Just to be contrary, I wasn't at the shop at all during the last weekend before shipping. I did talk to the student lead programmer on the phone Sunday afternoon as I drove back from Baltimore to Indiana, but except for those few minutes I had put robotics out of my mind almost completely.
Even so, I didn't miss out on the fun of spending entirely too much time on a project and getting entirely too much sleep. I left home in the dark hours of Friday morning, drove more than six hundred miles to meet with a group of people at a science fiction convention, got
maybe twelve hours of sleep over three days, ending by driving another six hundred miles to get back home before midnight Sunday night. During the weekend I gave suggestions to someone translating Harlan Ellison's
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, helped sell copies of
The Klingon Hamlet and back issues of
HolQeD, played my first game of
Klin Zha in over three years, finished a draft translation of
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (to be included in a collection of Hugo-award-winning works published within the next year), watched people playing odd variants on poker, enjoyed a game of
'oH SoH ("You're it!"), came dangerously close to buying a DVD of the
Star Wars Holiday Special, and made way too many polylinguistic puns.
Enthusiastic sleep deprivation does not need to involve building robots.
(Of course, I then spent about twenty hours on Monday and Tuesday programming the robot before shipping it.)