Weekly Update - 7/9/25

What a wild and weird trip it's already been. I'm in a hotel lobby in Coln, where I've got a handful of hours to kill waiting for my friend to come by and pick me up, but it's a good point for me to get out an update and let people know where I am, what's been going on and how the trip's been so far, because some of it has been strange and wild.

With about four hours remaining into my flight into Frankfurt on Tuesday, the cabin lights came on and I heard over the intercom a sentence I didn't know even got uttered on planes - "We're currently experiencing a medical emergency. Is there a doctor on the plane?" No idea what happened, if the person was okay or not, but the flight crew was definitely rattled for the rest of the trip.

When I arrived in Frankfurt, it took me a little bit to get my footing, but found my way to the train station and got on the right train up to Coln/Cologne. Found myself on the steps of the Cathedral while I figured out how to get down to the subway and take the short jaunt over to my hotel.

I got to the hotel and hadn't really slept in about 30 hours, and was trying to hold on, trying to keep myself awake until eight or nine local time at night, but after a meal in the hotel restaurant, I went up to my room at 7 pm and just didn't have the energy to keep going. So I laid down and woke up at 11pm local feeling like I'd slept for a day, but also like I was still in need of another day or two of local time, because, hey, it was a 4 hour nap, not real rest, so I went back to bed, and woke up again at 2 am local, and the body was like, "now?" and I was like, "no," and it was like "fine." So I went back to sleep and ended up waking up every two hours from a recurring dream that I was part of a travelling stunt crew that was a cover for a bunch of treasure hunters, but I could never seem to be asleep long enough to find out what the bigger story was. But when I finally woke up at 11 a.m., I was tired again, and yet, I went out and had a great day wandering around, seeing the city.

I'm not a religious person, but the cathedral is a very impressive piece of architecture, and so I went in and sat inside there for a while, and that was quite the experience. I stopped and got lunch while I was out, and was given a burger far bigger than I could handle eating.

I tried getting writing done on the flight from SFO to Frankfurt, but I think I just needed to get through the trip. I ended up finishing a new chapter of Before The Storm yesterday, and I have about five hours to kill here before my friend shows up to pick me up for the rest of my trip, so I'm going to get lunch in the hotel restaurant, and I'll also try and get some writing done while I'm here, but I'm not going to make any promises on how much I'll get done. We'll see what happens. Once my friend picks me up, I'm pretty sure I'll be occupied nonstop from the minute my lift arrives until the point I'm getting back on a plane in Frankfurt on Sunday morning to head home. At some point in my life, I'll probably have a story to tell about that time, but we'll see.

I'm also not going to post anything to the public sites this weekend, but once I get back, I'll line up a bunch of stuff for the following week, so there will be a big chunk up for that week. I'll try and space it out a bit for LE, and I'll get it to Simon over at EMCSA loads of time early for review.

I expect I'll be creatively recharged when I get resettled back in California time, but the week after I'll be in Denver for my first Red Rocks show, and then have a Magic prerelease weekend I'll be judging, but I'm going to get content out during then as well. I've already started work on the next QT2 chapter, and I've got starts on a few other things as well. I'm going to try and jam content out when I can. So we'll see what it looks like...

Thanks again to everyone for your patience.