The heat is still on, but I survived yet another Finncon!
Came home from Jyväskylä last night. After having sat in the train for four hours listening to wailing babies for more than I would've cared, I felt more like a well-used punching bag than anything else. My feet ached from all the weekend's walking back and forth between the hotel, the shops and the university campus area, my back was about as flexible as a crowbar and honestly, I was more tired than I expected based on what had been going on during the weekend.
I did not expect to be so tired after a weekend of sensible partying, attending a few program items and general hanging around. But it's probably the heat. Which I'm still enjoying to a certain degree (haha, no pun intended there), but the un-airconditioned hotelroom really was rather unrefreshing. My own bedroom was delightfully cool last night, which was a relief.
Aaaanyway. I had a lot of relaxed fun at this year's Finncon. Together with kaisay we wrote a short "article" for the conzine ("Close encounters of the drunken kind"), I did a lot of shopping both at the con and in the sales in town and got to meet the GoH's on Saturday evening over dinner at Restaurant Harald. The GoH's (Ellen Kushner, Pat Cadigan, Sari Peltoniemi, Liisa Rantalaiho + Delia Sherman and Cheryl Morgan) are such lovely ladies, and I felt really privileged to be invited to the dinner. Thank you, kondooritar for the invite and for Delia, Pat & Ellen (& others at the table) for the interesting discussions we managed to have while enjoying tar and other delicacies. It's a shame I only found out about Pat's dancing past on Sunday - I would've loved to hear more of her bellydancing days!
All in all, I found this year's Finncon a smoothly running (even if somewhat sweaty) and relaxed con, which was a welcome change to the enormous Finncon-Animecon -megaevents of the past few times I've been able to attend a Finncon. Next year sees Turku organizing one more of those combo-cons and I'm desperately hoping it won't be quite as hot then. Although Turku does seem to have a "tradition" of hot con-weeks. Back in 2003 we didn't have it much easier... But I suppose it's better to deal with one heat wave at a time and not worry about next year quite so much yet. I'm pretty sure the weather deities will require a few more sacrificial sweat drops from us before they're happy this time around.
I'll do my best to satisfy them by heading out to the golf course again later this evening. Drip, drop. We'll see what my new golf shoes will do to my results...
EDIT: I don't know it it was the shoes or the position of the moon, but I doubled my score from the last time! Meaning I'm getting better! I only need to score some five more points to get my handicap lowered for the first time. Yay! And this was only my third EVER time of actually playing. Yay yay, I don't suck at this! Whee! (Although I'm absolutely certain there will be days when I totally suck and if I'm to believe those who have played more, there will be a lot more of those days when the game is completely impossible than of those when you score high points and can be happy with your own performance.)
I did not expect to be so tired after a weekend of sensible partying, attending a few program items and general hanging around. But it's probably the heat. Which I'm still enjoying to a certain degree (haha, no pun intended there), but the un-airconditioned hotelroom really was rather unrefreshing. My own bedroom was delightfully cool last night, which was a relief.
Aaaanyway. I had a lot of relaxed fun at this year's Finncon. Together with kaisay we wrote a short "article" for the conzine ("Close encounters of the drunken kind"), I did a lot of shopping both at the con and in the sales in town and got to meet the GoH's on Saturday evening over dinner at Restaurant Harald. The GoH's (Ellen Kushner, Pat Cadigan, Sari Peltoniemi, Liisa Rantalaiho + Delia Sherman and Cheryl Morgan) are such lovely ladies, and I felt really privileged to be invited to the dinner. Thank you, kondooritar for the invite and for Delia, Pat & Ellen (& others at the table) for the interesting discussions we managed to have while enjoying tar and other delicacies. It's a shame I only found out about Pat's dancing past on Sunday - I would've loved to hear more of her bellydancing days!
All in all, I found this year's Finncon a smoothly running (even if somewhat sweaty) and relaxed con, which was a welcome change to the enormous Finncon-Animecon -megaevents of the past few times I've been able to attend a Finncon. Next year sees Turku organizing one more of those combo-cons and I'm desperately hoping it won't be quite as hot then. Although Turku does seem to have a "tradition" of hot con-weeks. Back in 2003 we didn't have it much easier... But I suppose it's better to deal with one heat wave at a time and not worry about next year quite so much yet. I'm pretty sure the weather deities will require a few more sacrificial sweat drops from us before they're happy this time around.
I'll do my best to satisfy them by heading out to the golf course again later this evening. Drip, drop. We'll see what my new golf shoes will do to my results...
EDIT: I don't know it it was the shoes or the position of the moon, but I doubled my score from the last time! Meaning I'm getting better! I only need to score some five more points to get my handicap lowered for the first time. Yay! And this was only my third EVER time of actually playing. Yay yay, I don't suck at this! Whee! (Although I'm absolutely certain there will be days when I totally suck and if I'm to believe those who have played more, there will be a lot more of those days when the game is completely impossible than of those when you score high points and can be happy with your own performance.)