include <disclaimers.h>

(i.e. I ran into a lot of people, and I have a terrible memory. If I do not mention you as being in a particular place or on a particular panel, I apologize -- there was just too much stuff and not enough rest this weekend to keep it all in my head. ;))

Pre-Con And Thursday

I have learned a couple of things.   First: Try and get your con duties done as far ahead of the con as possible. You should, ideally, not be doing them Monday and Tuesday, if you can. ;)

Second: Avoid having your housemate's car get hit, while parked, by a hit-and-run driver the Saturday before the con.

Third, and most important: Avoid taking your work's primary pager the week before WisCon. The resultant four days with no more than three hours of uninterrupted sleep at a go are not good for your final coherence, especially when combined with lessons #1 and #2.

The result of which was that I slept a lot on the airplane, and on the bus, especially after the "Leave the house at 6:00 AM PST" routine.
The flight and bus did mostly go off sans hitch, however, and there was even a lower-than-usual level of Steven Travel Fluster Panic involved. Some of this may have come from being asleep.

Books read on the flight out: Feersum Enjin, Iain Banks, and large chunks of The Dragons of Babel, Michael Swanwick.  Enjin was actually the first Banks book I tried to read, many years ago, which explains why I hadn't read very much of him until recently. Not a bad book, but a very hard one to *start* with.

Managed to realize that we were going to be late for our planned Thursday evening dinner with brisingamen, so wrote email ahead to try and warn her of our dire belatedness.  We later ran into her in The Bar, which resulted in general chortling over missed plans and the creation of new ones.

After potato skins and excellent company (such as badgerbag and kalmn ) at the Rotating WisCon table (no one who had started there was there when we got there, and by the time we left it was yet a third different batch of people), we repaired upstairs to watch the Earthquakes beat the Dynamo, with regular spottings of black_pearl_10, with a brief stop-off on the second floor; I picked up our reg packets. It was a true and utter delight to be able to look at the Pocket Program book, and think, "So this is what comes of all that coding work. Hooray!"


Friday

I'm not going back to the Governor's Club next year (among other things, I was about 30 minutes too late in booking a room) but the only thing I'll really miss is the free breakfast. It just makes getting up and out of bed a lot easier.

I know I did something Friday morning. I know I did. I just can't remember what it was. ;) Probably, knowing me, hanging out in the lobby with a book, a notebook, and saying "Hi!" to people; that's what I usually do on a WisCon Friday Morning. 

Lunch started out as gelato with bookzombie and pennski , and ended up at the noodle shop with them, with plentiful discussions of history, fiction, violet-flavor, and the rest. Sadly, lunch was interrupted by the Programming Crisis of the Con (as it ended up being) -- the question of whether a set of Saturday panels were when the grid said they were, or when the email and badgebacks said they were.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am sure I shoulder some of the blame for this, so my apologies, all who were confused(1).
So it was time to dash back to the room (after pantryslut  had reminded me repeatedly to calm down) and verify which was the correct answer.  All of you who were there know what it was. ;)

By then, it was time to hover about the dealer's room like a vulture and continue saying Hello! to people.  A lot of people. A *whole* lot of people.  More on that to follow.

The purpose of this circling was Aqueduct Press' limited(?) chapbook of stories by the two GoHs. I was first. I discovered, by watching, that I need not have been so hurried, but so be it.  I also, in that first swing, discovered the first ring that has spoken to me and said "I belong on your finger", thanks to Laurie Toby Edison, and people who want to will be able to see it in a few weeks. (First it needs to grow a bit more silver so it fits on my finger. ;))

The Gathering was its usual slightly-too-overwhelming self, though I got to again say hello to a whole bunch of people, and perform a prostration before Jeanne Gomoll for all her excellent work dealing with the data I sent her.  She was suitably amused and embarassed. ;)

Dinner, as is often the case at WisCon, was a pick-up-in-the-lobby affair, but ended up being great fun, as we went to Cafe Montmartre for delicious French bistro food. Along for the trek were fightingtiger, vito_excalibur, pantryslut (indeed, when it comes to meals, you can more or less assume she was there. ;)), and several people not-on-LJ, including Ian Hagemann, with whom I did a pizza-split...

So it was time to go home, and rest again (still recuperating from all that stuff) -- well, time to rest until we were told that Our Presence Was Requested at Opening Ceremonies. (I normally don't go, I confess.)  So we went, to be told to stand up and clapped at...

Which leads me to one Big Thing of the Con for me: I want to say that in my darkest cursing-at-Bourne-shell-and-text-file moments, I doubted that the WisCon community would appreciate what hell I was going through.  I was overwhelmed and delighted by the thanks and appreciation that I got, and feel faintly caddish for having ever doubted it. ;)

I did not make it to any panels on Friday, instead enjoying the parties until I was too tired to continue, and retreating to bed.


(1) If anyone really wants the gory details of how it happened ( though I should warn you -- con schedules, like sausages, are things you may not want to see being made) ask in the comments.