The net connection in my room has quit working. I let someone try his computer in my port, because it wouldn't work in his own. I think his computer must be infested with something and that the university must have a system that disables ports if spyware, trojans, or viruses are detected. Our university does that. Ever since he tried my port is dead too, although I've been able to connect using ports elsewhere on campus. Not in the cafeteria, unfortunately, where they have an SBC "freedom link" wireless system -- that costs $8 to connect to.
Today was the last full day of the kongreso. Tomorrow people will begin drifting away. There are meetings in the morning and the solena fermiĝo is around noon. Then there are post kongreso eksursoj to the museum tomorrow afternoon and an all-day excursion on Tuesday. I'm passing up the Tuesday excursion to come home. I still won't get home until evening, but should be able to sleep in my own bed Tuesday night.
Today was a very full day. In the morning, I attended several sessions and tried to help some people with technical problems. There was a fair amount of running around to get business attended to before the last business meeting.
After lunch, I was the sekretario again for the final ELNA business meeting. The results of election were announced and I was confirmed as vice president. There weren't any big surprises. I was disappointed to see that half of the valid ballots recommended changing the name of ELNA. Not that I particularly like ELNA as compared with something else -- I can see the value of the other names. Among the various proposed names that were presented to voters, there wasn't a clear winner, however, so the matter was put to the participants at the meeting that clearly favored Esperanto-USA as the new name. Now it will get written up as a bylaw change to be presented to the voters for next year and, if it receives 2/3 of the ballots, will take effect. I personally think the whole name-change thing is a waste of time because it doesn't address the problems that ELNA currently confronts and gives people an excuse to not focus on what the issues really are. But that's neither here nor there. Now that we are engaged in the process, the goal should simply be to get it over with as quickly as possible so that we can move on to trying to accomplish something real.
After the meeting, I set up and gave my session Ni Verku Hajkojn: Dumnoktaj Arboj. I provided a brief overview about why I write haiku in Esperanto and, afterwards, led about 10 people in a workshop to actually write some haiku about the theme of "trees at night". I liked that as a "summertime" theme: I'm not really out among trees at night at any other time of the year, so it made sense to me. I shared a couple of haiku to help people get started and then the participants got to work. Almost everyone wrote one or two haiku which we built into a keynote presentation to present and share on the web.
There was a second reason why the theme ended up being trees at night: I had meant to have pictures of trees to go with the haiku on the slides -- originally I meant to scan leaves of various species of trees: maple, beech, oak, etc., but I was too busy before I left and, when I got here, I realized I didn't know half the species of tree. I recognized sycamores and I could see something that was clearly oak, but the rest was more mysterious. There was something that I was pretty sure was a live oak with some kind of dwarf spanish moss growing on it. There was something else that looked like a giant sumac. Furthermore, it was too hot to go out and take pictures during the day. So I created a slide template with a black background and went out a night to take pictures of leaves of different trees. With the flash, I could get wonderful shots of tips of branches and clumps of leaves with a clean, black background. I also took pictures of trunks of trees with interesting textures of bark. The result was visually compelling. Tomorrow, I'll set up my computer where people can see it as they come in and read the haiku. When I get a chance, I'll post a copy where people can see if over the web.
During the evening, a substantial group went to the Congress Street Bridge to watch the bats fly out to forage. It's not often an Esperantist gets the chance to say Bonan Vesperton and have it actually mean something. When the city built the bridge they didn't realize the design would be conducive to attracting the nation's largest colony of bats. Bat Conservation International 
helped the city understand that it wasn't necessary to take drastic steps to curb the bat population and today hundreds of people turned out to watch hundreds of thousands of Mexican Freetailed Bats fly out from under the bridge. It was a truly impressive sight.
Afterwards, walked to the Alamo Draft House to watch Incubus. The Alamo Draft House is to movies what the Iron Horse is to music. It is a small theatre that presents offbeat movies and events to audiences that can sit at tables and order beer and food to enjoy during the show.
There were a series of funny bits and promos at the beginning and then the DVD of Incubus was presented on the large screen. One of the organizers of the convention knew someone who knew the owner of the draft house and had gotten him to present Incubus, one night only, to the public and we, esperantists, just came along with everyone else to enjoy the show. The room was not packed, but there were at least as many non-esperantists there as esperantists.
I had never seen Incubus before (which is actually a rather long story). It is really a pretty terrible movie, but truly enjoyable and hysterically funny in bits. The esperantists couldn't resist poking fun at the pronunciation of William Shatner. When a couple went on heckling the screen someone else in the audience asked "So, what's Esperanto for 'Shut the f*** up'?" I don't think that guy will be learning Esperanto any time soon.
StevenBrewer