hotThere were only two participants in this particular Fannish Inquisition. the first was the Utah in 2019 Westercon Bid.
After the bid for 2019 it was time for questions for next year's Westercon in Denver.
These two presentations used up the entire hour, and there were no announcements from any bids for future years at this time. No Worldcon bidder/convention presentations were scheduled.
While the Inquisition was going on, Ben Yalow, Site Selection Administrator, got a phone call. He came to me as Lisa was packing equipment away and told me that because of the call he really needed to fly home right away and would I please take over as Emergency Holographic Site Selection Administrator. I agreed to do so, but asked him if he could get the table going today and after I helped Lisa get the gear back to the room I would come down straight away and take over.
After helping Lisa, I went to the Site Selection table and Ben briefed me on procedures. Judy Bemis, Linda Deneroff, and later Seth Breidbart volunteered to help me. After Ben gave me the gist of things, I told him, "Thank you. I relieve you, sir!" and when Ben started to dither over additional things, I said, "Go home, Ben!" He left. We all hope that the issue was not too awful serious. (It's not medical, but I think it best to wait to hear from him about what the issues way before saying much more.)
Plans of mine to spend most of today at the San Jose Worldcon table were obviously scuppered, as I needed to run Site Selection. However, we had other commitments as well. In particular, Kuma Bear was supposed to run an Art Show tour, with us helping him. Fortunately, Judy and Linda were able to run things while we did the tour and then went off to get some lunch. Kuma will write about the Art Show later.
Lisa and I had lunch at the Cornish Pasty bar a block from the hotel. The staff were friendly, the pasty was good, as was the scotch egg, but Lisa said the fries were too peppery, and we both agreed that the music was too loud and too distorted. Still, we were better off for having had lunch.
Running Site Selection is relatively easy when there aren't a lot of ballots being cast. As I said in a reply elsewhere, not only is this a small convention (I'm guessing fewer than 500 bodies on site), but a lot of the "usual suspects" who regularly attend Westercon aren't here due to various factors. This means that a higher-than-usual proportion of the membership are people who won't/can't attend conventions outside of commuting range. For them, a site in Utah might as well be on the Moon, so they're not going to take any notice of or participate in the election. So 42 votes is low, but not terribly surprising.
At 6 PM, we closed the polls. Seth Breidbart and I along with the Hatchers (the Utah bid team) went up to the Board Room where we had been told we could count ballots. Unfortunately, the room was locked and we were unable to find anyone who could get the room unlocked. Fortunately, the adjacent room (where the Inquisition was this morning and where the Business Meeting will be tomorrow) was just winding up its last panel, so once they cleared out, we could use it to do the counting.
Counting itself was pretty simple, with so few ballots. Linda Deneroff joined us and helped with the count. To my relief, the number of voter information sheets and the amount of money we received matched the number of votes cast. Sometimes there are more voter sheets than ballots, which is okay because that means someone paid for a vote and then didn't cast it, but the bad result is when you have more votes than voters, which doesn't happen often and fortunately didn't happen here.
Because Westercon rules don't require that the Business Meeting formally accept the results, I declared the election final, congratulated the winning Westercon 72 Committee, and gave them their voting fees and membership data. I then wrote up the results for the convention newsletter, thanked everyone for their help, and Linda and I carried the Site Selection gear back to my hotel room, where Lisa was taking a nap. The three of us went to dinner at the "Identikit Irish Pub-Restaurant" next to the hotel, which had decent food, and then we hit the parties.
Before heading to dinner, I had set one of the computers to processing the Fannish Inquisition videos. They were done when we came back from dinner, but they are huge and the bandwidth here at the hotel isn't that huge, so I set them to uploading. It took many hours to get those videos online.
After 11 PM, Lisa and I remembered that we wanted to go to CVS to get some more Diet Coke for me and chocolate milk for her. You'd think a four block walk at that time of the night wouldn't be so bad, but the heat was still very stifling, and it was very hard on both of us, Lisa worse than me. I hope we're able to get enough rest to be able to get our remaining responsibilities done tomorrow.
On Monday morning, I'm helping Worldcon 76 co-host the Con Suite from 10:30 to 12:30, although I need to leave early because I'm chairing the Westercon Business Meeting, which Lisa is recording. There is no business expected, so unless someone surprises us, it will be a very short meeting, with an initial report from Westercon 72 the only thing I'm expecting. We have the afternoon free (other than helping with Worldcon 76's table), but will need to get dinner early, because we have to set up for the 8 PM Match Game SF show. Fortunately, we have two hours for set up. Unfortunately, we need to move the gear in from the car in the blazing sun. I've moved the minivan closer to the room where the show will be, but it still it likely to be a strain on us.