Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

[Yes, I know the Santa Clara light rail isn't a "trolley."]

I intended to use a combination of light rail and a bus ride to get to BASFA last night. I was one of the first aboard the LRV waiting at Mountain View, but the car filled up completely with people heading to the 49ers football game at Levi's Stadium. This proved to be my undoing. The car was so full that the operator began to skip stops, including Reamwood, which was where I was supposed to get off, and I would have been hard-pressed to get out through the packed-in crowd of people in the car anyway. I managed to extricate myself at Lick Mill, after all of the football fans had left. I started to walk back to try and go back the other way, but it took so long (partially because of having work my way through the Security Theatre around Levi's Stadium) that I concluded that it wasn't worth it, so I took the next car heading downtown and went back to the motel instead.

Sorry that I missed folks who might have been expecting to see me at BASFA. Once again, I thank those people who offered to give me a ride back to the motel.

I guess I must have had enough sleep (although I don't feel like it) because I woke up early and ended up catching the earliest LRV back to Mountain View that I could. I had the shuttle bus to my office all to myself.

I finished transcribing the results of three weeks of BASFA's Hugo and Campbell Award discussions, and the results start with this entry on hugo_recommend. Unfortunately, I'm not one of that group's administrators, and the tags were never updated for 2015, so everything is tagged with the wrong year, but I did get it done.

So as I mentioned at the time, Friday was just a mess of things that needed doing, and there was no time for writing. However, I do want to remember how it went, so here's the rundown.

( Just Another Frantic Friday )

( Photos from the Ball Game )

I think I got to sleep about 2 AM. Fortunately, I had no commitments on Saturday. I'm glad the BASFA outing was to that Friday game, not the Saturday evening one, where the Dodgers roared back and annihilated the Giants 17-0.

It turned out that the BASFA Baseball Outing was called off and I didn't have tickets to the game tonight after all.

( Oh, that's Bad. No, that's Good... )

Bad Vaudeville routines aside, the cancellation of the Giants outing meant that I could drop the final night of my hotel stay in Santa Clara and instead drive to Yuba City this afternoon (I was able to leave work at 1 PM after a company function in Fremont) instead of tomorrow morning having to be up at 4 AM after having taken the train back from AT&T Park after a Giants night game. (The hotel in YC is half the cost of the Candlewood Suites Santa Clara.)

Lisa and I left Fernley and Fremont at almost exactly the same time, with the effect being that she got to the hotel in Yuba City less than fifteen minutes after I checked in to the hotel. Tomorrow morning we'll go collect a rental pickup truck and get my nephew to help us extract the sofa from the locker and deliver it to my sister.

At Monday night's BASFA meeting, none of the club officers turned up. The meeting turned to me, as the closest thing they had (I'm a former President of the club), and I found myself presiding for the first time in quite a while. This of course gave me both the ability and the incentive to keep the meeting short so we could finish off our Hugo Award discussion nights, although I did let people blather on for an hour or so.

After the meeting we polished off our discussions of the 1939 Retro-Hugo Awards (for works published in 1938), and I'll get them posted as soon as I get the chance to hugo_recommend

Mo Starkey showed off the first physical copy I've seen of the Wizards Tower Press book Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion. We hope to work out a deal to get some of the physical copies for sale out here on the US west coast soon.

Being at BASFA until the Bitter End (because of the Hugo Discussion nights) plus being up at 5 AM to be at work for another ten-hour day is a bad combination. Accordingly, I have little to say tonight as visions of data structures dog me while I try to get ready to bed.

Thanks to the folks at BASFA for their support. I'll get the club's 2014 Hugo recommendations posted by this weekend. The 1939 Retro-Hugo recommendations (for works published in 1938) will take one more week because we have one more Monday (next week) for discussions.

BASFA generally always ends its weekly festivities by adopting a "Rumor of the Week." We didn't adopt the one I preferred, but I liked it so much that I thought I'd share it with those of you who follow gridiron:

( New Motto for Denver )

No, you won't understand it if you don't know American Football. Don't worry about it.

The Fremont Holiday Inn Express let me stay until 2 PM today, which was helpful. By the time I got to the San Jose Vagabond Inn, they had a room into which I could move even though it was not yet check-in time, so all was well, except the performance of the San Francisco 49ers on the football field, as I got to watch the second half.

I appear to have more or less adjusted back to Pacific Time, other than my work hours are relatively early by local standards, somewhat by my own decision that going to work early means not sitting in traffic for an hour to drive twelve miles.

Tomorrow I should be able to get to a BASFA meeting for the first time in some weeks. Would whoever left me a bag of stuff to carry back from San Antonio please contact me. I've forgotten who gave it to me with a promise to collect it at BASFA!

I thought that I would be able to sleep in this Monday morning, but late last night René Walling asked if I could attend a CanSMOF board meeting at 8:30 AM. (I am a director of the Montreal Worldcon's parent non-profit corporation. Worldcon is one of the few times we have a quorum in one place for an in-person meeting.) I said, "I don't want to do so, but I can make it." At least I didn't have to help Lisa haul equipment to the convention center, but could instead get a coffee and sit in a comfy chair while we discussed stuff we needed to approve as a Board. I would be out of line to talk about the decisions until the corporation officially announces them, however.

( Last Chance for Worldcon Shopping )

( Closing Ceremonies )

With LSC3 over, Lisa and I finally got our first and only real meal of the day over at the food court. I fear that we never really experienced the selection of restaurants around us. We ate twice at Luciano's Italian next to the hotel, but everything else was the food court, Denny's, or camp food in our room. Lisa was sick, and we were too busy to do much else.

( BASFA Meeting )

( Worldcon Chairs Party )

( Advance Move-Out )

Tuesday, we hope to be on the road by Noon. We have one stop in San Antonio, and we plan to take the scenic but slower route on US-90 through Langtry, Texas, heading for Fort Stockton. It could be a very long day, and I've had only about three hours of sleep in the past 48, so it would be wise if I tried to get a few more hours before we pack out of here.

I got away from work early enough yesterday to head back over to Newark, drop my things at my hotel, and collect Eric Larson from his place to drive us over to BART, where we caught a train for San Francisco and walked to AT&T Park for the Giants-Braves game. There we joined BASFA members and co-workers of Dave Gallaher, who organized the outing and bought the tickets.

( Not a bad seat in the house )

It was a romp for the Giants, who had a spectacular fourth inning, sending eleven men to the plate and scoring six runs. It was nice to run off a big inning against an opponent rather than being the victim of one, as so often has been the case. It turned into an easy 8-2 victory against the league-leading Braves, particularly satisfying given how the Braves had shut down the Giants the previous evening.

As the game went into the ninth, many people started leaving, as the result appeared to be a forgone conclusion, but those who left early missed the entrance in McCovey Cove of a peculiar object, even by the standards of the Cove.

( Illuminate! Illuminate! )

Eric and I walked back up the Embarcadero, stopping to admire the LED light sculpture on the Bay Bridge (this being our first time in The City since it was installed) before heading off to BART. We were train-lucky, as a train going our way was approaching the station as we reached the bottom of the stairs.

Aside from a short delay due to a "police incident" at West Oakland (where the BART Police apparently removed a person or persons from the train), we had an uneventful ride back to Fremont. I dropped Eric off at his place and headed back to my hotel. Given that I'd been up since 5 AM, I was very grateful to get to bed.

Today, I "slept in" all of 90 minutes but took my time packing and getting on the road before driving home to Fernley. Typically, today's Giants game came on the air as I was leaving signal range of any of the team's radio network stations. This keeps happening to me, so I gave up and stumped up the $20 for the MLB At Bat app that allows my smartphone to bring in the game as long as I can get a cell phone signal, and I-80 is well-supplied with towers.

I got home to Fernley about 5 PM, and Lisa was of course glad to see me. I'm tired from all that driving. Today was National Train Day, and I would have preferred to have been riding a train home than driving, but I need the van at home. Perhaps on another trip to the Bay Area for work I'll arrange to do it by train and leave the van at home with Lisa.