Still in Anchorage, still

Went to the conference this morning (after staying up way too late watching TV -- bad horror flicks with a gothic ghost twist and Knocked Up). Really excellent events this year. David Cohn of SpotUs was the presenter for two sessions, one on internet tools to enable journalists to do all kinds of exciting things, the other on models for community-funded journalism. There was also a panel on transparency and openess in government. Absolutely wonderful. I learned some amazing things today...

Anyway, called the airport to check on the flight. Everything was a go. Got there, blue skies, etc. And then, ta da, on weather hold. We didn't get to find out what that meant until 5:30, when they announced that all flights for the day were canceled. Why? well, the stuff that started falling out of the sky around then was ash. It looked like snow, it was so thick. Couldn't see the sun. Had to wait another hour to catch the bus back to town and check back into the hotel...read a lot of The Ecology of Commerce, however. (Really interesting book. More on this one later.)

So now I'm stuck here in Anchorage again, blogging away on the hotel's business computer, and, unless some miracle happens, I'll have no way home. Hans will be coming to get me. The library meeting will have to go on without me, which is probably good for the library, but which I would really have liked to have been at.