Lisa Wins an Award

I have mentioned before that Lisa (user handle KumaBear) is an enthusiastic participant in ActiveWorlds, a virtual-reality platform that has been around since the Dark Ages 1995, where she has been building the virtual town of Bleakwood. Last night, the ActiveWorlds user community presented the Cy Awards, which are voted upon by the users to honor achievement in different categories. I'm pleased to announce that Lisa's Bleakwood won the 2014 Cy Award for Virtual Art Design. (You may have to choose 2014 if you go to that page; I don't see any way to directly link to the specific year.) Lisa was not able to attend the awards ceremony (she didn't bring her AW-enabled computer on this trip), but sent an acceptance speech to a good friend to read on her behalf. Lisa is chuffed, as the British say, and I'm proud of her.

Maximum Hotel Utlilization

As expected, the worse-than-usual late arrival of Amtrak #5, the westbound California Zephyr (12 h 34 m late, arriving at the Emeryville terminal station at 4:44 AM this morning) has significantly delayed the departure of eastbound #6 (which uses the same trainset). When I awoke briefly just before 6 AM, I confirmed that train wouldn't be leaving until after Noon, reset the alarm, and went back to sleep. As I write this, the originally scheduled 9:10 AM departure has been pushed back to 2 PM.

On the bright side, this means that we got to sleep in this morning, enjoy a leisurely breakfast in the hotel, and we are getting pretty much the maximum possible use out of our free Hilton night, as they have let us extend our stay until 1 PM. A side effect is that, by charging the breakfast to the room, I've goosed my HHonors account back to life and do not have to worry about my remaining points (enough for one more free night) expiring for a while.