worriedI donned my Colonel Chinstrap uniform, and was accompanied by Lieutenant Hayes and Private Kuma. We were able to look through the exhibits without rush, and part of the dealers' room, and finished up in the Fan Tables, where Lisa was able to do a good turn for the Luna Society table while I walked around and chatted with people.
We had to leave about 5:30 because I'd agreed to act as part of the administrative crew for the Worldcon and NASFiC Site Selection ballot counts, and that was just enough time to go back and change out of my uniform and then get back over to the Convention Center.
I was assigned to the NASFiC count, which was the easier of the two. My job was to help the teams from the bids decide odd ballots and to answer rules questions. The NASFiC election having only two candidates and fewer votes was relatively straightforward, taking only 42 minutes to count. After cleaning up, I headed next door to help with the Worldcon count, which was more complicated. There were three candidates, none of them likely to get a first-ballot victory, and there were a lot more ballots cast to boot. Official count time was, I think, 2 hrs 5 minutes, and like the NASFiC it did not include time spent explaining ballot counting rules up front, rearranging tables to make it easier to do the counting, time to carry the ballots from the table up to the counting room, and so forth.
Results are not official until the Sunday Site Selection Business Meeting, but there were no disputes, and the conclusions are now known: Spokane won the 2015 Worldcon, and Detroit the 2014 NASFiC. Although we were finished several hours ago, the winning bidders asked everyone to embargo the results, even unofficial ones, until 11 PM CDT tonight to give the bids a chance to get dinner and do some initial work. I suppose the long faces on the other bids' staff probably would have given other people an idea of what happened.
I wouldn't know how the people looked, because I did not hit the parties at all. I went back to the room, where I found Lisa being sick. She has come down with some sort of respiratory ailment, and is coughing and hacking away like crazy. When you factor in the huge elevator clog, there was no way we would go out to get dinner. Instead, we used the stock of freeze-dried camp food that we'd brought with us for dining on the road and in emergencies. I boiled up enough water using the in-room coffee maker to make the dinners work. I also asked the hotel to bring us more teabags, Lisa having exhausted the in-room supply. To my astonishment, the hotel was able to do so even late at night with Worldcon room parties going on filling up the hotel.
By the time I felt even vaguely like going out and being sociable, it was after 11:30 PM, and I decided that I unfortunately would have to take the rest of Saturday night, the peak night of Worldcon, off because I have to be busy tomorrow night covering the Hugo Awards for TheHugoAwards.org, and also have to be up early once again to help Lisa record the Site Selection Business Meeting. We do hope Lisa will feel well enough tomorrow to be able to get to the meeting.
So while the rest of you are out there partying around us (literally; we're smack-dab in the Party Zone as buffer rooms), we're trying to marshal our energies for Sunday.