distractedWe walked over to Peggy Sue's for breakfast. Lisa only wanted tea and a dry English muffin, but I ordered the chorizo and eggs. When it finally came, it was pretty good, but they seemed to have some difficulty getting it made, and Lisa's English muffin got separated from the rest of the order. They seemed a tad disorganized. Maybe they weren't really expecting the amount of traffic they were getting for a Saturday, which is typically slow downtown but was busier than usual thanks to the start of Christmas in the Park.
We finally got set up a bit after 11, where we found
galtine1 holding down the fort for us. Throughout the day, our table, being the only Fan Table at the con, accumulated more fliers: not only those for the three SFSFC functions — Westercon, Corflu 28, and London in 2014 (SFSFC is acting as the bid's North American agent for banking purposes) — but also Renovation and Potlatch.One of the "dealers" in the small combined Art Show-Dealers Room is a massage therapist. Lisa's back has been troubling her mightily, especially since she pulled a muscle in her sleep while sleeping in the camper of her pickup truck on the trip down from Oregon. I gave her $20 and pointed her at the massage chair. Some time later, she oozed back to the Westercon table reporting that she was feeling somewhat better.
We sold some more Westercon t-shirts (including one each to me and Lisa) and talked to more people about Westercon, although we sold no memberships. We didn't really expect it; most of the people here either already have memberships, are waiting for information about programming or dealer's room in order to make their attendance decisions, or are not going to be attend for any number of reasons.
galtine1 and SFSFC Treasurer Cindy Scott relieved Lisa and me for a while in the mid-afternoon, which gave us a chance to get some lunch. After that, I sat at the table clear until closing at 7 PM, although I was distracted by Day Jobbe stuff. I also ended up making some small edits to the Westercon 64 web site as a consequence of answering people's questions and discovering that there was out-of-date material on the web site.Lisa reports that the convention's modest video program was surprisingly well-attended for the size of the convention. The video program mostly consisted of old bad B-grade SF movies (e.g. Attack of the Crab Monsters), accompanied by audience participation in the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 mode. She says the attendees seemed to have a good time. She periodically had to flee from the too-cold video room to the usually-overheated dealers room to warm up.
After closing, Lisa and I went back to Sonoma Chicken Coop for dinner, where I ordered the salmon risotto for
travelswithkuma's benefit. The fish was okay, but I didn't care for the risotto much. It's probably just as well that we didn't have the multi-layered-chocolate explosion that they're featuring for dessert, because despite the walk back to the hotel, my blood sugar was only barely normal an hour later.Returning to the hotel, Lisa could see that I was not going to be good company as I started hunching over my computer answering work-related e-mail, so she left me to commune with transportation savings models and went to the party (singular, but it is after all a very small convention).
Just before midnight, I came and told Lisa it was safe to come back to the hotel room if she wanted to do so, and we headed for bed. Lisa has taken a number of photographs, but I've not had an opportunity to process and upload them due to the interference from non-convention sources.
We have learned a few things about the hotel layout that will be useful next weekend, and it's good to know that there is a refrigerator (but not a microwave oven) in the room; however, what I want to know (and what I hope to track down SMOFCon's hotel liaison tomorrow to discuss) is what space SMOFCon will be using, if for no other reason than trying to work out exactly how I can organize the Probability & Statistics Seminar next weekend, assuming there is sufficient interest in my doing so. I've been so snowed under with work that I've not been able to give this as much thought as it deserves, and I think I've actually lost a number of my resources from last year like my chip and payout calculator spreadsheets. (They're probably buried on an archive somewhere, but I don't know where.)