zanzjan | rambling Arisia report

It was an exhausting con with a few moments of horrific badness, but all in all I had a good time.

Friday morning we woke up to the remnants of an overnight snow and ice storm and a two-hour delay at the child's school. This meant two hours late getting into work, and with stuff needing doing before I could leave I got a later start out of here than I would have liked and meant I started off the weekend more stressed than anticipated. Once we did hit the road, though, the roads were well clear and the drive was not problematic.

We reached the hotel around 6:45 and discovered that the hotel's parking garage was completely full and there were cars stacked up several deep around the entrance trying to unload stuff. At this point, being that I'd been in my car for something like three hours straight, I was in desperate need of facilities if you catch my drift. Further, although there were overflow lots down the street, for somewhat obvious reasons of my own current physical condition it was not going to be feasible for me to walk any distance. With the blessing of a very overworked doorman, I left the child in the car in not-the-best spot and went in to talk to the front desk about how I could get a parking space and discovered that the hotel registration line was practically out the door, maybe as much as a hundred people long. Yikes! So I went over to the concierge desk and explained my situation and he very kindly got the valet to park my car for me in a handicapped space in the garage and then insisted on checking me in right on the spot. (So yes, I kinda skipped the big long hotel line which hadn't been my intention and I'm sorry for those of you who were stuck in it. But I really did need to get off my feet ASAP. You forgive me, right?)Despite the massive crush of people, the concierge and the valet and hotel staff were all incredibly polite and helpful. Yay hotel staff! I went out to the garage at about 1:30 in the morning and went up 6 floors before I found an empty space and then moved my car to it.

The child and I then attempted to get our luggage to our room. The child had both of our suitcases while I was carrying the laptop and our crate of convention survival gear. We needed to go up the escalator to the second floor to get to our room, and as my daughter attempted to wrestle the luggage onto the escalator some random fanboy actually pushed her out of the way. This would be the first of a rather constant assault of mannerlessness -- I have to say that more people were inconsiderate or outright rude at this Arisia than I have ever seen at a con before, and that was NOT a highlight of this convention. When you are obviously physically challenged and you've been waiting patiently for an elevator for the last fifteen minutes, dumbass guys who figure the fact that they can move faster means they should get the space instead of you are not amusing. Especially not when they then shrug, smile, and say "sorry" in a very insincere manner as they let the door close in your face. This happened not only more than once, it happened a LOT. There was very little policing of the elevators (honestly, there shouldn't have to be *any*) but the only times I did see anyone policing them were at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways. Frex, Daughter and I stepped onto an empty elevator towards the very end of the con and the random gopher in the elevator YELLED at us to move all the way to the back even though there was no one else getting on and we'd moved well into the elevator already. And no one else got on on any other floor either, but that didn't stop the guy from glaring at us the whole trip down as if we were the source of all trouble in the universe.

Anyhow, we did reach our room and put our stuff down. The child settled into the fast track kid's program very quickly. This was the first year where I also gave her permission to wander between there, the con suite, and our hotel room on her own. She spent a fair bit of time back in the room watching TV and playing gameboy, but did exercise her freedom (judging by the number of empty soda cups I cleaned out of our room each night). She also spent an afternoon helping the younger fast track kids make costumes, which made me really proud of her.

istemi showed up Friday evening and the two of us went off for chinese food. More yay! Good food AND good conversation, can't do much better than that.

I was only on two panels this year, the Rosleyian reading (which is down to just myself and

infinitehotel) and a panel that was a surprise short story competition where the panelists were given some random subject matter(s) and 15 minutes to write a story about it. There were IIRC six of us on the panel and the table only really had room for five, so I ended up sitting at the end. This worked well except that the guy next to me behind the table insisted on setting up his display of books on their little gold scroll frames for all to see and admire, which didn't leave me any room to put down paper and write, and he was obviously disgruntled at having to shuffle stuff to give way to a lesser mortal. In any event, the two story seeds we were given were that a) the story had to be set in a factory, and b) it had to be about sports. The audience had thrown out a few suggestions -- strip scrabble, temporal jeopardy (which was misunderstood as tempura jeopardy by a few of us at the beginning) -- but those ended up not being officially incorporated into the challenge. Being as fond as I am of sports, I wrote mine about a has-been factory monkey named Bubbles who was once the World Champion flinger of poo. At some point I will type that up and put it online, though I will warn it's not any better than it sounds. Most of the stories were good to excellent, except one poor woman whose laptop died the final death just before she could save. The Rosleyian reading went well except that we had less time than usual and we both picked pieces that were too long and thus required some skipping. This is the disadvantage of having one's natural length of writing be novels -- short stories are very, very hard to keep short. Ah well. Next year hopefully we'll have more time, new members, more concise works, or some combination thereof.

I didn't actually attend *any* other panels this year, which is very unusual for me. I don't know if it's that there wasn't much that appealed to me, or if the things that appealed were just at times I was busy with other things, or whether it was my own greater-than-normal inertia kicking in. Some of all three, I expect. I did spend a lot of time hanging in the consuite taking up valuable chair space and chatting with a variety of interesting people. It makes me happy to know that there are a solid number of cool people at Arisia with small kids so that maybe when I make it back again (next year? hard to say) I won't be totally the odd one out.

We did the brunch for Viable Paradise on Sunday morning and although it was a very small corner we were wedged into I think it went well. I managed to stay on my feet through more than half of it, but then had to beg off and take a chair (which in turn gave me a chance to talk to Debra Doyle for a good bit, more than I think I've ever had a chance in the past.) In the end much freebagelry was committed and a few people seemed genuinely interested in the workshop.

Other than that I spent way too much time hanging out at my favorite jewelry dealer's room, eating her skittles and m&ms and eventually buying some shiny things too pretty to pass up. I also hung out with various people for dinner.

Food was generally problematic at the convention and I wonder if that's not one of the things that made the four-day con feel a little less workable than three. Last year's almost reasonable lobby food had spiked noticeably in price by this year (hot dogs went from $3 to $5, for example) and the buffet in the hotel's only restaurant was very expensive and not very appealing. I did have an excellent burger in the bar which wasn't too traumatically expensive, plus they made me a giant glass of chocolate milk just special for me. With no restaurants within real walking distance of the hotel the lack of choice was really apparent by Monday. It's hard to know yet if extending the con into Monday is enough to make Sunday feel like a "real" day or will simply extend the winding down. I hit mid-afternoon Sunday and felt very much at loose ends, but then spent the evening pretty much just being social which was very nice to do. I wonder if programming can somehow be manipulated to take advantage of that a little more next time.

My one keen disappointment was that the official t-shirt table disappeared before the end of the convention. I had very much wanted an Arisia shirt and had planned to buy one on my way out on Monday. I didn't carry my purse around with me for most of the con because it's bulky and annoying, and at the same time I'm fairly stuck with pocketless clothing for the moment, so that had seemed the most convenient opportunity to pick one up. )-: I'm still totally bummed about it.

Basically it was a slow con for me mostly because I was moving so slowly. Despite my complaints the child and I both had a good time, we hung out with various and sundry interesting people both old and new, and I was glad I got one more outing before my life turns to unmitigated chaos this spring. It will be interesting to see (if I make it) if a second year of 4-day scheduling next year seems a little more "normal".