Lisa and I once again went to Perkins for breakfast, joined by Martin Pyne. Martin is not only Parliamentarian of the WSFS Business Meeting this year in Glasgow, but has accepted my invitation for him to Chair the 2025 Westercon Business Meeting in Santa Clara ( Read more... )

It took longer to get this announced while BayCon's parent non-profit organization did some work behind the scenes, but the committee (Lisa and me) that was charged by the Westercon 75 Business Meeting at Loscon 2023 to either find a group interested in running a Westercon in 2025 to to do or to do it ourselves reached a conclusion and "transferred ( Read more... )

No bids have file for Westercon 77 (2025, to be selected at Westercon 75 Anaheim this year). The deadline for filing a bid to be on the ballot is April 15. If no bids file, the election will proceed with only write-in spaces on the ballot, as the final deadline for being eligible for election through the normal process is the end of site selection ( Read more... )

Thanks to getting the minivan back this morning, I was actually able to get down to BayCon today. However, because I also needed to get an oil change, by the time I got there, the only panel I really was deeply interested in attending (discussing the current Hugo Controversy) was mostly ending. I spent most of the day behind the Sasquan table, ( Read more... )

The rental car had to be back at 9 AM this morning or else I'd incur another $84 even if I dropped it tomorrow morning, because Enterprise Fremont is closed Sunday and Memorial Day and the "meter" runs until they're open again. They were backed up with people picking up cars, so I dropped the contract and keys, saying I'd be back later (I expected ( Read more... )

My mechanic has fixed the problem whereby the van would die when the engine idle dropped below a certain point, but now there's not enough high-end power. He worked on it all day today and into the evening without a solution, and he's going to come in tomorrow to work on it because I'm a good customer and he's a good guy, but he doesn't know if he ( Read more... )

My mechanic tells me that he thinks he'll be able to get my minivan running again (air-idle control valve or something like that; I was driving and couldn't write it down), but I can't get it back until late on Friday. This sort of scrambles up a bunch of my travel logistics, and on top of it all I have a bunch of extra auto expenses to pay ( Read more... )

Re-reading what I wrote about the last day of BayCon, I realized that I left Lisa in limbo at the Portland in 2016 Westercon bid table. She stayed until a bit after Noon, and then set off for home, leaving me to pinch-hit for her behind Portland's table. (If this was a contested race, I would have been quite leery about doing this, as I am about ( Read more... )

Lisa and I continued our attempt to not over-exert ourselves here at BayCon, sleeping in and not working too hard. In the late morning, we went to the Cargo Cult Books table, where we cashed out the pile of books I'd been accumulating with David Clark and took them out to the Rolling Stone, which has inadvertently started growing a bookshelf of SF/ ( Read more... )

I continue to marvel at how different it is to attend a convention without a vast number of stress-inducing commitments about which to worry. It's a good thing, too, because I continue to suffer the ravages of hay fever, just less bad than a week ago. Being able to sleep in, look around when we feel like it, and sit down and watch the convention go ( Read more... )