sickI'd loaned Lisa my orange Giants t-shirt and was wearing my San Francisco MLB All-Star Game polo shirt and my Giants cap festooned with buttons. There was a lot of orange and black in our section, but nobody shined like Jeremy Lassen in his three-piece orange zoot suit, which was a big hit with us.
Alas, the Giants weren't doing any big hits, having played a night game in Houston last night and then having to fly to Chicago and play a day game, and the Cubs won the game 6-4. But we still had a good time in pretty good seats, in the shade, and an intermittent breeze helped. However, Lisa and I are still sick — she's still coughing worse than I am, but that's probably because I'm a week behind her — and we also kept dozing off in the warm, muggy air.
When the game let out, our group sort of scattered to the winds, but Paul Dormer joined Lisa and I for the walk and ride and walk back to the hotel. We bade Paul goodbye just short of the hotel, where we went to the grocery store and got some pastrami to put on the bread we bought yesterday. At that point, what Lisa and I wanted to do was to take off our shoes and sit in air-conditioned comfort while we were eating.
After recovering somewhat, we went down to the Exhibits, where Lisa sat at the Luna Society table while I sat at the Westercon 66 table telling people to go up to the "Ordinary Hotel Room" for this evening's gathering while I dealt with mail and the failed attempt to upload the WSFS videos that I managed to perform much later in the evening. I also got to chat with John Mansfield, who I'd not seen for a while, and we caught up on a few things. Later, Lisa and I took Chris Carson out to dinner (Noodles and Co again; sorry we're not dining high, but we're not in good enough health to appreciate it) and then tried to work our way through the parties.
The smart way to do the party circuit is to take an elevator to the 34th floor and then use the stairs to work your way down through the upper floors of the hotel. But because of all of the pasta we'd eaten, we started at 23 and worked upward for the exercise. Alas, the room number we had for the Nippon party must have been wrong because there was a Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and we were never able to find the right room. We did hit most of the major parties — except those too crowded to enter or too loud to endure — but I'm way past my sell-by date and went back to the room by 11:30 PM.
Lisa and I volunteered to be blocked in the party zone to forestall noise complaints, and we now find ourselves almost directly above a very loud party that seems to have been playing the same driving bass beat now for about 90 minutes. We can handle it, and at least we know nobody's going to complain about the sound of our coughing.