wiscon

[sev]

quick list of things that happened to me at wiscon, in no particular order. inclusion or lack thereof on this means absolutely nothing in terms of importance but may say more about their ability to be breifly summarized in a list of sentence fragments:

discovered that they'd misplaced my registration. Pfah. This would have made me less mad if the guy dealing with me at registration hadn't struck me as rather snide. "No, I can't prove I registered already because I did not bring my cancelled check." "Well, thank you for being honest. That'll be $50." It doesn't appear that they cashed whatever payment I tried to make when I did what I thought was registering back in April, so I didn't pay twice, but I'm ticked at having gotten confirmation-of-registration when I don't appear to have successfully registered, and I'm ticked at the supreme lack of belief, much less help tracking the problem down, when trying to figure out what happened to my registration (and my fucking dessert ticket, which I just had to do without, as by the time I arrived they were all gone).

Met ktempest -- I was there when she made that "Jay Lake is slightly drunk" recording; you can hear my high-pitched stacatto chuckle several times.

Got called a member of "aynjel's corset brigade" along with haikujaguar.

Got to see porcinea and firecat and both see and have dinner with annburlingham, pipyn, lcohen, kalmn, happyelfling, and j00j. aynjel was at dinner, too, but sat at another table with Jim, an editor from Tor, because they didn't have a table big enough for all of us (and I think some of the others were weirded out about the strange guy who was tagging along uninvited, but as lcohen points out, he did find us the restaraunt when we got lost).

Drank at least one lemon drop way too fast.

Gave out too few business cards.

Delivered my photo project, which didn't make it into the out-loud auction due to time constraints (the auction went on for hours and they still carted off a bunch of stuff they didn't have time for; those'll be auctioned off some other year unless they got a gazillion bids in the silent auction) but a bunch of people oohed and ahhed over it.

Bought not one but two lovely wandering-wire pieces from elisem.

Came home with copies of Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads, Nancy Collins's In the Blood, Catherine Asaro's The Moon's Shadow, and I got my second-edition copy of Swordspoint signed by Ellen Kushner.

Went to panels on the darker side of community, feminists & traditionalists, exploring feminisms, movements & manifestos, power & tension in sci-fi, genre smut, and a number of others.

Got home at 3am because there was Weather in Chicago.

Comments

Re: *envy*

[kightp.livejournal.com]

They admitted that I was right and there was at least one person to start posting on alt.poly in the last two years who's worth reading.

Awwwww ... *blush*.

And that train trip? It's not that much longer than driving, and far more relaxed. (If you have a laptop, the Cascae trains even have electrical outlets so you can get something done if relaxing and watching the scenery isn't sufficient... amusement...)

Re: *envy*

[sev]

I s'pose I do know that my previous traintrip-down-the-coast experience is not normal and that one can in fact reach portland from seattle on the train in less than nine hours. But the whole "spend $400 for a sleeper, spend two and a half days on buses" thing has made me cautious about trying again.

Taking the train to minneapolis recently was much more as-advertised. And train-failure to portland isn't going to be as problematic as train-failure to LA was. So trying again isn't out of the question. :)

Re: *envy*

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Coast Starlight. One never asks "is the train late," but rather, "how late is the train?" This is the consequence of a route that has only one train a day, running on tracks owned by the freight companies.

The twice-a-day Cascade (http://www.amtrak.com/trains/cascades.html) trains run only between Seattle and Eugene, so the opportunities for delay are far more limited.