Surprise Genre-Adjacent Encounter

I was feeling alert enough this afternoon so that after I finished with Day Jobbe, Lisa and I went into Reno for a few errands. First we collected a part we'd ordered from Summit Racing (they have a large warehouse/retail store in Sparks), then went to Lowe's to buy some things the Fernley store did not have. We were going to go get groceries next, but Lisa was hungry so we went to the Peppermill buffet for dinner, getting there just after they opened. Things were pretty quiet. Lisa asked the manager about how traffic had been, and she said, "You probably want to finish up by 6:30, because that's when the gamers will arrive." We didn't understand what she meant until we went for our usual post-dinner walk around the upstairs function space.

( GAMA in Reno )

We talked with a few people, and it quickly became clear that the people we met knew "our" fandom. I could talk about "Worldcon" without having to explain what it was, for example. We could have hung around longer, but I have to work tomorrow, and we still had grocery shopping to do, so we had to move on to WinCo Foods. We saw a few signs of panic buying, particularly in the toilet paper aisle. (We bought one package ourselves, but that was on our regularly scheduled shopping list.) They were limiting purchases of bottled water, hand sanitizer, and other things. We weren't panic buying; this was just our normal grocery shopping, which we completed without incident. As my day was drawing to a close, Lisa drove us home.