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I've been taking my holidays, which is probably why I've been too busy to post. I took six wokdays, which takes me from the beginning of August to the tenth, which is our anniversary. (The thirteenth, in fact, but what of that?) We spent about four days of that down in Calgary. Most of that was for the Con-Version science fiction convention, but we spent another day or so visiting.
We drove down on Thursday, and spent the evening with Nicole's cousin Karen and her husband David, and their one-year-old twins. The kids kind of dominated the evening, so we didn't get as much of a chance to talk to Karen and David as I might have liked, but I guess that's what happens. They're moving up to Grande Prairie, actually. They used to live in Edmonton, and while Karen was still single she was a great babysitter. They're Luke's godparents, but we don't see them as often. And Grande Prairie is twice as far away as Calgary, too.
We were staying at the actual convention hotel, which is a first for us. When we went to Torcon, we did stay at a hotel, but it wasn't the main con one. We wouldn't have stayed in the hotel at all, but Karen's mom was down staying with them to babysit their kids, and Nicole's brother Wayne's place is too small...and besides, he's started smoking again.
It was an interesting experience, in a room with two double beds. The kids slept in the same bed, which I don't think they've ever had to do before. If we wanted to stay up past their bedtime(as we often do), then we had to go into the little alcove between the door and the bathroom, across from the closet, where the coffeemaker sits. Simon didn't want all the lights off anyway, so we had the bathroom light on; we dragged some chairs over and read or did puzzles or writing. And Luke took forever to go to sleep, babbling happily to himself. We had to keep shushing him, and threatening to take his teddy bear("Winter")away, etc. The first night it took close to an hour, but after that he was mostly quiet by 9:30. He never did nap more than an hour, though, if that. He woke up at 6:30 on Saturday morning, so I got dressed and took him on a walking tour of the hotel to give Nicole a little more time to sleep.
Friday, we went to the Calgary Zoo. The trip wasn't a complete success, but at least the kids enjoyed the playground. We went to the "Prehistoric Park", which has life-sized models of a number of dinosaurs, as well as other tidbits of paleontological and geological information. The rest of the zoo was not as much fun--watching the gorillas and the kangaroos, who refused to do anything entertaining, made me realize just how constricting an environment the zoo must be. We wisely didn't try to see the whole zoo, and went back to the hotel in the early afternoon.
That evening we mostly spent with Wayne, though we did duck down to the convention for one panel each. That was mostly what we planned for the convention, apart from part of Saturday afternoon where we had booked a babysitter through the hotel. Most of the panels I went to were in the writing stream--I wasn't that interested in the Anime or Comics panels, nor Costuming, so it was either Writing, Fan, or Science, with the outside possibility of Art. I did go to a few Art panels, actually, but mostly because Jim Beveridge, who we met on the plane to Torcon, was the Artist GoH.
I feel like I should have gone to the Arrogant Worms/Spider Robinson concert on Friday night, since I tend to enjoy the Worms' brand of humorous music, but I didn't feel like shelling out the $35 for it. Somehow it felt like too much to spend. And Spider didn't end up attending much of the con at all--he came down with some hospitalizing illness(at first I thought it might another collapsed-lung situation, but later I was hearing more like gastroenteritis--I have no hard information, though). I heard rumours that he was going to be there for Sunday afternoon, but we left at 2:00 and didn't see him.
I did chat with a number of SF Canada folks, including a Saturday morning breakfast--Paula Johanson, Robert Runté, Ed Willett, and Derryl Murphy(who we also saw at the zoo), all of whom have or had kids, so we shared a lot of parenting stories. A number of Cult of Pain members were down, too, and we caught occasional glimpses of them.
The Writer GoH was George R.R. Martin; he'd been scheduled for the year before, but, perhaps because of conflict with Torcon, didn't attend. (We didn't go to Con-Version last year, for similar reasons--too close to Torcon.) He's still not finished A Feast For Crows, by the way. I got a couple of books signed by him--Tuf Voyaging, which was the first of his books that I read, and Fevre Dream, which I was actually reading during the Con. (I figured that he might be glad to sign something that wasn't part of "A Song of Ice And Fire", but I don't know if it impressed him that much.)
We tried to go to the Masquerade on Saturday evening, but it wasn't meant to be. It was scheduled for 6:00, with the doors opening at 5:45; we hadn't managed to get to supper in time, so we decided we'd go afterward. We went down to the foyer and waited, with a ravening crowd of other Con-goers. The kids got more and more restless. We were told that, apparently, the Masquerade is traditionally late. At 6:30, the doors finally opened, and finally the thing got started. Simon was unimpressed with the initial batch of Novice contestants, and at one point loudly said, "How long do we have to sit here?" Luke, who had skipped his nap, fell asleep. So we left before 7:00 and went to have some supper. Not the high point of our visit--the masquerade, that is.
What else did I see? Well, Jim Beveridge doing a "Pictionary" contest with SF-themed entries, against an artist pulled from the audience(I suspect the scheduled competitor never showed up, but then the program book annoyingly did not list the participants for any of the events). A "Recommended Reading" panel guest-starring George R.R. Martin(and Derryl Murphy, before he had to run off and do his co-scheduled reading)--most of the books they recommended were ones that I've already read, or at least bought, older books like This Immortal, writers like Algis Budrys and Edgar Pangborn, so I guess I'm doing okay. "The Matrix Rehashed", with the panelists(including Jim Beveridge again)and attendees talking about which movies they liked, and didn't like, in the series, and why. The GoH speeches--Jim's was fairly short, since this was his first GoH experience, but Martin's was a more thoughtful examination of why people read, with amusing anecdotes.
The last panel we went to, this time with both kids in tow, since we'd checked out, was a NaNoWriMo panel. I would've loved to be on the panel, but we hadn't bothered to get in contact with the programming people to try to get onto any panels. (Nicole ended up on one Friday night merely by showing up, and being known to one of the panelists when they had someone missing.) I settled for butting in a lot.
Next year Westercon will be in Calgary, which is supposed to be a larger event, somewhere between your normal Con and a Worldcon, so we might sign up for that. And the 2006 Con-Version is supposed to have David Weber(who Nicole's been reading a lot of)as one of the GoH's, so we might go for that as well. It's too bad that Edmonton can't manage a convention more than once a decade or so, for no readily discernible reason, but Calgary is much closer than most of them come.
We drove down on Thursday, and spent the evening with Nicole's cousin Karen and her husband David, and their one-year-old twins. The kids kind of dominated the evening, so we didn't get as much of a chance to talk to Karen and David as I might have liked, but I guess that's what happens. They're moving up to Grande Prairie, actually. They used to live in Edmonton, and while Karen was still single she was a great babysitter. They're Luke's godparents, but we don't see them as often. And Grande Prairie is twice as far away as Calgary, too.
We were staying at the actual convention hotel, which is a first for us. When we went to Torcon, we did stay at a hotel, but it wasn't the main con one. We wouldn't have stayed in the hotel at all, but Karen's mom was down staying with them to babysit their kids, and Nicole's brother Wayne's place is too small...and besides, he's started smoking again.
It was an interesting experience, in a room with two double beds. The kids slept in the same bed, which I don't think they've ever had to do before. If we wanted to stay up past their bedtime(as we often do), then we had to go into the little alcove between the door and the bathroom, across from the closet, where the coffeemaker sits. Simon didn't want all the lights off anyway, so we had the bathroom light on; we dragged some chairs over and read or did puzzles or writing. And Luke took forever to go to sleep, babbling happily to himself. We had to keep shushing him, and threatening to take his teddy bear("Winter")away, etc. The first night it took close to an hour, but after that he was mostly quiet by 9:30. He never did nap more than an hour, though, if that. He woke up at 6:30 on Saturday morning, so I got dressed and took him on a walking tour of the hotel to give Nicole a little more time to sleep.
Friday, we went to the Calgary Zoo. The trip wasn't a complete success, but at least the kids enjoyed the playground. We went to the "Prehistoric Park", which has life-sized models of a number of dinosaurs, as well as other tidbits of paleontological and geological information. The rest of the zoo was not as much fun--watching the gorillas and the kangaroos, who refused to do anything entertaining, made me realize just how constricting an environment the zoo must be. We wisely didn't try to see the whole zoo, and went back to the hotel in the early afternoon.
That evening we mostly spent with Wayne, though we did duck down to the convention for one panel each. That was mostly what we planned for the convention, apart from part of Saturday afternoon where we had booked a babysitter through the hotel. Most of the panels I went to were in the writing stream--I wasn't that interested in the Anime or Comics panels, nor Costuming, so it was either Writing, Fan, or Science, with the outside possibility of Art. I did go to a few Art panels, actually, but mostly because Jim Beveridge, who we met on the plane to Torcon, was the Artist GoH.
I feel like I should have gone to the Arrogant Worms/Spider Robinson concert on Friday night, since I tend to enjoy the Worms' brand of humorous music, but I didn't feel like shelling out the $35 for it. Somehow it felt like too much to spend. And Spider didn't end up attending much of the con at all--he came down with some hospitalizing illness(at first I thought it might another collapsed-lung situation, but later I was hearing more like gastroenteritis--I have no hard information, though). I heard rumours that he was going to be there for Sunday afternoon, but we left at 2:00 and didn't see him.
I did chat with a number of SF Canada folks, including a Saturday morning breakfast--Paula Johanson, Robert Runté, Ed Willett, and Derryl Murphy(who we also saw at the zoo), all of whom have or had kids, so we shared a lot of parenting stories. A number of Cult of Pain members were down, too, and we caught occasional glimpses of them.
The Writer GoH was George R.R. Martin; he'd been scheduled for the year before, but, perhaps because of conflict with Torcon, didn't attend. (We didn't go to Con-Version last year, for similar reasons--too close to Torcon.) He's still not finished A Feast For Crows, by the way. I got a couple of books signed by him--Tuf Voyaging, which was the first of his books that I read, and Fevre Dream, which I was actually reading during the Con. (I figured that he might be glad to sign something that wasn't part of "A Song of Ice And Fire", but I don't know if it impressed him that much.)
We tried to go to the Masquerade on Saturday evening, but it wasn't meant to be. It was scheduled for 6:00, with the doors opening at 5:45; we hadn't managed to get to supper in time, so we decided we'd go afterward. We went down to the foyer and waited, with a ravening crowd of other Con-goers. The kids got more and more restless. We were told that, apparently, the Masquerade is traditionally late. At 6:30, the doors finally opened, and finally the thing got started. Simon was unimpressed with the initial batch of Novice contestants, and at one point loudly said, "How long do we have to sit here?" Luke, who had skipped his nap, fell asleep. So we left before 7:00 and went to have some supper. Not the high point of our visit--the masquerade, that is.
What else did I see? Well, Jim Beveridge doing a "Pictionary" contest with SF-themed entries, against an artist pulled from the audience(I suspect the scheduled competitor never showed up, but then the program book annoyingly did not list the participants for any of the events). A "Recommended Reading" panel guest-starring George R.R. Martin(and Derryl Murphy, before he had to run off and do his co-scheduled reading)--most of the books they recommended were ones that I've already read, or at least bought, older books like This Immortal, writers like Algis Budrys and Edgar Pangborn, so I guess I'm doing okay. "The Matrix Rehashed", with the panelists(including Jim Beveridge again)and attendees talking about which movies they liked, and didn't like, in the series, and why. The GoH speeches--Jim's was fairly short, since this was his first GoH experience, but Martin's was a more thoughtful examination of why people read, with amusing anecdotes.
The last panel we went to, this time with both kids in tow, since we'd checked out, was a NaNoWriMo panel. I would've loved to be on the panel, but we hadn't bothered to get in contact with the programming people to try to get onto any panels. (Nicole ended up on one Friday night merely by showing up, and being known to one of the panelists when they had someone missing.) I settled for butting in a lot.
Next year Westercon will be in Calgary, which is supposed to be a larger event, somewhere between your normal Con and a Worldcon, so we might sign up for that. And the 2006 Con-Version is supposed to have David Weber(who Nicole's been reading a lot of)as one of the GoH's, so we might go for that as well. It's too bad that Edmonton can't manage a convention more than once a decade or so, for no readily discernible reason, but Calgary is much closer than most of them come.
