Up and About

I "slept in" until 8:30 AM this morning. Unless I order room service ($$$) on Friday-Sunday, I don't think I'll be able to laze about like that if I'm going to be at 10 AM business meetings, what with having to set up our recordings and all that.

With internet service at $13/day in the room, as I mentioned yesterday, I don't expect to pay for it every day I'm here. Whether I'll be able to upload videos of the Business Meetings while I'm here is rather doubtful, but we'll see what sort of other connections we'll have available to us around here. I might manage to make a low-resolution copy where you would at least have the sound if not very good pictures.

Today Lisa and I are going to the Field Museum, but we're going to try and not wear ourselves out. My pedometer says I walked 28K steps yesterday, although of course that's hugely overstated due to the train vibration. I'm pretty sure it was over 12K, though, given the walk over to Greektown and back for dinner. We won't be able to afford that much time off site for most of the time we're here, of course.

I'm not sure when I'll be back online again. Darn these high-end hotels and their overpriced services! Lisa says, and I agree, that we wanted the convenience of location (the convention hotel), but we'd rather be staying in an Holiday Inn Express -- included in-room internet, refrigerator, microwave oven, and breakfast.

Friday, Sunday Business Meeting Schedule Changes

According to an announcement on the Chicon 7 Business Meeting page, the WSFS Business Meetings on Friday and Sunday will start at 10 AM, not 10:30 AM as originally scheduled and as the printed program schedule has it. The Saturday meeting will start at 10:30 AM as originally scheduled. To stress this: The Friday and Sunday WSFS Business Meetings will start 30 minutes earlier than the printed program schedule says. The WSFS Business Meetings will be in Columbus CD.

( Logistics of Business Meeting Scheduling )

Friday's Preliminary Business Meeting (10 AM, Columbus CD) will work through setting up the agenda for the Main Meeting, including receiving reports for various WSFS Committees and also receiving nominations for the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. This may sound like something you can skip, but bear in mind that this is where new constitutional amendments first come up, whereupon they can be killed without debate or amended. (I'm personally expecting to move an amendment on one of the proposed constitutional amendments affecting its "sunset clause," for instance.) There are people who have skipped Friday's meeting because "nothing important happens there," turned up on Saturday, and discovered that the thing they expected to debate wasn't even on the agenda, or was there in a form they didn't recognize, because the Friday meeting had killed/amended it out of shape. This is the WSFS equivalent of bills dying in committee, since the Friday meeting is (in effect) a Quasi-Committee of the Whole on Rules and Resolutions.

Saturday's Main Business Meeting (10:30 AM, Columbus CD) is where debate on constitutional amendments mostly happens. This particularly includes the pending constitutional amendments awaiting ratification: the Best Fancast Hugo and the substantial reworking of the Best Semiprozine Hugo. Should the proposed Young Adult Fiction Hugo survive the Preliminary Business Meeting, it will be debated and get its first vote here too. The Mark Protection Committee members will be elected here as well.

Sunday's Site Selection Business Meeting (10 AM, Columbus CD) will formally receive the results of the 2014 Worldcon Site Selection and also deal with any business for which there was insufficient time on Saturday. The Mark Protection Committee may meet after this meeting, although since there's only a single slot (albeit an elongated 2-hour slot thanks to the 30-minute advance), there may not be time for it here, in which case the MPC may not meet until Monday morning in the "overflow" business meeting slot.

Chicon 7 Day 0

For us, the Wednesday before Chicon 7 started was a day to "sleep in" (i.e. get up at 8:30 instead of 6:30 AM) and get acclimated to Chicago. Since my 24 hours of internet access would expire this afternoon, I spent more time than usual online trying to get things done, but consequently we were relatively late getting moving, and we hadn’t even had breakfast.

( Rant About Registration )

Despite my exasperation with the person who mistook process as being a substitute for policy (which is like mistaking precision for accuracy), we did collect our membership materials, which we took back to our room because we planned on spending most of the day off-site.

After a stop at the front desk to deal with some bookkeeping matters like getting my Hyatt number added to the hotel information and asking them to clean the filthy air intake on the air conditioning in our room, we set out for breakfast. We ended up eating at the Corner Bakery down the street from the hotel, which is okay (there are no Corner Bakery stores on the west coast, and I do like their pecan-raisin bread). After that, we picked up a CTA Day Pass from the CVS/pharmacy and headed for the Loop to catch a train south toward the Field Museum.

( Hello, Sue )

Although we’d stopped for a snack mid-afternoon at the Corner Bakery inside the Field, we hadn’t actually had lunch (having had breakfast so late in the morning), and by the time we rolled out of the Field just before 5 PM, I was really starting to drag. We walked back over to the El and rode it back to the Loop, getting out on the far side away from the hotel and looking for something relatively fast and inexpensive. We ended up at Curries, a fast-food Indian restaurant. Lisa has been concentrating on protein (and eliminating dairy) in an attempt to deal with some digestion problems that appear to be dairy-oriented, so we got her a small dish of fairly mild tandoori chicken bites, while I had a real cultural mash-up of tandoori chicken mac, which is basically macaroni and cheese with chopped tandoori chicken. Person of low taste that I often am, I really liked it.

( More Rail Geekery )

Returning to our origin point at State/Lake, we trudged back to the hotel, stopping at the CVS to pick up some sugar-free cough syrup for me. I can feel the cough that started with Lisa building in my chest. I hope I don’t get it as bad as she had it, and I hope I don’t pass it to others while I’m here. We’re avoiding touching any of the party food and we’re using hand sanitizer liberally.

Back at the hotel, Lisa decompressed in the room for a few hours while I went in search of free internet and also checked out the room in which the Business Meeting will be held to confirm that there was a place where we can set up the camera. I also scoped out where the WSFS MPC Meeting will be on Thursday, which is the Wright Room on the Silver Floor of the West Tower, which is quite out of the way. I was happy to find a way to access that level by stairs (the stairs are to the left of the first entrance to DaddyO’s Irish Pub in the West Tower). Then it was back to the lobby to see if the promised free internet would work.

( Free and Slow, but not due to the Connection Speed )

While in the lobby, I learned from Linda Deneroff that there were parties on Night 0 on the 29th and 30th floors, so I went back to my room on the 33rd floor, put my computer away, and Lisa and I walked down (the stairwells open from the inside, thank goodness) to the Boston in (Christmas) 2020 Worldcon Bid Party (don’t try to think too hard about it) and the Kansas City in 2016 party. In keeping with our desire to avoid infecting more people, we limited ourselves to collecting bottles of water or soda.

We turned in before midnight and tried to wind down, and Lisa suggested I get my LJ entry composed while I was thinking about it. It takes longer than you might think to try and get this much stuff organized, which unfortunately cuts into my sleep for tomorrow. Although it’s only the first day of the convention, I’m going to be very busy, what with trying to find some time to sit at the Westercon 66 table, attend the opening ceremonies (where Lisa, Kuma, and I will be rolling out some brand new matching costumes), a panel I have at 4:30 PM, the MPC meeting at 6 PM, and the opening night event at the Adler Planetarium on Thursday evening. I’m getting tired just typing it.