Worldcon 7: Changing Gears

Wednesday was all about moving from vacation mode to Worldcon mode. Breakfast in my room, working on various computer housekeeping things, then the hike down three floors of stairs with my luggage to check out. By pure coincidence, I got to the Hilton check-in desk just as my roommate arrived from the airport. As expected we couldn't get into the room yet, but after dumping luggage we went over to the convention center to register. I then spent entirely too much time and wandering between venues to get my transit pass for the second half of the week. (In theory, you can add time to the one-week pass, but to do that I'd have had to wait until it was actually expired, so instead I bought a second one-week pass.) I'm probably not getting my money's worth out of the unlimited ride pass, but it's worth it to know I can just hop on and off the tram and not worry about fares.

By then, the room was availble. In getting settled in, I missed the message from my dinner companions (fromankyra and her father) that they were quite ready for food in advance of our scheduled time, so by the time I had the message and joined them they were hanging in a pub with Sara Uckelman. After a bit, we adjourned for a pub with dinner options up by Trinity College (location for reasons that ended up being not relevant) and spent about three hours chatting about linguistics, multilingualism, living in countries not your own, academia, SCA, and all sorts of other things that subsets of us had in common. I distributed presents of the Produce of My Estates and received (as pre-arranged) a box of genuine Turkish lokum in return.

After I got back to the hotel I decided to hang out in the lobby lounge on general principles and was soon joined by Carl Cipra and a friend of his. With the prompt, "So I picked up this book I want to send you--have you ever heard of Anne Lister?" I was off in full geek mode and we chatted about queer history and the difficulties of research for quite some time.

And now here it is: Thursday and the start of the convention. My first panel (Dragons and Debutantes, about Regency fantasy). Since I have a full evening social schedule, don't expect another update until tomorrow. (Whatever "tomorrow" means in the negotiation of timezones between us.)