What happens in Chapel Hill stays in Chapel Hill

I am in Chapel Hill, NC visiting a collaborator at UNC. We'll be working on the follow-up to our Congress paper and related stuff (like following up on my SURF student's Facebook network project).

Tomorrow, I'm going to have dinner with Steve Van Hooser (a fellow Lloydie from my class), who I haven't seen since we graduated. (I've lately been working on trying to see below I haven't seen in a while. I wonder if I can get my former roommate, who lives in Long Beach, to put his computer games down for a bit? I'm tempted to just show up on his doorstep, because I can't get him to respond to queries about getting together, but then that would be annoying if that trip didn't work out. There must be a workable strategy somewhere, although Vincent's mindset is quite different from most.) Steve is a neuroscience postdoc at Duke. Steve Shepherd '00 is a grad student in the same program, although I didn't know this latter Steve too well and I don't have any plans to see him.

I'm in the Best Western right now, which isn't horrible close to campus and has no open food places in walking distance. There doesn't seem to be great delivery opportunities outside the campus area (especially not now) either, so it looks like the 30 minute delay between landing in Chicago and arriving at the gate is going to force me to go the whole day without food. (I typically don't like eating in the mornings when I'm tired, so I only had an iced latte today. If I knew the Chicago thing was going to fail me like that... United still congratulated themselves on landing "on time", although the extra 30 minutes in the plane, during which multiple babies decided it was time to cry and they didn't want us using our electronic stuff, wasn't particularly pleasant.)

In sum, "Mason needs food badly."