Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I finished prepping Match Game SF last night, which took some hours as I sorted through what prizes we still have and picked out the questions I want to use. Our show is only 1 h 15 m, so I'll be surprised if we get more than three games, but it should be entertaining. Also, as it has now been more than two years since our last show, if we are reusing questions from back then, even people who happened to be there might not remember them.

Lisa is our Loadmaster for this trip, and she says we're about 85% packed. Tomorrow as soon as I can log off from Day Jobbe we can finish packing our personal luggage and set off for Bishop, which is where we're spending tomorrow night. I was talking to people this evening online and they seemed surprised that we were leaving tomorrow instead of driving from Fernley to LAX in a single day. "It's about 800 kilometers!" I said. "Maybe when I was 26 I'd do that drive in one day, but not thirty years later. As much as we like these road trips, we also don't like putting too much distance into each day of driving.

I'm happy we've got as much packed as we do, though. I was really worried yesterday, and happy to have gotten most of the critical stuff done with a day to spare.

We were at the auto shop as soon as they opened (it's right next door to the hotel). As we rather expected, they didn't think they could look at it until later in the day, so we had to switch to Plan B. After confirming online that they had a small (10') truck available, we walked the 3 km or so to the U-Haul dealership and paid $700 to rent the truck for a week. This is expensive, but less expensive than renting a sufficiently large cargo van from any of the car rental companies in Elko would have been, and there were no U-Haul cargo vans available in Elko.

After collecting the U-Haul, we drove back to the hotel (stopping to pick up a padlock for the truck's cargo box), moved out of the hotel room, and then drove over to where the Astro was parked and trans-loaded the convention gear.

( On the Bright Side, It Loads Much Easier )

After getting the SpikeCon stuff and our luggage into the U-Haul, we turned the keys over to the auto shop and set off for Utah, stopping to get breakfast at the Starbucks inside the Red Lion Hotel/Casino.

We made decent time, and could have done even better on the high-speed sections of I-80, but the truck has a speed governor and can't go faster than 75 mph. (The speed limit is 80 mph in many places.) Still, the driving was easier than you might think. The U-haul handles more like the Rolling Stone than the Astro, but it's okay.

Around the time we finished the crossing of the salt flats east of Wendover after crossing into Utah, the mechanic called. Not to Lisa's surprise, the diagnosis is the need for a new water pump/fan assembly. Estimated cost $450. They don't expect it to be a problem for us to collect either Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. (I think the latter is more likely.) We'll make a reservation at that same motel next door, and as long as we get the U-Haul back by the time they open on Wednesday morning, we should be okay.

So on we pressed for Layton. Unfortunately, we were several hours behind the schedule we would have been had we been able to get to Wendover yesterday, and that meant we got to the SLC area in the teeth of the afternoon commute/getaway day traffic. We finally got to the Home2 Suites around 5:30, about three hours later than originally planned and $700 poorer (not including the repairs to the van, which don't really count).

We unloaded our personal gear and most of the Tonopah stuff into our hotel room, leaving the Match Game gear on board. Had we been on the original schedule, we would have had time to go shopping, but time had run out on us, for we were scheduled for a guest of honor dinner at the nearby Golden Corral, which did suit us as we'd had nothing to eat but the breakfast sandwiches at Elko this morning.

We had to leave a little early to go get MGSF running. Lisa and I headed over to the Convention Center, where we met up with Scott Sanford, and while they started working on getting the tables and chairs on the stage arranged along with the tech tables, I walked back to the Home2 and brought the U-Haul over. I handed the keys to Scott, and a bunch of folks volunteered to unload the gear (and there's a lot of it) while I returned to the Home2 and changed into my game show host costume.

As I expected, we started at 9:30 rather than the announced 9 PM, for various reasons. But the show really went quite well, and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves. It went really well, and we gave away prizes and Lovely Parting Gifts.

After the show ended, we had many willing hands to "strike the set" and put it back in the rental truck. Here is the one bright side of having to rent that truck: we can store the gear in it pretty safely locked up in a way that we did not feel comfortable doing in the minivan. That means we don't have to try and move all of the gear back into the hotel room, but can leave it in the U-Haul. That's good because our hotel room is the site of a room party on Thursday night, that being the only night we can hold a bid party.

It was a frantic day, and there will be a day of financial reckoning later, but we managed to pull off everything we promised today. Tomorrow won't be any slower, with the opening ceremonies, initial Westercon presentation after the Opening, site selection opening, our bid table, a room party, and the shopping trip we'll need to do sometime in the afternoon. How we're going to manage it, I don't know, but I do know that we have to get a few hours of sleep now.

Westercon 70 in Tempe next month has confirmed that we'll be doing Match Game SF at Westercon this year. We're currently scheduled for one evening show on the final night of the convention, Monday, July 3. Panelists are still being arranged.

We need your questions! I know a number of you out there have been saying you've been coming up with SF/F/genre-related fill-in-the-blank questions (not trivia questions), but I haven't heard from any of you! You can post questions here if you like, or send them to me by e-mail. My @gmail.com address is kastandlee.

One of the hassles of having the rear door on the Astro jammed (as it has been since last December when something broke inside as I tried to open it in deeply sub-freezing weather in Tonopah) has been grocery shopping, as access via the side door is mildly tricky when the middle seat is installed, as we normally configure the minivan. Last weekend, when we did our large scale grocery shopping, we were mildly lazy and left some of the non-perishable items in the minivan. Yesterday, in the late morning, Lisa came in and suggested that if I could take a short break from Day Jobbe, we could finish unloading the minivan to give her room to work on the rear door. I agreed and walked out to the vehicle with her. I slid the side door open and started to reach inside for the first items.

Lisa said, "Oh, wait, it's probably easier to get things out this way," and walked around to the back of the van and opened the rear door.

( Open Sesame! )

The rear doors on the Astro now work properly, and that's a big relief to me, because we need that access in order to haul the Match Game SF kit to Portland for Westercon. Furthermore, it's much easier to use the vehicle when we have rear-door access, particularly on our long road trips like the planned trip to Kansas City for Worldcon this year.

Lisa was very pleased at how she surprised me.

I'm pleased to announce that it looks like we'll be able to do one show of Match Game SF at this year's Worldcon in Spokane after all.

( Behind the Scenes )

I thank those of you who sent messages saying they were disappointed that they wouldn't get to see our show in Spokane. That was a contributing factor toward our seeing if there was any way we could make it work while still living up to our primary commitments to WSFS.

Match Game SF is one of Westercon's "opening acts," as our "daytime" show is on Thursday, the first day of the convention, at 6 PM in the hotel Atrium just before the Opening Ceremonies. We have a second "Late Night" show on Saturday night at 10 PM (or after the Masquerade, whichever is later) in the Folsom Room.

The online schedule application Westercon is using is superb. Check it out!

Originally posted by bovil at Q Branch has outdone itself...

When I arrived at the office today, I had two packages: An ICOM IC-2SA radio I purchased on eBay for Lisa (the one she'd been using as a white-noise source broke last week, which is Very Bad), and a box from the John Mansfield containing the innards of one of the home versions of Match Game. The home game isn't very much like the television game, but then again, it was probably a little difficult to get enough people together to play a version equivalent to the television show.

Because the Hugos ran longer than expected, and because it was so difficult for the flood of people to get out of the Tuscany Ballroom across the Sorrento Room where our show was, we started very late and even playing only 3 games managed to run past 12:30 AM.

Kudos to Lisa and especially to yourbob for incredible service well above the call of duty, skipping the Hugo Ceremony to help Lisa make the show possible.

I'd write more, but after packing the show out of the Sorrento Room back into my van, and driving us back to the hotel, we're beat. Fortunately there was still a little bit of food in the room, because we're worn out. I'm so glad I have no appointments tomorrow morning, particularly no 9 AM Business Meeting Setup.

Renovation has published a list of what happens where at Worldcon, which includes our room assignment for Match Game SF. We'll be in the Peppermill, Sorrento 2 - 4, with a scheduled start time of 10 PM on Saturday night, but that scheduled time is "after the Hugo Awards," and may be subject to delay depending on how long the Hugo ceremony runs and how long it takes me to wind up the live coverage of the Hugo Awards and post the results the Hugo Awards web site.

By Sunday night, I'd sort of gotten the feeling that I've been living in Club Regent, after Saturday's Match Game SF and the over-three-hour marathon Business Meeting on Sunday morning and the 8 PM Girl Genius Radio Theatre. After GGRT, our crew efficiently turned the stage from radio play to game show set with time to spare, and at 10 PM we set forth on another show. The contestants seemed to like it so much that they didn't want to leave, with the fourth and final game doing into extended-play not-so-sudden death before we finally wrapped things up after midnight.

Having been "on" for more than eight hours today (not counting time spent helping move equipment and set up/tear down stuff), I am utterly knackered and am not getting up early on Monday. Fortunately, I have no morning commitments and no specific tasks until nearly 2:30 PM.

My thanks as ever to the crew of people who helped Lisa and me make it happen: Bob Hole, our Producer, along with Eric Larson, announcer, and production assistants Brad Ackerman and Fred Moulton. All of you made it so much easier to look good.

After we got the show packed out and into the room after 1 AM, Lisa and I made a brief trip through the parties, where people continued to heap praise upon me for my Business Meeting turn today. Now I hear there are calls for my canonization, but I agree that it's too soon for that because I'm Not Dead Yet. But maybe I will be dead to the world in a few minutes.