(no subject)

arkuat and I were kindly given a ride to Madison with kalmn and her juggler. The latter performed astonishing legerdemain with the luggage and the trunk of the car. The trip was quiet but very amiable, as Eric and I tried botanizing at sixty miles an hour. There was a little construction delay that allowed us to confirm our guesses about what all those blurry plants were. Some knitting happened. The car was declared at one point to be a small fierce truck. Culver's put cheese on my fish sandwich, but I triumphed over it. There were baskettail dragonflies, or some kind of emerald, anyway, zipping around at the rest stop near Menomonie.

Our hotel room was glorious, a corner room on the ninth floor with windows that opened and two views of the lake. I am told that it was Lake Mendoza, although since whoever named the lakes foolishly named the other one Monona, it's hard to be sure. Eric and I have stayed in a lot of cheap hotel rooms, during the long-distance phase of our relationship, and this might have made me a little excitable about the room.

We settled in and then went down to the lobby, where we fouind oursin, marykaykare, and truepenny. Then we went over to Room of One's Own for the guest-of-honor readings. After wandering around the bookstore and drooling a lot, we parted, since Eric recalled having had a difficult time hearing last year. I ran into lcohen, with whom we had dinner plans; and wild_irises and alanbostick, who immediately made dinner plans for Saturday with me; and rushthatspeaks, whom I recognized perfectly well but whose name I immediately botched. She was another person I'd thought of following around to panels to make my programming choices easier. The room was dreadful for conversation, magnifying the babble harshly, but much better once the reading started. I did find it useful that the left-hand wall was mirrored, so that I could look at Mary Anne Mohanraj and read her lips from time to time. I did not realize how much almost everyone reads lips until elisem enlightened me on the subject some years ago, but it is very useful information.

Mary Anne's reading style is very congenial to me. The story was amazing. I found myself split down the middle, half living in the story and the other half busily trying to analyze how she was doing what she was doing, where the sensuousness came from, how the tension built in what seemed so simple, how the pacing worked. Part of it was recognition -- the story is about cooking, and I too have put the chili into the oil and promptly started coughing -- but only part. I had the chance to greet her briefly, and she told me she was writing a portal fantasy. I can't wait to read it.

The other guest of honor, Nnedi Okorafor, had been stuck in such phenomenal traffic that she could not arrive to do her reading.

Lisa and I found Eric, and we had dinner at Flavor of India, which Lisa selected for us. The three of us had never eaten together before, but we put together a meal that delighted and nourished us all -- shrimp mango, aloo gobi, lamb saag. I got most of the shrimp since I couldn't eat the lamb. We were all a little punchy, but the conversation was good. Near the end we fell into a loop where I would make an innocent remark that sounded less than innocent, Lisa would sarcastically take up the double-entendre, and I would, in the course of trying to extricate myself, make an even doubler entendre. Some giggling ensued. Then we went back to the hotel and hung around the second floor, and Lisa introduced us to Jennifer, the first of many strangers wearing jewellery made by Elise. It's a very nice introductory opening. I was wearing an Elisian necklace myself. It was at this point that I did my futile though pleasing highlighting of all the panels I wanted to see, and Lisa and I put our programs on our heads, and we talked to ckd, unless that was before dinner, and boxofdelights and others. My memory is deplorable.

I think we went up to the room at twilight; at least, we saw several notable sunsets from that room, and watched Venus come out. I sent email to David and Raphael announcing safe arrival, and Eric and I had some interesting conversation.

On Friday morning, Eric went out for coffee and had a larger sandwich than he had envisioned when he ordered it. We went to a grocery store to find me some lunch, but I was a little too far gone in hunger by then, so we stopped in at Himal Chuli and split their sample platter (dal, a momocha, and a samosa) and a kind of doughnut made of ground black-eyed peas, in yoghurt and mint sauce. It was all extremely good. Eric and I remembered the first time we went to Namaste in Minneapolis, also a Nepalese restaurant, and how we exclaimed over the delicacy of the seasonings, guessed what the spices were, and contemplated the subtle differences between this and Indian cuisine. We also stopped by Chataura, where we were going to have dinner that evening, to look at the menu. A waiter popped out of the door, saw our badges, and cried, "Wisconites! Wonderful!" When he heard that we were planning to have dinner there that night, he said we should have a reservation, and made it for us on the spot. At some point someone, presumably from the restaurant, chalked a winged fairy-like creature with stars around it and the word "Wiscon" on the blank red stucco wall opposite the door, but I don't remember if we noticed it then or when we arrived there Friday evening.

Then we took a walk to the address of a meeting of the Society of Friends that Eric had discovered on the web. We thought we might go to meeting on Sunday, but since I had a reading in the afternoon, we wanted to know how long it would take to walk there. We tried to come back along the lake, with a brief diversion onto the university campus (I approved of their landscaping) and a fruitless attempt to go through the Law Building. There are a lot of really lovely old trees on the campus. We succeeded only in blundering into the student union terrace, which was full of people sunning themselves; and then saw that a row of seedy-looking frat houses had private lakefront property, thwarting our plan to walk along the lake. This struck us as a waste of a good public resource, but it is certainly a much larger lake than any in Minneapolis, so possibly there are good places to walk somewhere else on the shoreline. There was a marked dearth of dragonflies, which I didn't think boded well.

We were glad of the chance to stretch our legs, but felt extremely hot by the time we got back to the room, so we remedied this situation with showers and air conditioning as required.

Then we went to the Gathering. Eric was interested in the lock-picking lessons, but the table was full when we arrived. We promptly ran into Lisa again. I sat and talked to her until the person she was meeting for tea and cookies showed up, and then talked to them both while they sorted themselves out. Eric had found a seat at the Locksport table by then. At the tea table I met and briefly chatted with redbird, who was wearing a fine purple shirt. I went over to the fiber arts corner, and met and talked to daedala for a while. Eric joined us, and got to quote from A Civil Campaign -- "Stop! She's getting away!" I had headed for the fiber arts corner in the first place because carbonel was there. She was our ride home, and I need to find out when she wanted to leave on Monday so as to understand the possibilities of rescheduling lunch with sdn, whose flight had been cancelled so that she lost most of Friday. I got my information, and then Eric persuaded me to get my hair braided, since I had been dithering about it for hours. But we were wrong about when the Gathering was over, and the hair-braiders were packing up their gear, looking exhausted.

I managed to get to a panel that sdn would have been on if the airline had not been deficient: "How to get good programming at other conventions." I don't usually go to con-running panels, but this one had Terry Garey, whom I never see any more, and kalmn, and Jennifer, who had been wearing an Elisian necklace the night before and seemed very Minnesotan even though she was from the west coast. I found it very interesting and oddly soothing.

Then we descended to the lobby to meet rarelylynne, who was taking us and the Monettes out for dinner. She wants my papers for her archive -- and will get them, too, if I can get even minimally organized. I was still suffering from the heat and did not comport myself brilliantly, but everyone else was sparkly, and I really enjoyed the stories about the breadth of experience an archivist achieves. Especially the one about the dairy-goat photos. I also approved of her policy of approaching authors who are still active and alive rather than trying to sort out estates and watching papers be sold and scattered.

Chataura is apparently the larger, more formal, pricier half of Himal Chuli. The dal was the same, though. I had a tarkari sampler with tofu secewa (someone murmured, "Pamela wins," when they set down the platter, which was indeed beautiful and abundant). The restaurant was very noisy with Wisconites.

Eric and I went back to the room to regroup. We did a lot of that over the course of the convention, partly because of the heat and partly because the convention was our date for the weekend, so a little private time was indicated. Then we went off to Opening Ceremonies.

These were unexpectedly hilarious, featuring Ellen Klages as a respectable librarian much concerned with, well, respectability, in her Christmas sweater and a very alarming wig; and Pat Murphy in a Hawaiian shirt and backwards baseball cap as the "surfer biker librarian." Arguing amiably, they put up a long strip of paper with The Tempest on the far left as the peak of respectability, and "My Mother the Car" on the right as the opposite. Then they had their lovely assistants, the guests of honor, take index cards with the names of works of science fiction and fantasy -- books, TV shows, and movies -- written on them earlier by convention members, and move along from Not Respectable to Respectable while the audience, trained in a mere minute, hummed the Jeopardy them. When the audience stopped, the assistant was supposed to stop as well, so that the card could be affixed at the proper point along the spectrum of Respectability. There were shenanigans from the beginning. The best of these was Nnedi Okorafor's frankly scuttling as fast as she could go so that The Left Hand of Darkness ended up way past the Respectable end of the spectrum, into the infra-Respectable, I guess. There was a certain amount of aid from the audience in this endeavor. The librarians tried to thwart this behavior by changing to an applause-o-meter -- after a brief squabble, Ellen got to be the meter. But the assistants more or less got the better of them anyway.

After Opening Ceremonies, we went up to the sixth floor to party. At this point I can't remember which party was which night, and I'm afraid to look in my program book because I don't want to have choice paralysis for events that are over. Party reports are in the other entry, though I should mention that I also liked the Fogcon party; and also another convention party whose name I have lamentably forgotten. It might have been Musecon. S.J. Tucker is to be their first guest of honor, and they were playing Tricky Pixies' "Tam Lin" when I came in, which got me kindly pounced on by a couple of people who liked the book. I'm pretty sure that it was on Friday that I sat around in the comfy furniture at one edge of the con suite and talked with Ctein, prettymuchpeggy, lynnal, and badger2305, which I enjoyed very much. I did kick myself later for not arranging some kind of meal with them. As with gerisullivan, I find myself, when I see Lynn and Victor, reverting to my "oh, you're here, you live in Minneapolis" behavior, which is comfortable but very vexing when my actual brain remembers that they don't live in Minneapolis any longer and some effort to socialize with them would be useful.

I went back to the room around one a.m., called Raphael, and sent more email home, and Eric joined me an hour or so later, having fallen into a Zar game.

I am tempted to type, "I'll hear thee speak out the rest of this soon," but all I mean is that I'll write up Saturday and Sunday when I have done a little useful work first.

Pamela