Long Worldcon day

Yesterday morning, I attended the second WSFS Business Meeting of the convention. Assorted instances of parliamentary procedure (someone made bingo cards), various interesting decisions. The anti-slate amendments will be discussed and voted on at Sunday's meeting.

Afterward, I had a bit of free time, so I took the hotel shuttle to the courthouse. (I would normally have walked—about a fifteen-minute walk, I think—but I didn't want to make my knee worse; Worldcons turn out to require a lot more walking than I've noticed in the past when I've navigated them without leg trouble.) I needed to get a document notarized by a Washington-state notary (for reasons having to do with my father's life insurance), and that seemed to be the closest notary. All went fairly smoothly.

Afterward, I called a doctor from back home to ask about the knee. It's much more healed than it started out, but I'm not sure the infection is all gone, and I finished the antibiotics a couple days ago. Was told doctor would call me back.

I needed to get more bandages & bacitracin (now there's a roleplaying-game name) for my knee, so I walked to the Rite-Aid downtown. The air was hazy with smoke from the wildfires. While I was at Rite-Aid, I bought a collapsible cane; I had found, using a borrowed cane in Chicago, that it added some stability and let me more easily correct for mistakes, and helped with getting up and down steps, and generally seemed to make things easier on my knee.

Started to head back to the convention center for a concert I wanted to attend (TJ Burnside-Clapp), in ever-smokier air, but then got a call back from the doctor, who was concerned that if the knee is still infected and if I don't do anything about it, infection could spread to the joint. So he prescribed more antibiotics. (And we made an appointment for me to go to the doctor in person on Monday.)

So I had to stick around the area for an hour to get the prescription filled at the Rite-Aid. (I missed the concert, alas.) By this time visibility was about six blocks; everything further away than that was obscured by smoke. There weren't many people in the streets; some of those who were out there were breathing through makeshift masks. I found a place for a late lunch (Satellite Diner) and had a tasty veggie burger (with especially good pesto on it). Then back to the Rite-Aid, got prescription filled, headed back to the con, hoping to get out of the smoke.

Three blocks later, trying to figure out why Google Maps wasn't displaying my walking route right, I realized that I had somehow gotten turned around much earlier in my afternoon, and that I was now walking fast in the wrong direction.

I turned around, discouraged, and limped back along my path. But the convention center was closer than I'd thought; even with a brief stop in a bookstore en route, I made it in time to David Gerrold's speech. The speech was nice, a kind of a love letter to science fiction and the writing thereof. Also short, which left me with enough time to attend the last third or so of Kate Elliott's presentation about the ways in which our expectations and our incorrect ideas about history can aid or interfere with our enjoyment of narrative. Her Book Smugglers post about Cleopatra includes some of the same material.

I did a little bit of day-job stuff (I had been lugging both my home and work laptops around in a backpack all day, for different reasons), then attended an Alexander James Adams concert. There was a sweet moment when he played “Only the Music” and a couple got up and waltzed in the aisle.

The rest of the evening was dinner and hanging out with Sally, who had unexpectedly-to-me decided to come to the con. A nice evening. I rounded out the night by writing most of this entry (but failing to post it) and then finishing writing something for an APA; it took a lot longer than it should've, because I kept falling asleep at the keyboard.

But my afternoon of spending 45 minutes walking (and thus putting stress on my knee) while breathing smoke was probably not the best possible thing I could've done for my body.

Today: More WSFS! More panels and readings and stuff! The Hugo Award ceremony! More hanging out with friends!

Tomorrow: Even more WSFS! And then home in the evening.

Join the Conversation