Words are inadequate

Fourth Street Fantasy may well be the con of my heart. It is small (somewhere over a hundred attendees this year), it's a single panel-track so you can talk about the panels with everyone and they probably saw them too, it's surrounded by walkable lunch and dinner options. Most importantly it is friendly. A few folks take on the role of Meal Ambassadors and during scheduled lunch and dinner breaks wrangle a small group off to a local restaurant. I continue to dislike Large Group Restaurant Meals but six or so people makes for good company, and there's plenty to talk about. I expect I'll be back next year, and for longer. (Perhaps the writing seminar on Friday, certainly the post-con party Sunday evening.)

My sociability is evidently still fairly rusty, so I found it easier to mostly talk to people I didn't know at all. But I did at least manage to say hello to everyone who I knew would be there. Part of going for longer next year is so that I can be both rested and sociable, and not staggering around feeling like I just got off a plane.

As always, hanging out with writer-types awakens the part of me that wants to write. So I've opened Scrivener for the first time in *mumble* years and ... I'm still fond of that one story that I haven't yet managed to put a satisfactory climax to. But it might be doable, now, at least doable enough that I wouldn't be too embarrassed to send it to someone and say "hey, can you tell me if this works?" I have time and space to do that in, too, I think.

I also got to spend some time with Steph, and that was quite good as well. She's still in the same house she was in when I visited in 2006. As I'm now on my ninth residence since then I'm extremely impressed by the consistency. I loaned her Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's 'goth Jumanji' comic DIE; she in turn loaned me Salman Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, which I am enjoying immensely.

I committed a minor tactical error in my trip back. My flight back left Minneapolis at ten and landed in Winnipeg shortly before midnight, and then left Winnipeg at six AM to get into YVR at seven. "That's okay," I told myself, "I can just sleep in the airport, there's plenty of benches there." I had reckoned without going through customs in Winnipeg and thus getting stuck on the wrong side of security. Airports have at least some measure of, I don't know, privacy or protection or something. Airport lobbies are deeply uncomfortable places to pass any amount of time. If airports are liminal spaces existing only to pass from one real place to another, the airport lobby is the liminal space's liminal space. In the end I slept for about an hour and a half, once the cleaning crew had left.

Mr Tuppert is pleased that I've come home. He's been politely demanding scritches and occasional bouts with the string or the red dot.

I have been stuck in YVR for several hours due to first a Westjet system-wide computer outage and then just Westjet being terrible. So I write about my cat.

( meditations on cat )

Gathering was quite good this year. Having my own room is I think a requirement for my mental health. (Or at least a facsimile of my own room: Christine was a great roommate because we were basically never in the room and awake at the same time, so I had evenings to decompress.) Eric B-- was back, and I met and gamed with his wife Claire as well. I didn't get to play all the games I wanted (but when do I), or with all the people I wanted, but I got in a large proportion of each. It's still disconcerting to go around saying goodbyes and have so many people say "You're leaving?" in a disappointed voice.

I miss being here with someone, though. Even though I've only done that once, and that for only half the week. It'd be nice to be here with someone to snuggle and game with and talk about game-type things with.

Gamingwise, the standout would I guess be 1841, an 18xx in which companies can own shares of other companies, including presidencies, and in fact can start new companies during their operating turns, and that's not even the most ridiculous thing about it. It's set in northern Italy and has a truly impressive amount of historical and geographical chrome: national boundaries, mergers and in one case a company that divides in two, mountains that count as stops for your train but don't provide any revenue (and can be tokened), and runaway inflation and train prices to match. I don't know that I feel a need to own it or to play it often but I enjoyed it.

Other highlights include a two-hour game of 1846 in which I came in second and beat Eric for the first time, and a playtest of a forthcoming Tom Lehmann dice-building game. It's more or less "Dominion with dice" but I do like it better than Dominion. Though again, I feel no particular need to own it or play it often. Also the late-playtest of Hibernian Rails, a hopefully-forthcoming crayon rail set in Ireland. The board was an utterly tangled mess by the end of the game. Great fun. Unfortunately the recent collapse/acquisition of Mayfair Games leaves the future of the crayon-rail series in doubt, so who knows if or when it will see the light of day.

Scattered thoughts. It took me longer to adjust to the timeshift this year than it has in the past, possibly because I was going into it kind of tired, possibly because I was waking up earlier than usual. I did 30-45 mins of yoga a couple of mornings and that seemed to help.

Sad to have not been able to stay the whole week. I ended up unexpectedly having dinner with Steffan O-- one night. He said that he actually prefers leaving before the second weekend, because by then people are starting to get tired and rundown and generally sad about how it's about to be over. I can understand that, but I think I would prefer going through the emotional goodbyes along with everyone else. Feels less like I'm missing out on a lot of fun, less like a party and more like a parting. And I do enjoy the bustle of the prize-table and the flea market, and it's just plain weird to be leaving the Gathering with less stuff than I arrived with.

Checking a bag on the way in means that food is sorted: I bring pop-tarts for breakfast and sandwich fixins for lunch, and splurge on dinner at a hotel restaurant. I definitely appreciate not needing to track someone down for a grocery run, or needing to be functional enough on the afternoon I get in to buy groceries.

And now it is too early in the morning and I am sitting in the fancy airport lounge in Toronto, because when you fly too much on Westjet they give you fancy-airport-lounge passes. They feed me tea and breakfast, and give me comfyish chairs, and it is blessedly quiet in here. And soon I fly out to Prince George to accompany Erin on a drive south (my first time driving the southern route), for a pagan camping event and a floatplane trip to the island and more.

I feel wildly variable, veering between calm and unanchored. I don't know what to do about that. I mean, in the short term the answer is "get more sleep," and maybe that's the long-term answer as well.

Because it's been ages and ages since I did a proper con report.

( Though this isn't exactly one )

I am writing this here so maybe I will remember next time: when taking a redeye flight, do not sit near the back of the plane. The flight attendants chatter ALL NIGHT, preventing you from sleeping. In addition, they seem to have put some sort of diuretic in the drinks on this flight, and the bathroom was constantly in use.

I remember very little of the stopover at Toronto, except that the breakfast options were uniformly terrible. We overpaid for Starbucks breakfast.

The flight from Toronto to La Guardia couldn't land on its first pass due to an almost complete lack of visibility. Then, once we landed and managed to locate the gate for our exit flight (no mean trick, LGA's C gates are not all in the same building) our original flight to DC had been cancelled, and the replacement that we'd been bumped on to was the victim of a plane unable to leave DCA for several hours.

We arrived somewhat the worse for the wear into a fifteen-minute downpour. It's good to see real rain again instead of the constant dripping one gets in Vancouver. Thankfully it had stopped by the time we got to the hotel shuttle waiting area.

Got checked in and picked up WFC registration, had a very slow dinner at a very busy diner across the street, had ice cream, and slept for twelve hours.

Now I am officially at World Fantasy, though I'm not entirely sure why.

Well, that was about the easiest trip through airport security I've ever had.

A few months after we moved to Vancouver we got Nexus cards. For $50 and a background check, we can now cross the US-Canada border in special expedited lanes. The signs that declare PEACE ARCH CROSSING 45 MIN WAIT now translate to "ten minutes in line and two questions from the customs agent." We also get lighter security screening on intranational flights and don't have to talk to a human being when we fly into Canada from the US.

Sometime last year the TSA decided to acknowledge that those of us who'd been through the Nexus screening program were unlikely to be a terrorist risk, and opened the "PreCheck" security lanes to Nexus cardholders. Attempts to use the PreCheck lanes last year met with frustration at every turn: the lanes were only open some of the time, the people working the lanes didn't know who was eligible and who wasn't, PreCheck is only available for entirely domestic flights (if you're flying out of the country, clearly you are going to blow up the plane on your way out.).

Today the stars aligned. After a pleasant train ride down and a tasty lunch with imperatrice at Katsu Burger (I am only surprised that the people selling deep-fried hamburgers are Japanese and not, say, Texans at the state fair) I arrived at SeaTac at 12:30. Plenty of time to wait through the ridiculous security lines and still make my flight. On a whim I wandered over to the PreCheck line, just to see what they'd tell me this time.

They scanned my boarding pass and ... just waved me on through. I hauled my luggage onto the conveyor belt (didn't have to remove liquids or laptops) and walked through a normal x-ray scanner. Total time from entry to exit: maybe five minutes.

This seems like a reasonable way to run an airport security line. Now to entertain myself for an hour and a half before my flight.

So, on Friday morning I woke up at quarter of four, taxied to the airport with the cat couriers (because the Skytrain doesn't run that early), and hopped a flight to Toronto. From there I caught a puddle-jumper to Columbus.

( Eventually. )

But I made it okay, starving and headachey and worse for the wear. I found uilos and collapsed on the bed in the hotel room for probably half an hour or so, and then she herded me to North Market for the first of several weekend meals involving crepes.

( And then it was Origins. )

( Speculation about next year )

Overall: fun but not nearly enough of it.

And now I am home,and it's time to face the week.

On a more pleasant note, Key West.
( A good trip. )

Holy crap I'm finally caught up on a week's worth of LJ.

Which is to say, after catching Ponyo with uilos last Tuesday night (verdict: a very very odd fairy tale of a movie, more like Totoro than any of the other Miyazaki films I've seen, and worth watching although don't stay for the godawful end-credits song), I spent most of a week in and around Bellingham with nixve, attempting to go backpacking in a downpour, successfully meeting her other SOs (but not the Insignificant ones, which works out, I think), eating an awful lot of ice cream, and generally having a Vacation. Details forthcoming.

(I will note, though, that the Atlanta airport reminds me of the Memphis one, with less brown, on a larger scale, and with a train that seriously jerks one around. Oof. Changing planes here was something of an Experience, and would have been touch and go if I'd not had such a crazy-long layover.)

I'm not sure if it'll do anything for my feelings of burnout, because I suspect that's not so much burnout as dissatisfaction and a desire to be doing something wildly Different. I'm beginning to piece together ideas about why and how that is, and what it is I'm wanting. Starting to write again has been a part of that process, I think; ditto a handful of other Projects. Thing is, crazy ideas that will never actually work keep popping up and wanting to be taken seriously like now.

Bleh. Sleep, perhaps.