Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I got home from Seattle yesterday, after a smooth flight (first class is spoiling me).

( Who He )

It was a great Worldcon for Kayla. My contribution was minimal, as expected, and that's fine.

Today is a booked day of rest. Lots of sleep needed. If only I could sleep while Kayla had fun.

Today I flew from Reno to Seattle on Alaska Airlines. It was a very good flight: traveling in first class is something I could get used to, although in this case it was primarily because I had a lot of extra stuff to carry, so the two-checked-bag allowance made the bigger seat almost incidental extra expense.

I was running so far ahead of schedule that I almost was too early, but the check-in desk opened just as I got there. With my first class ticket, I went though a shorter queue, and even though I had to once again take out my computer, camera, and put my shoes through the belt, I was still through Terrorization only 15 minutes after dropping my bags. That gave me loads of time to have breakfast before heading down to the gate, where I still had an hour to wait for my flight

( Heritage Fleet and Hotel Upgrades )

I then walked down to the Sephora to confirm that I had understood the map properly and to figure out how long it would take to get there. After that, I located a Walgreens that wasn't too far away. I'd forgotten a couple of toiletries items that were easy to replace there, and I also bought some milk and soda. Across the street from Walgreens was a Chipotle, and I got a burrito to take back to the hotel. I was pretty tired already, and besides, having such a nice room, I wanted to get some use out of it.

Anyway, that was the trip to Seattle. I do not expect to update daily on this trip, for the reasons I've already given.

Kuma Bear and his Girl have continued to go see things. Yesterday they visited the German Transport Museum in Munich. It was not their first visit there, but the place is so big that it deserves multiple visits.

Things get a little complicated in the next few days. I'm heading for Seattle and Worldcon on Sunday, while Kuma and Lisa will be in Lucerne, Switzerland. After being burned in Berlin, I made sure to contact the hotel in Lucerne to make sure they understood that the reservation was for Lisa and that any charges should go against my credit card on file, although in this case, there should be no charges (other than a small local tax that she'll have to pay, I think) because the room is on my IHG points. In my case, I'll be spending two nights at the Crowne Plaza Seattle before moving in to the Sheraton Grand for Worldcon. This is because my original reservation was based on driving to Seattle instead of flying, and when it proved to be more economical to fly (even in first class), I needed to arrive two days earlier than originally planned, and I was very concerned that trying to modify my Sheraton reservation might break it. Besides, I'm an IHG diamond member this year, so I might as well get some use out of it, although it does mean changing hotels on Tuesday.

Because of the European train vacation, Lisa will not be at Worldcon this year.

Something I'm going to have to pay close attention to at the conventions I'm attending this year (Westercon/BayCon, Worldcon, and World Fantasy Con) is pacing myself. Kayla is going to get pretty excited, and that could lead to overwork. I love Worldcon, but we'll be turning sixty years old in August, and going without sleep is something that I could do much more easily thirty years ago than now.

I suspect that getting enough sleep is going to be a huge issue for us. I hate the idea of having to take mid-day naps or something like that. Worldcon is apt to be the biggest challenge, particularly inasmuch as I'm saying in the party hotel, which is the farthest away from the convention center, so even getting back to the room for some rest in the middle of the day is going to be a challenge.

Video from the presentations, announcements, and Q&A sessions for past, present, and bids for future Worldcons are now posted on the Worldcon Events Channel SMOFCon 41 Playlist. As time permits, I will also link the individual videos to bids on the Worldcon.org bids list, but I do not expect that to get done until after I get home. I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time in my hotel room wrangling YouTube videos as it was this weekend.

There were two 2027 Worldcon bid developments on Saturday at SMOFCon. I filed Montréal's formal bid for the 2027 Worldcon with Seattle 2025 just after midnight (just before I went to bed), after having confirmed with bid chair Terry Fong that everything was ready to do. Seattle responded later that day that the bid was correct and met the WSFS Constitutional requirements, so Montreal is on the ballot.

Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv bid sent an announcement to SMOFCon 41, which Vincent Docherty read during the Worldcon bid Q&A session, stating that they have suspended their 2027 Worldcon bid until an unspecified future date.

The combined announcement is on the Worldcon website, including the link to the list of bids and to the specific documents making up the Montréal bid.

This morning I got up at my usual work day time and did not rush. I did make one miscalculation, though: the freezing fog continues to bedevil us, and I cannot find my frost scraper. It's not something that I use all that often given that I work from home and rarely need to be out and about in this weather. I eventually got the windows sufficiently thawed that I could set off for Reno Airport.

About the time I checked my luggage and was making my way to Terrorization, I got an update from Alaska Airlines telling me of a small flight delay. That was actually good because it meant that I would have enough time to have a full breakfast rather than whatever I could grab from Subway or McDonalds. In the end, I had about 15 minutes leeway.

It was nice to have a first class seat. This was my first trip on an Embraer E175, which has 2-1 seating in first class, and I had the side with the single seat, which suits me fine. It was a comfortable trip, and I took a bunch of photos.

( Reno to SeaTac )

The Doubletree Hotel is very close to SeaTac Airport. So it is ironic that it took me almost as much time to get from SeaTac to the Doubletree as the flight took to get from RNO to SEA. First there was a delay getting the luggage out. Then I went to the wrong place to get the hotel shuttle. Then I had to backtrack to the terminal to find a restroom, not helped by the huge amount of terminal renovations making a mockery of the signage. I finally made it out to the correct pickup location and called the hotel second time. They told me the driver would be there soon. In this case "soon" meant thirty minutes. It's just possible that I could have walked to the hotel faster. But I got there in the end, even if I was so disoriented that I left my luggage on the curb when I went inside to check in.

I was given the option of waiting several hours for the single king room originally blocked and reserved for me in the tower, or taking a nominal downgrade to a single queen, but on the ground floor of Wing 6 of the hotel. I took the latter. I'm traveling alone, and having a room sooner was better than later. Besides, while the Con Suite it on the Penthouse floor of the tower, Programming is in the function rooms downstairs, so it is possibly more convenient to be on a ground floor room. At least I'm not out on Wing 5B. (Norwescon regulars will understand why that's a good thing.) OTOH, this room doesn't have a refrigerator. On the gripping hand, there are no stores nearby so there's nothing perishable for me to store.

After unpacking and checking messages, I went up to the Penthouse and ended up spending the afternoon and evening smoffing, as one does at a SMOFcon. I did eventually get a meal, as I met up with Kent Bloom and Mary Morman, who invited me to join them for dinner in the hotel restaurant, which I did. We later were joined by Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf (who is leading the only bid for SMOFCon 42 (2025), Stockholm) and Vincent Docherty.

After dinner it was back upstairs for more socializing, which is to me one of the biggest attractions of SMOFCon. There was certainly no shortage of subjects about which to talk, with the plans of Worldcon 2025 Seattle (not the same group as is running SMOFCon this year) announcing plans to hold the WSFS Business Meeting mostly online.

Several people asked after Lisa, and I explained that she was a bit traveled out from the three month Worldcon trip.

The convention actually starts on Friday. See the SMOFCon 41 website if you are interested. If you are local to the area and are interested in the subject of genre convention running, you can still join at the door.

Fortunately, I don't have any commitments early on Friday, so I don't have to be up early. That's goodk because getting up at 4:30 AM and socializing until Midnight is something that's much harder to do than it was when I was in my twenties.

Yesterday was an SFSFC Board of Directors meeting, of which I am currently the corporate Secretary. Among the various items of business was the need to elect directors for three year terms commencing January 1, 2025. SFSFC currently has thirteen directors elected for three-year terms in groups of 5/5/4. This year was the group of 4, and my own seat was one of those up for election.

Because one member was absent, we have to a very short meeting sometime between now and the end of this year to elect officers for next year. Although directors serve three-year terms, officers are elected annually for one-year terms, and the elections for officers have to be of the directors who will be in office as of the start of the year when the officers' terms commence. Whenever possible, we do the officer elections at a separate meeting of the directors who will be in office as of the start of the next year to elect officers that we usually hold immediately after the meeting where we elected directors who take office on January 1 of the following year; however, technically, we must give notice of that extra meeting to everyone who would be eligible to attend it, and I forgot to include that bit in the regular meeting notice. Despite this failing on my part (caused by using a copy of the previous meeting's notice and forgetting to put in the part about electing officers), I was re-elected as a director for another three-year term.

I would have worked on the SFSFC minutes after the meeting, but we needed to get the rather substantial amount of Reno-based errands done, and by the time we got home, I was much too tired to do anything except eat dinner and fall into bed. As I've said before, we try to group our tasks for trips to Reno together for efficiency, but while Reno may not be Los Angeles, is still sprawls a bit, an it can take a while to get to everything.

Today, I attended a Montreal in 2027 Worldcon bid committee meeting. I'm responsible for keeping track of all of our WSFS-related responsibilities as a bid (big surprise there, I'm sure), and we dealt with those as well as lots of other things, including our preparations for SMOFCon, which is only a few weeks away.

Edit, November 18: Revised to clarify the distinction between SFSFC director elections and officer elections, which are separate things and operate under different rules.

Today is my first day back "in the office" since the start of this Worldcon trip. I'm working remotely (albeit that I always work remotely; it's just that instead of Nevada, I'm in Wales). To my relief my work computers are both working. As I'm trying to keep my hours closer to my co-workers in the Central and Eastern time zones, that means that for a change, I don't have to set an alarm, although it means I'll be working into the evening most days.

( GXO in Glasgow )

I'm making some progress on getting the hundred of photos that I've taken labeled. That will make it easier for me to do the backdated entries for Worldcon and the tourism since Glasgow.

This morning, I took Lisa to Glasgow Queen Street station by taxi for her and her friend Chris to start their two-month European rail holiday. We were supposed to collect Chris at his hotel, which, as far as we knew, was the Argyll Hotel, and then go on to Queen Street. However, when the cabbie took us to the Argyll Hotel Glasgow, neither Chris nor his roommates were there, and the hotel said they had no record of them. We gave up and continued on to Queen Street, hoping that Chris would find his way to us. While we waited, we validated Lisa and Chris' Eurail passes (fortunately, the UK is still part of Eurail). Chris arrived a little while later. We determined that there are two different hotels with nearly the same name! Besided that Argyll Hotel Glasgow, there is the Glasgow Argyle Hotel, BW Signature Collection. None of us knew that there were such similarly-named hotels. In any event, they only were running one train behind their original schedules (the Glasgow-Edinburgh shuttles run half-hourly). I watched their train depart, then walked over to Glasgow Central and got a train to Exhibition Centre, making my final trek through the pink tunnel from the train station to SEC campus. After showering, I proceeded to pack. Anything Lisa left with me has to go back with me, including stuff she brought only for Worldcon and doesn't need in Munich (where they will be based) or during their travels.

Today, Lisa and Chris were off to York, where they planned to visit the National Railway Museum. Tomorrow, they plan to travel from York to Portsmouth and visit the historic ships there before taking a ferry to France, passing through Paris, and going on to Munich, from which they will base themselves for the next couple of months. More about this later.

As you can read, I have internet connectivity back for now. I complained at check-out at the Crowne Plaza about it. They told me that they are in the process of starting upgrades, but they admitted that it's an issue. Not they will do anything about it, but I told them that besides wi-fi, they should wire the place with Ethernet, so one doesn't lose their connection when someone walks by their hotel room or something liek that.

Those of you who saw me at Worldcon may have noticed that I had a Dealer ribbon. I was a minion to Cheryl Morgan and Wizard's Tower Press. Due to my commitments to the Business meeting, this ways mainly limited to moving boxes of book into the dealers' room at the start of the con and moving the (fortunately considerably fewer) boxes out at the end. She's taking care of me post-con, taking me to see Welsh trains and so forth. It's too far to drive from Glasgow to her place in Wales in one day, especially after a week of Worldcon. I contributed a night at a Holiday Inn along the way, for which I could redeem points, which is good because I couldn't use them at the Crowne Plaza.

The night on points doesn't include breakfast. I'm happy enough with that. It means that I can sleep in tomorrow a little bit rather than being pressured to be up early for the included breakfast. There's a Starbucks next door and we can get breakfast there.

It was a clear, sunny day, great for traveling, but not so good if like me you sunburn easily. I didn't really expect it to be an issue in these parts.

I'm grateful Cheryl sold enough books that I and my luggage could fit into her car and I did not have to ride on the roof.