happySomewhere between last night and today, I seem to have lost my cold-weather stocking cap, which is annoying but not critical.
I spent a good chunk of today just hanging around talking to people, which is a major part of SMOFCon, of course. Linda (who is deputy division head of WSFS for Worldcon 76 under me) and I met with Dave McCarty, the 2018 Hugo Administrator, to discuss some of the logistics for administering the coming year's Hugo Awards. Dave and I then had a separate discussion about the Hugo Awards web site, as he is Chair of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (of which I'm a member) that manages the Hugo site as well as the Worldcon.org, WSFS.org, and NASFiC.org sites. It appears that we've had a glitch in e-mail handling at TheHugoAwards.org that we're working on correcting.
Most of the afternoon was taken up with a Worldcon 76 general staff meeting, this being one of the places where we can get a lot of the people together. Unlike the meeting in Scottsdale, this was more of a "get as many people as we can in one place and then we can talk over things in smaller groups as needed" as opposed to the more structured meetings.
A group of us went out to dinner at the Summer Shack right next door to the Hilton, at which I had some excellent crab cakes and, upon Deb Geisler's advice, the shells and cheese side dish. Well worth it. Then we came back to the hotel for the ice-breaker, which was a hilarious game where people came up with the most outlandish possible solutions for conrunning scenarios. (I won a small prize for my suggestion of the application of high explosives to one of the problems.) After that there were several possible things to do.
I choose to join in to a game of If I Ran the
The Utah NASFiC bid and Santa Rosa SMOFCon bids jointly hosted a meet-and-greet session that I wanted to attend, but the SMOFCon game took up so much time that things were breaking up by the time I got there, so I went back down to the hospitality suite and hung around until the word came down that it was closing time. I guess I'm still closer to living on West Coast time. I'm glad I don't have any early-morning commitments on Saturday, so there's still a chance to sleep in a little bit. That's particularly important because Saturday night is first the Fannish Inquisition and after that the traditional Probability & Statistics Seminar, which I, as the tournament director, have to attend to the bitter end even if I crash out in the early rounds.
Am I having a good time? Yes, definitely. SMOFCon is generally one of the high points of the year for me, and so far, this year is no exception.
