over the vineyard next door. The town of Millpond has some great restaurants. There's not a ton of stuff to do in the area, but there are some cute wineries and hikes and gardens and stuff if it's not, y'know, sleeting. Really pleasant weekend destination, really memorable pictures. (I put them on Facebook. It's less of a pain than uploading to DW, I'm afraid.)

Anyway, would seriously consider staying there again.