Wish I could be there. Especially because the temps shot back up to the mid-upper 90s for the next three or four days.

Temperatures are quite pleasant here, but there is that minor concern over Hurricane Felicia barreling at us. (Fortunately it declined from a Cat 4 to Cat 2 overnight and is expected to be no worse than a tropical depression by the time it gets here.)

I knew he read SF, but that's ratcheting up the geek coolness factor quite a bit.

(Those are the two products Hawai'i residents hoard whenever we face a "weather event.")

We ARE having an "I'm not at the Worldcon and want to partee" party tomorrow, potluck and fun.

(My alarm clock didn't go off, so I'm late and no one is answering the Skype.)

Then Security knocked on the door and shut it down. Apparently, rather than designating it a party floor, they put people into conference rooms on residential floors, and they were getting noise complaints.

The party is now adrift, I think, and looking for somewhere else to land.

Further updates as events warrant.

(I don't know if the plums are still chilling in the bathtub. I think someone was eating them. Breakfast may be canceled.)

2. please update this post. We're in the Lower level, room Cartie A and B.
Thanks

Also, does anyone know what was up with Security running such a tight cordon around the elevators at 11:30 tonight? Hotel security, not con security. I don't remember that happening last night.

Xopher's chocolates were truly exquisite--especially the chipotle and lime ones! Thank you so much!

We are wicked tired at this point, but are going to walk on over anyway. Sleep is for when you aren't at a Con. :)

And NAKAKon gave us a 50 lb bag of rice, we're set for rice for about a year. We have a dog-food 'canister' from Walmart for that, bread flour and regular flour (I do a lot of craft baking when it's not so farking hot outside).

His talk was absolutely fascinating, and I'm still processing it. I find I suddenly want a second life, in which I have the time to read more about economics.

Oh where oh where can the party be
The hotel took it away from me
I cannot find it and I'm full of gloom
I cannot find the party for its moved the room...

===========================

[it got worse, but the bitbucket ate the next piece.... ]

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were not in
the bathtub

since you
had probably
cancelled
our breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and warm.

Somebody got a bunch of little plastic dinosaurs and put them in, er, Compromising Positions. Sadly, there were no examples of Infernokrusher art.

All I know is that while I passed Micro (on my way to a j-school degree), I couldn't get past Macro. I think if I'd had Krugman as a teacher, I'd have understood it. I'm seriously considering a pilgrimage to Powell's when I get home.

...must... drink... dregggggggs...

I will second the "YAY" for Kathryn from Sunnyvale.

And the pinata MacDonald was customizing when I got there, so that a thought bubble with the words "You People!" emerged from its mouth.

And, of course, you people.

(My own attendance was plagued by trouble, from the failing alarm clock to the kid barf incident. And I am now very weary. But it looked like fun.)

My personal high point: finally talking to Jim Macdonald! It was before the headphones turned up, so he heard very little of what I said, but that was neat.

I have not eaten
The Maple Pie
or the Ice Cider

which was
at the party
being saved
for a good moment

Give me
some ideas
they'll be sweet...

Wish I could be there, but am enjoying the stories.

BAWL.

My violet corset + skirt will forever hence be known as "the Paul Krugman Outfit".

As for the rest of...You People!...I'll get you next time! /moustache-twirl

Thanks to everyone who said nice things about the chocolates, here and at the party; it was my pleasure to produce them and watch you eat them. Especially the watch-you-eat-them part.

The chipotle-lime chocolates were really just a weird whim of mine. I was surprised by their popularity, frankly. When I commented that I hadn't expected them to be so popular, someone (I wish I could remember who) said "NOOOOOOOObody expects the chipotle-lime chocolates to be popular! Their chief weapon is chipotle! Chipotle and lime..." (and yes, it went on for some time after that, and I'm sure you can guess exactly how).

And Paul Krugman definitely feels fannish to me.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=121105237372&ref=nf

This is what happens when we're left at home to our own devices.

Xopher, the chipotle-lime chocolotls sound divine. Xomeday . . .

Being in the masquerade was fun. I was just a ninja for our group, which is why I hid behind its organizer when she won and came onstage. Judging took longer than the actual masquerade, but there were Bugs Bunny cartoons in the intermission so that was ok.

Went to bed late. As soon as I'm presentable, I'll go over to the worldcon and do some volunteer work. I think I'm registered to be an usher for the Hugos too.

I went back to my hotel to sleep because Abi told me to, and when is Abi not right?

I'd feel guiltier about sending you home from the party, but I've seen what happens when someone recommends something that you don't think is a good idea. So I trust that my reminder of the time was not, um, untimely.

que ce n'ai pas moi
qui a mangé les prunes
qui étaient dans la glacière

et que vous sauviez
probablement
pour le déjeuner

C'etait probablement Serge
qui a pris "prunes" pour "puns"
Pardonnez-lui
il est comme ca

OH GOD NO

Well, thanks for landing me with that image. Thank god the photo was taken before the clothes-changing started at least...

If anybody can handle a text-only party experience, it must be you lot. At the moment, the database is a slightly warped, and furry, version of Wildcat Island. Do we congregate by the campfire, or resort to the treehouse?

Timezones will be a problem. CONUS is 5 to 8 hours behind proper time, and I'm not sure I want to leave the thing running unattended.

The big advantages are low bandwidth and no need for fancy software on the part of users. Anyone interested?

Also, who requested the ice cider?

2. good quality corkscrew
If it is the white one I brought, it's free to a good home. There was another red one there, whose origins I don't know.

Also, who requested the ice cider?

Found it back on the "Our Worldcon schedule" thread; it was TexAnne.

It was great to meet everyone! And I'm having a small happiness that apparently my first attempt at a "This is just to say..." riff seems to have been received well. I was nervous. I'm used to lurking.

Thanks for all of your work, Kathryn, even when it seemed that the hotel was against you! And to Serge, for much slicing and dicing.

He was entrusted with a knife?!?

He needs one? I thought he just used his wit.

APPLE: I've done nothing wrong! What are you going to do?
SERGE*: You should throw yourself on the mercy of the core-t.
APPLE: Will there be any mercy?
SERGE: No, I'm feeling crabby today.
APPLE: (falls into slices)
ORANGE: How could you do that to him? What are you going to do to me?
SERGE: Your appeals are fruitless.
ORANGE: (falls spontaneously into pieces)
PLUM: My god! What have you done?
SERGE: Nothing I can't drupe-licate at will.
PLUM: (falls into slices)
BANANA: You bastard! You murdered them!
SERGE: They did it to themselves. The worst I am guilty of is plantain the suggestion that death is better than any more of my puns.
BANANA: (splits)

----
* Voiced for this scene by Christopher Lambert

It was a great party.

For those interested, the Toronto Star today has an article on Miracle Fruit.

As for the Miracle Fruit, it was pills made from the fruit, not the actual fruit.

I have not copied the still and video I took at the party yet. I need to download the file for decoding Pentaw raw images, and do some downsizing gfor anything that goes on the web--similar stuff with the video (I handed the camera that does video to someone--Kathryn?--to record me eating the Miracle Fruit.... )

As for my reactions to the Miracle Fruit, I could still taste acid in various stuff, and while the taste wasn't nasty-sour anymore, I could smell/taste things.... the pill didn't cause me to like things, it made them taste less overtly unpleasant.... the flip side is that I got a queasy stomach that didn't settle down until late afternoon....

As for the Miracle Fruit, it was pills made from the fruit, not the actual fruit.

I have not copied the still and video I took at the party yet. I need to download the file for decoding Pentaw raw images, and do some downsizing gfor anything that goes on the web--similar stuff with the video (I handed the camera that does video to someone--Kathryn?--to record me eating the Miracle Fruit.... )

As for my reactions to the Miracle Fruit, I could still taste acid in various stuff, and while the taste was no longer a high bar .... the pill didn't cause me to like things, it made them taste less overtly unpleasant.... the flip side is that I got a queasy stomach that didn't settle down until late afternoon....

Teresa, not that you will be unduly concerned about this, but I think I owe you a quarter. For strange reasons which perhaps psychologists could explain, I've had trouble remembering that there are no half-dollars in the Canadian system and that the things that look strikingly like U.S. quarters are indeed quarters.

Very happy to have been able to spend so much con time with TexAnne, Cath, Barbara, and others whose names my addled brain isn't readily spitting out. Excellent to finally meet Serge in the flesh and converse with abi digitally. Xopher's chocolates were miraculous once again. (Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of high points. It was a weekend composed of 95% high points. No wonder I'm so pleasantly exhausted.)

It's Tuesday morning and in about 2 hours I will be making my way to the train station. Avram assures me that before I reach my connection in Schenectady I will have learned how to play this Dominion thing.

Coming soon...
"CSI - worldcon"

I should practice the Caruso glasses-removing for when I go on my Citrus Splitting Investigations.

Mark 48: There's no one to kill, because there's no recipe. I soaked some chipotle powder in lime oil, added a little bit of lime juice, and added it to my melted chocolate (in my tempering machine). Let it work for a while (the temperer keeps the chocolate agitated) before I put it in molds prepared with luster dust. What I'll do differently next time: use a ceramic bowl instead of a paper one (lost some oils to wicking), and look for a real fire-red luster dust. Also, I'll make more of them, since they were so popular.

Oh that Mike Ford were here.

(Add Muse of Fire, etc., to taste.)

It would, I think, be an interesting exercise over the tickets to the Hugo Losers Party.

Want me to drive up to Montreal, pick you up, and drive you to New Jersey?

I've put a photo of Jim's pinata up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpolowin/3811895446/. Pictures of the googly-eyed brownies are here.

I'm hoping to get a well-informed explanation of what was going on behind the multiple room changes and party shutdown when my con-ops friends get back home. (When I asked one, she told me that it was a long story and she'd tell me later.) I know that the concom was looking for specific details about the supposed trigger event for the hotel closing the non-party-floor parties, and there were a lot of rumours which I'll avoid repeating at this point.

James: Thank you, but I still hold out hope for a plane flight to Newark. A very generous offer, though, since that would be many hours of driving.

Right now the air is as thick and warm as blood, with blinks of light in the sky and distant growls of thunder.

I wonder if it would work for Astroturfed health reform rage.

What server type is it?

If you'd like to use existing facilities rather than doing your own administration, why not invade Waterpoint; we've* got lots of lovingly-crafted grand spaces and cozy nooks nobody's bothering to occupy, and I think You People would get along reasonably well with Us People. (We don't have very many knitters these days, though.)

* I am not a Waterpoint admin, just a regular.

Technically, it's a MUCK rather than a MOO.

Update from Schenectady's one hour of free wi-fi, where I am between trains: Avram was good as his word. I now have a new card game to pick up at the Gen Con dealer room. I also now have new friends on Twitter and Ravelry and LJ (hi Herbert and BDan and Josh!), and got to say some last goodbyes to Ron and to the Segals Stu and Stephen.

Trains are cool! They make the party longer, often without sacrifice of sleep! We must do this again, with those of y'all coming from the midwest at least, when WorldCon comes to Reno! (C'mon, you know you want to, we've got big sharp mountains! Made of rocks!)

I heard a train whistle, so I'd better pack this up--

Never had any experience with MUCKs. That is what I meant by 'server type' though; I don't think considering the various MU* to be Different Things In Need Of A New Acronym is very helpful (though of course different software should have different names); they're all muds to me. Except we say 'virtual world' these days.

TWin is an auxiliary thing; goes beside the regular text-based view and gives you windows for whatever the server provides. Very handy for reading documents and status displays, the sort of stuff that would be annoyingly verbose in a text-only system.

</ramble>

http://ckd.livejournal.com/68367.html as of 2106 tonight.

Xopher, tell me you made it out okay....

...then stopped, opened the door, reattached the jetway, and did NOT kick us off (which of course is what I feared). They had simply forgotten to fuel the plane.

They. Had. Forgotten. To fuel. The Plane!!!!

Now, I'm willing to be persuaded to think otherwise, but I really would respectfully submit that that last problem really cannot be blamed on the weather, except perhaps in the very distant sense that all the delays made hasty people, and hasty people make dumb mistakes.

At any rate, we arrived in Newark around 9:00. I just got home and collected my boxes from Lenore and put my pants in the wash and logged on.

Thank you everyone, for your kind wishes. Thanks especially to Jim for his kind and generous offer. Thanks to Someone Else, too. You know who you are.

(I ran into Xopher at the airport, and saw him board his plane. Didn't find out about the fuel thing until I got home, though.)

Apparently if I'd wanted the 6:30 flight to Boston, I would have been totally horked -- it was cancelled with little notice. (The thunderstorm, I guess.) But I'd asked for the 8:00 flight and that just left twenty minutes late. Full, mind you -- the 6:30 people had no luck trying to transfer onto it.

A woman sitting behind me said that she'd been on a 3:30 flight which reached Boston, circled above the fog for a while *and then flew back to Montreal*. I thanked her for using up all the bad luck.

More conreport tomorrow night.

That is mindbogglingly stupid.

Glad you didn't end up as a passenger on a Gimli Glider. They caught it, this time. At the end of that page is a disturbing list of airliner accidents. Apart from the birdstrikes and volcanic ash, there are several out-of-fuel crashes, but not many.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

Flight crews must insure that all surly bonds have been slipped entirely before aircraft taxi or flight is attempted.

Maybe not, but I shall note that the Spontoons Islands Speed Week looms for intrepid aviators.

We made our connection in Denver but it was literally deplane, change terminals, reticket (Air Canada and United's computers don't talk to each other, sigh, good data point to keep in mind for the future), and leap onto the plane. Our bags didn't make it with us, but they did get delivered to our house by a gnomish little man in a green station wagon late at night.

Another friend had her plane messed up by malfunctioning bathrooms, which led to a Winnipeg layover.

Okay. That's two Worldcons in a row that the planes have been screwy on departure. We're not going to Australia--Labor Day cons don't work well for teachers--but I strongly suspect we're driving to Reno.

Nicole--great meeting you at Alma's kaffeeklatch!

Joyce - yes, that was most excellent! Less of a kaffeeklatch and more of a catch-up-with-friends session, the way that turned out.

Serge - I generally post with my full name, but since I publish under my pre-hyphenated name, that's the one I put on con badges. In any case, though no one tried to speak to me in French, I had a few occasions with people surprised to hear me speaking English and assuming I was a local. I had to explain that though the name *is* sort of from Quebec, it was displaced a few hundred years ago to southern Louisiana. The word "Cajun" met with universal bafflement.

Antonia T. Tiger: Flight crews must insure that all surly bonds have been slipped entirely before aircraft taxi or flight is attempted. ...in other words, there's a reason "remove tie-downs" is in the checklist?

They must be people who don't read much in English if they've never come across that version of 'Acadian'.

The word "Cajun" met with universal bafflement.

I... Really? Quebecois that you met didn't recognize the word "Cajun"? That's... well, I'm baffled. The Acadian Expulsion is a featured part of high school Canadian History classes. I don't actually know how you can grow up here and not know that.

Serge, Cheryl: Exactly. I was startled. Granted, it didn't come up *that* much, so possibly not a representative sample. Maybe I was speaking to people who had moved to the Montreal area post-school.

My grandfather farmed in the Canadian prairies, and I don't think he had as much as a high school education. But Evangeline, by Longfellow, was one of his favorite poems. There is a scene where the ships carrying the separated lovers pass nearby without either being aware of it (described in this section of the poem). I had thought that the phrase "ships that pass in the night" originated there, but it's not to be found; that came from another Longfellow poem (I've linked to a blog which quoted the relevant passage: the full poem is much longer).

His other favorite poem was The Cremation of Sam McGee.

I only made it to the ML party a few minutes before we were kicked out of the initial location, and I opted to go back to my hotel and sleep instead of hang around in hopes a new one might be found, but I did manage to grab one of the chocolates on my way out.

http://eblong.com/zarf/thod/32.html

By the way, did anybody here try to voodoo-message me on Monday morning? Or maybe Sunday night. I got a red thumbtack but no note. Please re-send next year, or comment here if you want to be timelier than that.

(Not Serge's message on Friday about the ML party -- I got that, thanks.)

I C UR YOOTOOB LINK DAVE

Serge, I still haven't read Evangeline. It's been on my todo list for most of my life.

...and I've never liked hockey. What sad pitiful examples of North-American francophony you and I make.

Hidden content

</lj-cut>

Nicole@102: Not just tiedowns; on light planes the pitot tube (air pressure/speed reader) has a cover (to keep flies out on the ground) with a \huge/ tail, and the control lock (prevents surfaces from flapping in the wind) has an extension that covers the ignition keyhole. And people still manage dumb stunts....

I was at the party for a little while and met several of you, and even spent a few minutes in the first alternate location on 28, before giving up; somehow I can't sleep past ~7 even at an off-site hotel, and after 2.5 days of firefighting I was wasted. (I arrived Monday night; Tuesday night I got the specs for the special exhibits I built on Wednesday, and ditto for the next day.) Drove home Sunday, through rain in VT, because my wife was coming home from Pennsic with a multiply-broken arm. (Jim: not a FOOSH; soon we have to find out how to get a TSA certificate for the plate, and later she and Debra can compare scars.)
The pills were fascinating -- to me they muted sour but not bitter; did anyone else slip and eat some of the pith or peel of the citrus pieces?

It didn't seem to me that the pills turned sour into sweet so much as they just blocked the sour, letting other flavors and scents come through. Lemon didn't taste like lemon candy, it tasted more like Meyer lemon, and I had no temptation to swig down vinegar. It may be that half a tablet wasn't enough to give the full effect.

It did confirm for me that I just Don't Like Beer.

Making Lumiere

I was going to take more, including pics of, you know, people, but then The Man shut us down.

I misread this as McGuckin Cthulhu, which produced a very strange image in my brain.

For those that don't know, McGuckin's in Boulder is The Best Hardware Store In The Known Universe.

Andrew Plotkin (#96): The sad part is that I picked the 1805 flight so that if something happened, I'd have a backup option in the 2000 flight!

I did, as my LJ entries noted, get a chance to continue the convention at the Holiday Inn, in a small way. (Before my flight was cancelled, I saw ML's own Kathryn from Sunnyvale as she headed off to her own flight, which apparently did depart....)