Tuesday, May 29th

The Daily Report

Preparing to leave Madison. I had a small budget miscalculation, due to having booked the airlines and the hotel several months apart... the hotel was originally booked for one day fewer than we actually ended up staying, and I was using the estimate from that as a lump sum for our housing expenses. The difference isn't terrible... the reason we stayed until Tuesday is that it's just cheaper to stay one more night at the con rate than the difference it would be to buy three plane tickets to fly on Memorial Day... but it means I'm going to be pretty tapped out the next few days.

This is especially true since because February exists, none of my recurring payments are going to come in on the 29th through the 31st. So I've got no money coming in before Friday. We should be able to squeak by, but if anyone has a few bucks and wants to help make things a little more comfortable for us, I would appreciate the contribution. If you're a reader who only has a few dollars and worried that it wouldn't be significant... now's the time when the impact of a buck or two will be really felt.

One aspect I haven't mentioend of this year's con has been the weather. Every day this year there's been one or more period of gray cloudiness and rain alternating with some gorgeous sunshine. So while it's been hot and humid, it seems like it's been more bearable than last year. Obviously the timing of the rain wasn't always totally convenient, but it did a lot to keep the heat down. Just one more reason this year was an awesome con.

The State of the Me

I have a feeling I'm going to be sleeping for a day when we get back to Hagerstown, but I still feel great. No cold symptoms, thank goodness.

Plans For Today

I've got to go hop in the shower. We're bugging out of here around eight and I believe I am the least packed among us.

Blogging schedule.

One of the things that hit me during Wiscon is that I very often have thoughts I want to blog but don't get around to, and there are topics that are important to me and that I think about frequently that I somehow don't blog about. I also have a habit of starting blog posts and letting them get away from me, which means spending a long time rambling on and never actually finishing them. When I went back to look at some of my posts, I realized that some of them were written on a timer, and were pretty good.

So I think I'm going to create a blogging schedule for certain topics, like gaming and writing and self-publishing. Nothing too strenuous, just something to make sure that I'm keeping my thoughts on those topics flowing, and also keep them organized a little.

I'm going to start playing around with this when we get back to Maryland. Hopefully the results will be interesting.

The Long Con

So, I kind of figured that cocktails with Tempest was the last hurrah of Wiscon for us, but then when we were waiting at our gate for our plane, sparkymonster showed up, and wouldn't you know it, she was going our way. We'd already been sitting there for a while... we have a habit of over-padding our airport stays, just to be on the super safe side. We had a pretty interesting and wide-ranging conversation, and it made it feel like the con wasn't quite over.

We ended up getting about an extra forty minutes to just chat, too, because the plane was a bit late getting off the ground. That didn't seem like a big deal to us, because we had nearly three hours on the ground in Cleveland, but it made things a little dicey for people with tight connections to make.

Anyway, it was a pretty great time, especially considering that I think in real life I've talked to Julia maybe once or twice, probably about Etta Candy. Even online I think we've more talked in the same places than talked to each other.

But there was some real... clicking, I guess. Ironically, one of the major topics was about awkwardness and how amazing it is that some people can just walk up to someone and say something to them like it isn't even a big deal.

And you know, this is something that I'd started discovering before WisCon, on Tumblr: there is a lot of power in being able to stand up and admit to feelings and experiences like that. There's just such a high chance that somebody reading/listening will understand and share the experience, and then you have a common ground with this person and you also both have one more data point that says you're not alone, that your experiences are not unique.

The rest of our trip went pretty well. We went through Cleveland because we know the airport and like it pretty well. It has a good seafood restaurant, and a gelato stand... last year we tried the gelato stand on a poorly-thought-out impulse (mine) and because of a small (large) miscalculation involving time and distance... it just didn't work out very well. This time we planned for it in advance, and it was awesome

There were some technical difficulties involving our plane possibly not actually in fact existing, but after it was pushed back several times a flight to New York was cancelled, freeing up the plane. That required us to hoof it back to the terminal with the gelato. Then when we got back to the east coast, Sarah had to drive us home from DCA (not an area she knows as well as the one around BWI) in a deluge and the dark, which was a little stressful... but even with those hitches, I think the positive outweighed the negatives even on the travel portions of the trip: good company, good conversation, good food.

Anyway... home now. I started to write this post last night, but apparently I ended up crashing without hitting the submit button.