UnCommon Sense

This past weekend I spent in Naperville Illinois at the Science Fiction Con, DucKon.  Now I’ve been before and had a good time so I decided to go again this year and take mom with me. So far, so good.

Now last year the lady I stayed with was kind enough to get me pre registered for this year. At least I thought so, but having heard that information from someone else I wasn’t sure. Second hand info…you know.  So I wrote the person in question way back in April to see if that was so and…heard naught over the electronic ether.  O0kay says I to myself after hearing nothing for a month or so.  I went to Duckons’s website and ordered myself 2 registrations, one for me & one for mom.

Then since I didn’t know if we could stay with said individual this year I got myself my own room and decided to invite some friends to stay with me.   So far, so good.  It’s the end of May, I’ve got reservations for Con & hotel, and 3 staying in my room.

And then I hear back from the lady I stayed with last year. Apparently I’d gotten lost in her email box until she spent some extra time emptying it and found my message.  Turns out she’s not sure if she got me a pre register for the con.  So I send an email in to the folks running the Con itself.  And wait several days for a reply. Turns out she DID pre reg me after all.  So I ask the nice folks to change 1 of mine to mom’s name and take the pre reg & give that to my best friend whom I’m picking up along the way.

Thursday night before we leave for Duckon I’m so geeked I can hardly sleep so 5 hrs of sleep later I’m up bright eyed Friday morning for an early leave time.  Mom arrives right on time, we finish loading up the car and off we run.  So far, so good.

We get to the outskirts of Gary, IN where my girl friend lives with her husband and we’re an hour earlier than we needed to be. She was still at work and her husband not well enough to take visitors.  Alright, fair enough. I’ve been there often enough so I drove mom and I off to the local Barnes & Noble.  While there I double checked my route since, silly me, I’d forgotten to print it off.   The Murph was beginning his attack albeit more slowly and sneakily than normal.

So I checked the route via Google maps.  Looked pretty straight forward to me.  I 80 to I-385, to I-88 to Naperville rd.  Beware screen fonts for they shall bite thee in the arse.  Get a call from the best friend.  She needs to work another half hour. Eeks. This is cutting into my ‘Avoid Chicago RUSH Hour at all costs’  buffer but ah well.  We’re going somewhat south of the city so we should be okay.

Go back to friends house, wait for her to finish packing (she travels light!), and 45 mins later we’re on the road. Now while I’d been waiting at B & N my dear spouse had called to say there was so truly evil weather coming my way.  Forty mile an hour winds with rain specifically.  So just about the time we hit the Indiana/Illinois border the weather hits.  Visibility drops to 5 feet from your bumper, every car has lights and many are running hazard lights, several  vehicles have pulled off the road entirely. I’ve got an Ford Escape so I’m taller and heavier than many and we slog along at a whopping 5 miles per hour.  The good part is no one is driving like an idiot, the bad obviously is the “I can’t hardly see a damn thing in this horizontal rain!!”  And yes, horizontal is the right word.

In the middle of this I get a call from the other woman, the one I roomed with before, since we have 2 rooms and not nearly enough people to fill them all. I ask her to cancel her room & we’ll all bundle into mine.  Thank the gods for Sync, Bluetooth phones and mom.  With Sync running the call over the car speakers, mom can handle things, I can put my 2 cents in, and keep the overwhelming majority of my attention on the road.  The end result of all the back & forthing is that for some reason her room can’t be changed, we found out why later, and mine can. So we wind up canceling my room instead. This was a mistake but that’s for later.

So, the weather clears, traffic moves apace, albeit slowly at times and I start looking for my turn off to go north.  We pass I-355 but I’m looking for I-385 as per Google maps.  As we approach Joliet, Il my girl friend says I think we’ve passed our since she used to go flying not too far away.  Next exit with a gas station I pull off to get a MAP. Turns out i-385 doesn’t exist.  The turn I needed was I-355 after all.  A-and we passed backed up traffic heading east.  Joy.

Murphy is now giggling at me. Back on the road we go, 10 miles of backtracking, before heading north. Fortunately best friend has taken over navigational duties, and the map.   We get to our hotel with no further delays but its now about 6:45pm. Nearly 6 hours in the car for mom and I.  We pile out, grab a luggage trolly and load up.  I drop off the car and head into the hotel hoping we can get the room change thing sorted out.

Umm..yah right. Somehow the other woman’s room is on the party floor and those rooms can only be changed by the Con chair. Okay I can see the reason but GAH! WE got there “just” in time to have opening ceremonies going on.  Sooo no Con chair until that’s done.

So I have a luggage trolley fully of gear for 3 and nowhere to unload it at and I’m hungry. Now a hungry Beq is a very unreasonable creature but Hey, at least we can get ourselves signed into the con right? Um…not so right.  There’s 2 badges and but there were 3 paid registrations.  Sooo…Okay, I’d been talking to one of the con committee via email ahead of time. So where is $Con-committee memember? Well know one knows but they CAN find his wife who’s one of the folks running the Artshow.  Soo off, with BestGF in tow, mom’s watching the luggage trolley, we head to the art show where I  ask for $spouse of help I need. When I explain why, they find the very nice lady, who calls her spouse on the cell. She tells me to “look for a guy with curly hair, a long bear & looks like a misha”  so I thank her and head back out into the lobby near registration.  And soon enough a late 30 something gent matching her description comes striding down the hall. Yay!!

I great James, and explain the situation. Fortunately for me he remembers said email conversation and gets things sorted.

He goes to the nice folks working behind the counter making badges and getting folks signed up to create the third badge for Carol and to make a name change for mom. It takes about 10 minutes but hey, we’ve got time!

Now, what to do? We have a luggage trolley, badges and no place to put our stuff but back in the car which I’m not really wanting to do. Well there’s a bar in the lobby that we can put the trolley next to and since we’re all ravenous by this time food becomes the next order of business. We park ourselves down and sit. And sit some more. Finally I get up and go to the bar asking if there’s someone who can help us. The poor barmaid is obviously running her buns off but says she’ll send someone as soon as she can.

A few minutes later a young man shows up to take our order. At this point I want a beer. The only thing that’s remotely edifying is the Sam Adams summer tap so I get that. We order food and wait for it to arrive. Just about the time food arrives, its after 8pm by this point I get a call on my cell. It’s the Con chair! Yay. This room nonsense may be over soon. He asks that I meet him at the hotel desk, which is easy since I can see it from where we’re sitting.

While we were waiting a young lady came up to ask if she could borrow the trolley. She was with one of the filking groups and needed it for speaker hauling. Having moved a few of ‘em I know they’re heavy so we off load the trolley of all our gear & lend it to her. Now the table is surrounded in stuff. Fortunately she got her stuff offloaded and the trolley back to us before we got the room deal sorted.

I go great the Con chair and explain the situation. He says he has some folks who want a party room so we agree to the swap. Once they get there it turns out that they have a room w/ 1 king bed. Which isn’t working for 4 women. Sorry we’re not that good a set of friends. Finally he changes a room for someone who hasn’t arrived yet for the king and puts us there. There being the 7^th floor. At this point I’m tired enough I don’t care. 7^th floor is fine with me. I report back that we have a room! So we finish our food, put the bill on the room tab and take the weary bodies and gear upstairs.

About this time the room mate shows up too and joins us bringing all our stuff upstairs.

First order of business after room drop off is the Beaders Jam. Yay, geeky beading FTW. Carol decides to join me, mom chill in the room and read, and roommate Josie to check out the rest of the Con.

Saturday morning:

Did I mention that mom is a morning fairy? UP bright and early every day. Sleeping late for her is 7am. Yeah she’s one of them.  Now me? I’m a night owl.  A day that starts at 11am is fine with me and a bedtime of 2am works as well.  And its a CON so of course I indulged in my inner geek desire to stay up and PLAY at night.  Bedtime was 2am.  Mom starts bumping around at 8am. I think. I pull the covers up and the pillow over my head.  Still I’m up and showered by 9:30am.  Off to the dining room for breakfast.  Josie is still fast asleep and since she came in later than I did we don’t bother her.

So we start looking into panels to go to & to plot our day.  Some didn’t happen, some folks didn’t show to chair them, so it was a day of serendipity. Mom found some movies to watch. Carol dropped in on various panels. I wandered the art show and dealers room.  I had one panel I wanted to make. One on Finding Your Voice (writing workshop) in 2 hours.  In between times I was checking in with a friend who was going to join us on Sat. Well she was running late but made it in time for dinner and Tesla Coils!

Only the seminar I wanted started right about dinner time, ran 2 hours, somehow I thought it was 1! and so my friends saved a couple pieces of pizza for me.  Now I goofed, oh yes, and forgot to bring paper with me. Fortunately there was a small hotel pad of paper there and I rarely am without something to write with. Voila pen in hand I was ready to begin.

I’ll skip the details of class for another post but suffice to say it went really well except for that tiny detail about being an hour longer than I’d originally thought.  Murphy was just warming up.

After dinner with friends, pizza that they saved for me from a hungry teen, we went outside to see the Tesla Coils. Now I know there’s some folks out there who don’t believe they’re real. That its all special effects. Sorry kids. It’s real.  There is so much electricity in the air the bugs that aren’t immolated run thinking there’s a thunderstorm approaching once they get going.

Show starts and I have my camera going trying to record video of the event for Carols husband who couldn’t make it. Silly me didn’t bring a tripod and about 10 minutes into the show my back seized up.  Major owwwies stabbing across the middle back.  I made my excuses and headed back to the hotel room for a much needed lie down.  Murphy’s warming up.

Two ibuprofens later and a bit of lying down some of0 the friends show up expecting a bit of a room party. Mom and Carol had arrived by then and mom is really looking at going to bed.  So we tell them sorry folks no such luck.  After they leave group number 2 of friends arrive and wind up hanging out for about an hour and half.  It’s 12:30am when we crawl into bed.

Mom had alreadydosed herself on Ambien to help her sleep.  I drop off shortly after 12:30.

A loud whine awakens me. I look at the clock. It’s 1:30am. I bludgeoned my sleep fogged brain into identifying the noise.  Carol, more with it than I, says it’s the fire alarm.  I start muttering curses. I’m tired, in pain, and have a drugged mom to assist down 7 flights of stairs.  I toss on clothes, shoes and ID.  Bundle mom into her cloak and shoes. Get her, her cane, and the three of us out the room and down the stairs.  Carol takes point, mom’s in the middle and I’m tail hovering near mom in case she needs a hand.  Down, down we go, dodging a couple with a stroller & howling child.  Can’t blame the kid much that siren was loud and annoying.  My sentiment was that there had bloody well been a fire. Somewhere. Pranksters would be punished severely. There was a lot of unhappy mutters to that effect and I know I wasn’t the only one.

We get ourselves out and into the parking lot. Carol goes reconnoitering to see if she can see the fire. When she returns, nada. No sign of fire at all.  My grumpiness grows. Shortly thereafter someone from the Con staff comes out to say we can return to our rooms.  Joy. No fire at all.  Apparently it was a ‘mechanical failure.’  Murphy’s on a roll and I’m along for the ride with about 700 other people. None of us are enjoying it much except the Murph.

It’s 2:30am when we get back to our room. I had to put a bug in the night managers ear to get us a working elevator sooner than later since the main ones weren’t working yet.  Fortunately the freight elevator was working fine.   Murph relented a bit. So I thought.

7:30 am: Again I am awakened by a bellowing wail. The fire alarm. AGAIN!! Murphy got up early just to screw us over.

ONce again we make the 7 story trek down the stairs. This time mom is tracking much better and in less pain.  I however am much, much crankier, tired and really pissed off. I’m still in pain as well. Sunday is starting out with a bang. Down, down we go, out the door and into the parking lot.

This time there are no fire trucks. Last night we got two hook and ladders, an EMS unit and a pumper truck.  Hmm…well this is different. Less than 15 minutes later we get to go back to our rooms because this time there actually was smoke that set off the alarm system. Fortunately it was only burnt toast nothing serious.  But I mean really, who’s the bloody idiot who gets up at 7am or so and then makes toast in their room? Auggggggh. Especially after a 1:30 am fire alarm!!

Alright so the Con didn’t occupy the whole hotel. Still…sigh.

I’m now awake, sort of, grumpy, very and very, very short on sleep.  In 96 hours I’ve had about 20 hours of sleep. Maybe a less.  Food is no longer working as a substitute for sleep.  And I still have a minimum 5 and half hour drive home.  Now mom can take some of the drive but she’s as tired as I am although a bit better on the sleep.

Murphy’s not quite done with me yet though. The one item I wanted at the art show was sold. Boo…but I did pick up a print of something I couldn’t afford to bid on so it wasn’t a total loss.

So we packed up, put our stuff in the car and did a last trip through the dealers room.  I picked up some business cards, tried on a few things that were too small still, picked up the hard cover Graphic novel of Patricia Briggs Homecoming, YAY!, and some other reading material. Mom got earrings for herself.  Carol got a book of short stories and made contact with a small publisher that she’s going to submit some of her stories to.

I think the Murph was taking a nap around then.

The trip to Carols place was uneventful other than I was having a hard time staying awake at the wheel and my inner snark was out and being vicious.  At mom mostly since Carol crawled into on of the books she’d bought. Actually she says she thinks she fell asleep back there and probably did.  I was way too focused on the road to notice.  Mom was tired enough her fearful twitches, which she usually controls well, were out and playing havoc with my temper.

After dropping Carol off, we hit traffic, lots and lots of traffic.  What had taken 5 and half hours to drive on the way out then took 8 plus hours to return and I’m not counting the time change when I say that. 3 construction zones the smallest of which was 10 miles long. Ugh.

I came home and collapsed. Mom poor dear had another 45 minutes to drive after she got home.

Thank the Gods I took Monday off. I slept and slept and then cleaned out the car.  Murphy took the day off too but came back for one last hurrah on Tuesday.

So far he’s left me alone since and I’m not complaining.

{p.S.} Yes I know its not last weekend but its taken awhile to finish this missive.