Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I had a very quiet birthday today. I did get one present: a free coffee drink from Starbucks, for which I went out for a walk around the middle of the day. I then printed out the directions for my travel tomorrow, which are complicated, requiring using three different transit agencies, one of which does not play nicely with Clipper, the stored-value, multi-agency transit card for the Bay Area. I may write about this later.

In case I had not made it clear, the reason I had to stay down here as long as I did was because I accidentally made my appointment for and interview for a Chinese visa (needed for the trip to Chengdu for Worldcon) on August 29 instead of the previous Monday. Had I made the appointment for the 22nd, it would have meshed well with my tickets for attending Thanks for Playing the Game Show Show. However, by the time I figured it out, I was stuck. The Chinese visa interview appointment system requires that in order to change your appointment, you have to cancel the first appointment, and they won't show you available appointments if you already have an appointment. So had I canceled the August 29 appointment, I might not be able to get a new one until much later, and we're cutting things a little fine as it is.

On top of all this, according to the consulate, it takes four days to process a visa, and if you don't pick it up quickly, they'll cancel it, so I have to stay for the rest of the week to be sure that I can collect it. On top of that, they'll have my passport while they process it, so I wouldn't be able to fly home.

Most of you will recall that the Astro needs repairs from the Winnipeg trip, and the Rolling Stone is also hors de combat. I was facing needing to rent a car twice or something like that, and after working out how much the costs would be with me, not to mention how much the wear and tear on me would be, Lisa said I should just fly to San Jose and stay here for the full two weeks.

Assuming I can get my passport and visa back by next Friday, I plan to fly home on Sunday morning. (There are no direct flights on Saturday, and I'd really rather not have to fly SJC-RNO via Las Vegas, San Diego, or Phoenix.) If something goes really wrong and I can't get the visa and passport back by Friday, we'll need to make alternative plans, such as maybe taking a train home from Emeryville on Monday. I won't be able to fly back in that case because my only compliant ID is my passport.

In the meantime, I've had a generally comfortable stay here in San Jose, and I'll be taking tomorrow off to go up to The City to deal with the visa interview, which is in the 10:30-11:00 am slot, although I'll show up early just to be safe.