Words are inadequate

I wrote my last post sitting in the Vancouver airport lounge. (I flew too much in 2018 and 2019, so I have Gold Status on Westjet, which comes with free airport lounge privileges.) After I posted it I checked my flight status, because it was getting on time to board.

The screen just said CANCELLED.

The de-icer in Prince George broke, so they cancelled all flights for the day. I got rebooked for two days later, through Calgary, at six in the morning. Insult to injury, it also took them nearly two hours to unload the checked luggage.

So I grumped and trudged back to Rainbow House, where they were kind enough to put me up for two more nights.

Yesterday we all went over to New West, to get barbecue from Re-up and see the new condo. It's still pretty great, and I have a good idea as to how I'll arrange the furniture.

That evening Erin pinged me to ask if I'd tried to get a better flight. I said I hadn't, because I didn't want to deal with sitting on hold for several hours to get told there was nothing they could do because they'd already squeezed three days worth of passengers into two days worth of flights.

A few minutes later I shrugged and called the Westjet line. Half an hour later I was rebooked onto a direct flight leaving at noon. Except it was somehow already delayed two hours.

Stupid learned helplessness.

Anyway, I'm back in the YVR lounge, and with any luck I'll be able to get home today, with all my luggage. Overall it's been a good trip; I'm just ready to be in my own space.

This year's Gathering was smaller than usual: 262 attendees was I think the final count, where in a normal year it's a little over 400. (To the extent that anything pre-plague can count as "normal" going forward.) I noticed this partly in several missing people I'd hoped to see, and partly in a difficulty in finding pickup games by just wandering through the main hall.

Joe H-- pointed out that he'd seen a bunch of people he knew who weren't really circulating this year but were playing a bunch of games together. Which makes sense: normally (that word again) they'd get plenty of gaming with each other during the year and would use the Gathering to meet new folks and try new things, but, well.

When Sarah left she dropped me at the grocery store, so I picked up my standard pop-tarts and sandwich fixins so that breakfast and lunch were sorted. I've taken to bringing my own tea and small hot-water-heater, so I'm not dependent on a) bad hotel tea or b) a coffee-maker for hot water. This works out really well: tea and pop-tarts for breakfast, sandwich and apple for lunch, wander off to a restaurant for a "real" dinner. The sole advantage of Niagara in the summer is the row of food trucks a couple blocks from the hotel: slightly cheaper and faster than restaurant food, and far more varied.

I got in an 18xx game every morning but one, when I overslept due to overstress. I progressed from making obvious errors at the start of the game (1880: starting my initial railroad with a tile lay that could have helped Mark, but Tom's railroad could help him more, so I got quickly shut out of some early money) to obvious errors about a third of the way through (1822CA: starting a minor with enough money to buy a 2-train but miscounting and buying a more expensive 3-train out of pocket... and then the minor I actually wanted came up next round instead of one round later) to no obvious errors (2038: I could probably critique my play if I reviewed it closely but I didn't see any severe misjudgements). I even managed to win my first 18xx at the Gathering: a three-player 18CZ against Tom and Mark, where I got enough of a mid-game dividend lead to (barely) carry me through against Tom's superior share-value position and Mark's impressive late-game dividends.

Apart from that I spent a surprising-to-me amount of time with Jacob D--. I met Jacob ages ago at Origins, even before I was running Fluxx tournaments for the Looneys, where I gained a lot of respect for him as an Icehouse shark, a savvy game developer, and a generally insightful if somewhat pushy person. "Game developer" isn't a term I would have used at the time, I would have said "designer," and he's designed one of my favourite abstract-strategy games in Pikemen, but even early-mid-2000s I think a lot of his best work was in refining other peoples' ideas. More recently he's done an awful lot of work on Sidereal Confluence, a game of aggressive cooperation.

"Pushy" isn't the right word either. I struggle some with Jacob, honestly: he's very much an extrovert, and he's interested in people, and so he asks probing questions and talks a bunch. He's happy to back off if you ask him to, or if you're obviously uncomfortable, but to me it's still awkward. It's by no means wholly or even mostly unpleasant: I enjoy talking to him. (Compare with my ex-friend N--, who always seemed like he was looking for ... weaknesses, or sore points to poke at: Jacob just feels genuinely interested and curious.)

I played two rounds of Sidereal Confluence with the late-playtest-stage expansion, about which I can't say anything other than OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME. SidCon is already one of my favourite games: a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun. The expansion ... basically adds in a new and even wackier set of variable-player-powers. There is just so much gamespace to explore here.

I also played a handful of "normal" games: nothing super exciting but plenty of "that was fun" or "someone I know should own this so I can play it a few more times and figure out if I like it." And I talked to Jacob, and to Tau (the designer of SidCon) and Chris C-- also from Origins, and a few other folks.

And it was, for the most part, a really good time. I've missed people, I've missed having a flood of gaming, I've missed getting my butt solidly kicked in a bunch of different 18xx games. I've missed travel, though by the end of it I was ready to be Home for awhile.

Hotel reservations are up for next year (back to April again, in theory). Hopefully Alan will put up registration info soon and I can start thinking "I get to go back soon" instead of just vaguely hoping.

My normal travel plan for the Gathering (a small-to-medium boardgame convention in Niagara Falls NY): take a red-eye flight to Toronto, catch the Via/Amtrak train from Toronto to Niagara, taxi from the train station to the hotel, and get Joe C-- to take me on a grocery run.

Joe C-- isn't going to be there this year, alas. More worryingly, there's no Via/Amtrak service. Flights to Buffalo (the nearest airport to Niagara) are stupid expensive and badly timed. So I figured I'd fly into Toronto and figure out the rest of it later. Worst case scenario, I buy more plane tickets from Toronto to Pittsburgh and Sarah picks me up on her way out of town.

In the event, travel to the Gathering required no fewer than seven separate steps in the transportation process:

• Driving from Fort to the Prince George airport (YXS), stopped for a plague test on the way.
  
• Flight YXS-YVR.
  
• Flight YVR-YYZ. This was the first time I've flown first-class, on the grounds that a) I wasn't going to sleep well anyway without my CPAP so I might as well be comfortable in my discomfort, and b) it was relatively cheap since WestJet is desperately trying to get people to give them money. Verdict: very nice seats, they fed me (TED: "What's the deal with airplane food? Why don't they serve it any more?"), and when I managed to get about an hour and a half of sleep they kindly left a snack box on the empty seat next to me. Not really worth it in the normal course of things but I'm glad I did it once.
  
• Commuter train from YYZ to Union Station in Toronto. One of the nicer commuter trains I've ever been on.
  
• GO train from Union Station to Burlington. Also a perfectly serviceable commuter train. Took me forever to find a) breakfast and b) the train, which I attribute partly to the aforementioned 1.5 hrs sleep and partly to Union Station being a poorly-signed hub for four different train lines (Via/Amtrak, GO regional, Toronto subway, and the airport thing). Plus I'd bought my ticket on the Via website so I figured that was where I was supposed to go, but no.
  
• Regional bus from Burlington to Niagara Falls ON. Uneventful except for having to lug my full suitcase to the second floor of the bus. I think I slept some.
  
• And finally, a half-hour walk from the bus stop down to the land crossing at the Rainbow Bridge, a typically unpleasant encounter with US border guards (ignored for ten minutes, then had my passport taken away for five minutes, then had it given back and told "go through that door over there." No "welcome to the US" or anything, and no request to see a negative plague test. Bah), and a fifteen-minute walk to the hotel, all in 30-degree heat.

But I got here, around twoish, after not quite twenty-four hours in transit, and checked in and dozed for a bit.

And then Sarah got here around 5:30, and left today around noon, and the inbetween time was almost entirely lovely.

Tomorrow I'll go down to the Gathering. Tonight is for talking to Erin and introverting and journaling and such.

At some point I should figure out how I'm getting home, too.

I do things other than consume media but honestly they're not that interesting, at least not to me. Stupid plague.

That's not entirely true. Erin and I visited the town of Smithers over the weekend. It's a pleasant place about four hours west of here, population 5000 and another 5000 outside the city limits, a walkable downtown and a game store and two sushi restaurants and plenty of other stuff, all of which was closed. Oh well.

We did hike out to see a couple of very pretty glacier-fed waterfalls on Monday morning. We started out in the middle of a cloud that was creeping its way up the valley, so that you stared across the stream at a grey sky that was a little less grey right above you, and gradually you realised that you were staring at a mountain, with water pouring down it. Lovely. Perhaps next time we'll take the much longer & more difficult hike up to the actual glacier.

---

What are you reading?

Nth reread of Susan Cooper's dreamlike Seaward, because I need a transition after finishing Strange & Norrell. I wonder if it will make any more sense this time, or if it really is just a collection of fairytale images. I love it either way.

What did you just finish reading?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Such a wonderful book. I'm embarrassed that it took me fifteen years to get to a second read. It is long, and physically awkward, and I can't rush through it... but it's so, so worth it.

Ebook, Hambly's The Silicon Mage. Bits kept coming back to me as I read: the general arc of the book, the trip from the Citadel to Angelshand and back again; Caris and Pella and the Regent; the plague rose; the denouement ("It was the Dead God who saved me"). But somehow I'd completely blanked out the actual climax, the confrontation with Suraklin. Odd. I spent that entire two chapters thinking "Caris deserved better," and my irritation was only somewhat mollified by Antryg returning him to life.

What do you think you're going to read next?

Reread of Gideon the Ninth and then on to Harrow, because Sarah's been after me to read Harrow so she can talk to me about it. After that, /finally/ The Baron of Magister Valley.

In a surprise to absolutely no one, my next two trips are cancelled. No Vancouver run at the end of the month, because work has gone to "remote work is Highly Recommended." And of course no Gathering in Niagara in April, because getting four hundred boardgamers from all over the world in one place in the US and then sending them home again is highly counterindicated at this point in time. Still an open question as to whether I'm going down to Virginia Beach in May to hang out with my DC gaming group.

It's far from the worst thing, but... feh. Disappointment.

Also, it turns out that when you cook three meals and do two rounds of baking (bread and cookies, because I'm out of both), there are an awful lot of dishes to be done at the end of the day. I miss my dishwasher.

And, insult to injury, my new-ish two-disc special edition of Ronin won't play. Bah. Bah, I say.

Hoping I get some solid sleep tonight.

I am currently running on about fifteen hours' sleep over the last four days, which is not ideal. Expect I will be sleeping a lot over the next week.

I landed at YUL having only slept for a couple of hours on the flight from YVR, got to the hotel, ditched my bags because I was way too early to check in, and stumbled over towards a chair, whereupon I was greeted by someone who clearly recognised me. It took me a good ten seconds to realise that this was Jonathan, who I'd met at the last Farthing Party five years ago. He pointed me at a Chinese bakery around the corner which sold me tea and sweetbuns for breakfast/lunch, and I sat on a bench in the fall sun and watched little sparrows hopping around, and it was good.

Scintillation was quite good. As at Farthing Party before it: I met some interesting people and said hi to some folks I'd not seen in years, some of who even remembered me; I had some good conversations; I went to some lovely panels. Including Why You Should Be Reading John M. Ford, which started with moderator Marissa Lingen saying "How many people in the audience have read Mike's work? All of you? Okay, in that case this can be the Mike's Work Is Awesome panel." And it was, and that was pretty great. Other highlights included, startlingly to me, a panel on why people keep reimagining Lovecraft, and circulating and being actively social at the afterparty. Including finally saying hi to Sherwood again, which, yay, and one hopes it will not be another seven years this time.

I didn't see much of Montreal at all this time. I'd still like to come back and see more of the city somewhen. The con was in Chinatown, which was somewhat bittersweet: Vancouver's Chinatown (the downtown one) is my favourite area of the city, but/and Chinatowns for me are indelibly associated with urban wandering Emily.

Also I seem to have popped my jaw something fierce yesterday, and it's still a bit sore today. I guess if it's not better in a couple of days I'll call my dentist.

So, it's been a week. Eight days. Whatever. I've been busy, and I want to write up a lot of it before I lose it, and I don't think I have time to do it justice.

Erin and I went cabin-camping with a bunch of other folks. Things happened. I played my viola in public for the first time and people liked it. ... the weekend in particular wants, needs more expansion than I can give it at the moment, or at least to not be mixed in with other things. It was good, and it

( On the island )

I have seen The Last Jedi and I have come home. Now all I want to do is curl up in my bed (or a bath) with a dozen or so unread books and sink into Story for awhile, because that was some good Story. I think it held up on its own; it certainly evoked lots of emotions around the original trilogy, which were formative experiences for me, so.

Too bad about having to go to work tomorrow. And having to start packing.

Curious as to how I'll feel tomorrow. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

Previously: sleep has been iffy due to dogs occasionally deciding that something outside needs to be yelled at a lot. (They may even be right.) In addition, being up north is nice but it's not home and I was looking forward to being home.

Sunday evening, a discussion turned acrimonious and lasted a couple hours longer than it perhaps should have. Less sleep than ideal.

Monday I worked remotely, and that was alright. The week looked to be shaping up to be rather busy.

Monday afternoon we left for the airport at what I'd thought was about ten minutes earlier than the latest possible time (with a checked bag, it was actually five minutes later than the latest possible time). Early darkness, slick roads, and slow cars combined such that, for the first time in my life, I missed my flight. Options were all bad at this point so we turned around and came home. I ended up putting together a route to get me home by four PM on Tuesday: I'd have to write off Tuesday for work but at least I'd be a) home and b) ready to roll on Wednesday.

Tuesday we woke up early and dropped me off in Vanderhoof, an hour south and halfway to the airport. From there I hung out in a rather nice coffeeshop for a couple of hours, caught a BC transit bus to downtown Prince George, had lunch at a known-to-be-decent restaurant (it was still decent), took a taxi to the airport, flew back to Vancouver, and took the skytrain home. I stopped long enough to drop off my stuff and then headed out to pick up my mail and packages at the old condo and go grocery shopping, on the grounds that if I didn't go grocery shopping Tuesday there would be no food until at least Thursday.

I was going to go to my viola lesson after that, but when I got in from grocery shopping and sat down long enough to eat a bowl of cereal, my brain decided that it was Done and wasn't leaving the house again. So I stayed home.

Wednesday morning I fully intended to go to yoga and then to work, but I couldn't convince myself to get out of bed in time for yoga and fell back asleep. I woke up to the previously reported disconcerting dream and again couldn't convince myself to get out of bed. So I called in exhausted and did basically nothing all day: slept, read the entirety of Scott Pilgrim (mostly utter fluff of the boy-grows-up variety; a little deeper and less-cringeworthy than anticipated, but only a little), poked at the internet, had a decent lunch and a better dinner, straightened my room a bit, got to sleep not too terribly late.

Today the hotwaterpot at work is broken, has been all week, and ought to be replaced but hasn't been and I don't expect it will be. Other than that I seem to be more functional, which is nice. I made it to yoga this morning ( <3 ) and I had lunch with Holly and I haven't snapped at anyone or fallen asleep at my desk. I don't really approve of being in a situation where I need to take 'mental health days' but I approve even less of pushing myself until I totally collapse / make terrible life choices and take it out on other people, so here we are.

The weekend was alright-to-good. I'd moved my dentist appointment to Monday from the middle of next week, and that went fine except for some gumwork that I'll need to have done in a couple of weeks. Then come Tuesday night the stress stacked up again. Emily's successfully located a subleaser, at least for a couple of months: yay! I won't have to pay half the mortgage in addition to Vancouver rent, and I might even not be dipping into savings. At least for that couple of months.

Trouble was, the subleaser wanted in on 1 October, and I was scheduled to leave Thursday evening and not get back 'til next Sunday. The first. Panic ... did not exactly set in, though stress certainly did.

Over the course of Wednesday I:

• Got a couple of friends to hang out with me Wednesday night and help finish packing, which otherwise would have been a) slow, b) frustrating, and c) generally sad-inducing.
  
• Acquired a small storage unit on short notice.
  
• Decided to just call in exhausted on Thursday due to not sleeping well (this is not a lie), and just go in for my early-morning meetings.

So that happened and the packing went fine, and the move itself went fine. I left the bookcases and coffee-table there for the subleaser's use; the bookcases might fit into the storage unit if necessary. I'd intended to find myself a new better bed and move the old one to the condo so the subleaser could use it but given my state the last week or so, finding a decent bed was Not Happening. I'll throw money at Emily to find a bed. And then I guess I'll have two low-end beds.

---

After all that I made it back to my basement apartment about an hour before I'd expected, with plenty of time to pack for ten days up north. Indeed, I managed to leave about an hour early to get to the airport, so I'd have plenty of time to grab a leisurely dinner before my flight.

Except that when I got to the airport I realised I'd forgotten my viola, which would make it difficult to a) practise and b) have a Skype lesson on Tuesday. So, half an hour transit back out to the apartment and half an hour back to the airport, and there went all the extra time I'd built in for dinner. I did manage to grab something to eat anyhow but it was a close thing.

I then discovered, once I got here, that I'd left my glasses at home as well. This is deeply frustrating, as it rather limits my late-evening options. It's also gonna make things interesting if my contacts self-destruct again.

(I briefly thought I had lost my Nexus card, but it turned up again. Still not sure what happened there. I'd blame my lack of glasses except that I generally find things by touch and not by sight, so.)

---

But the weekend was pretty good: reconnected with Erin, went out to a couple of events to start trying to make connections in the local kink community, generally got a little more sociable and a little less stuck in my own head.

And today's the equinox, so maybe the horrificness has just been the fault of summer and it'll start to settle out now. I can hope, anyway.