The last few days my face has been like this:

There are several reasons for this.

On Thursday I got to attend a full-day accessibility and HTML 5/ARIA/CSS3 workshop presented by @feather. I love his blog posts, particularly his post about finding whitespace in your life, note just your websites. And the one about being a walking contradiction. He gave an inspiring keynote at 2008's Edge of the Web conference, and another great one this year. The workshop was incredibily useful and certainly furthered my desire to know everything ever.

On Friday I attended the conference portion of Edge of the Web. Attending an Edge of the Web is like getting a, it's like getting a, are you listening, right, okay, it's like getting a sandwich, right, a sandwich? And then, okay, instead of bread, it's like, fluffy freshly baked inspiration, yeah? Right, right. And then the filling, you with me? The filling, it's like, not meat or jam or stuff. The filling, it's like, practical strategies and new ideas and stuff. And, right, you take the sandwich, right, you take it, and then you grate it. Yeah, like cheese. Or beetroot, yeah, it could be like that. Anyway, you grate the sandwich, and then, and then... you sprinkle it in everyone's ears. Yeah. And that's what the Edge of the Web is like, right?

Ahem. Anyway, it was pretty special. Mr @colly opened the day brilliantly with his talk on craftsmanship and passion about what you do. Saw great talks by @russmaxdesign, @mrpatto... the list goes on. And as usual the other attendees were also fantastic, met a bunch of great Perth web types!

I have a confession to make, though. The thing that got me the most excited was that I was finally, finally attending an event at the UWA Club during rainy weather. Which meant I could use one of these:

I'll be honest with you. I'm not difficult to delight. And I love trying new things. If you don't recognise the device above, it is an umbrella sheathing device. Now in Western Australia, rain is so infrequent that most organisations wouldn't consider investing in one of these items. The UWA Club is the only place in WA I've ever seen one. But previous Edge of the Webs were held in summer, so I never had a chance to try it.

I'd love to draw you an illustration of my umbrella sheathing adventure. My skills just aren't really up to it, though. So, let me illustrate the scene to you using that time-honoured practise, the art of interpretive Google Image Search.

Here's my face as I approached the umbrella sheathing machine and realised I was holding a wet umbrella:

Then here is me using the umbrella sheathing device (or, in this case, strawberry):

Whether I actually ate the machine is up to your interpretation. But either way, afterwards I looked like this (pretend the dog is my umbrella):

So all in all, between umbrella machines and brilliant conference speakers, I've had a pretty great couple of days!