Minneapolis, I am not in you!

There's something really cool about reading an article from a newspaper four hundred and fifty miles away and knowing every single person mentioned, and some of them quite well. And also . . . more than a little bit sad.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune just ran a nice little piece entitled "Blurring fact, fiction is elementary at U Sherlock Holmes confab," and the names . . . Hobbs, Stinson, Mason . . . oh, the names!

Sure, Twitter had been slipping out dribs and drabs all day . . . Chris Redmond getting his schedule together, Vince Wright doing his usual bang-up job with my old favorite topic chronology . . . but somehow, just seeing that article practically splashing out the newspaper version of that classic exclamation, "Oh, my God, it's Don Hobbs!" which was first uttered in Watson, Oklahoma (Home of the Watson Tigers!) nearly eleven years ago.

At this point, it's been at least six years since my last Minnesota Sherlockian conference, and I have hated missing both this one and the one before, due to a variety of factors, primarily based around a career that somehow got more demanding in my later years than it ever was earlier. Now I am reduced to blog-whining and name-dropping, along with that horrible guilty feeling that I somehow could have made it if I just did something different.

Sherlocking is just not all joy, some days, and missing favorite events can be a real kick in the Watson. (I don't know what I really mean by that, other than no one wants to see Watson take a hard boot to the anything.)

But, hey, one of these days. One of these days . . . .