What is this with our inability to say “no”?

We were asked to teach at Carreg Wen’s Academia in November. But Carreg Wen is at least four hours from here, north of Darach and Isles. So we’d sort of discussed it and sort of decided no, but not told the steward.

Then, yesterday at Crown, Kuang Ch’i told the steward (a friend of all of ours) that he and Berengere would be going, and I said, Umberto, it would be fun if they were going, and somehow we all decided to rent a van and snag as many other people as we could, and all go up, and spend the night and maybe go to Solvang for awhile the next day, and… I’m really not sure how this happened. We keep saying that we need to have some free weekends. Ack. But it’ll be really fun (especially once I decide what to teach. Painting canvas list shields? Autocratting from A to Z? How to Fail Miserably at Saying No?).