Greetings from Snowy WNY!

Worshiping at the Mother Church.

Mother of Fausto is having some medical issues, so Fausto has been visiting her in the Rochester, NY, area for the past few days, helping out. No access to home e-mail and it snowed last night. Brrr.

But it's not all dull and dutiful. F'rinstance, I've been grabbing meals from the unbelievable selection of ready-to-eat prepared foods at the flagship Wegmans supermarket in Pittsford. And I've been enjoying watching the out-for-blood political ads in this traditionally Republican area that stands a good chance to vote decisively blue this time around.

And best of all, since I had to make a side business trip to Buffalo this morning, I got to attend the First Impromptu Millard Fillmore Memorial Western New York UU Bloggers' Meetup and Soundoff, at the Higher Grounds Coffeehouse in Amherst this afternoon. In addition to myself, the packed event was attended by, um, well, only Indrax, but then again, it was only arranged last night, so it was pretty good even to be able to round up two of us on such short notice. Not that we thought to invite anyone else or anything. The coffeehouse had big couches and wireless internet, and Indrax had his laptop, so we sucked down the Java and surfed for half an hour or so. If only Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston had joined us, it would have been just like "Friends".

Among the topics debated and resolved in that half hour were: pseudonymous blogging (we support it); "outing" pseudonymous bloggers (we oppose it); bygone internal politics of a certain church in a large Francophone Canadian city (nous n'étions pas là, et ne pouvons pas juger), the wisdom of burdening new people with old complaints about matters that they were not involved in and have no ability to correct (unwise), our favorite UU blogs (ChaliceBlog, PeaceBang, Philocrites, Wild Hunt, and Jess's Journal were mentioned, but for the written record I should also add Making Chutney, A People So Bold, Unity, Never Say Never, and Ms. Kitty's Saloon, and I'm sure there are others that I should also mention); ex-Catholic baggage (it sucks); crowding Christianity and Christian seminarians out of UUism (it also sucks); and flipping the bird to the room on your way out the door (it too sucks).

My goodness, debating is so much more efficient when there are only two viewpoints and they largely agree.

P. S. There's a yeasty conversation on pseudonymous blogging gathering steam here.