Those people who arrived a day early here in Tonopah met over lunch at the Tonopah Station Hotel, after which some of us including our hotel liaison, along with Lisa and me, met with the Mizpah-Belvada hotel sales manager. There, we went over a pile of things we needed to review. Nothing to worry about; just a lot of details to get right. We ( Read more... )

As I've mentioned, the Tonopah Westercon 74 committee is holding an in-person meeting in Tonopah this weekend. Lisa and I got away from Fernley about Noon today, and arrived in Tonopah about 4:30, with four stops (gas, food, restroom) along the way. We're staying in the Belvada Hotel, which is the closest of Tonopah's hotels to the Convention ( Read more... )

The Westercon 74 committee will be meeting in person in Tonopah next Saturday. Around a dozen committee/staff members will travel to Tonopah, but many others will participate in a Zoom call. For this meeting, we'll be using one of Lisa's video cameras (not the big one, but the medium sized one she used to record the WSFS Business Meeting in Dublin ( Read more... )

Westercon 74 sent the following announcement to all of its members today (except for the ten members who don't have email but do have paper mail addresses: we sent a paper letter to each of them yesterday):

( COVID-19 Policy: Vaccination and Masks Required )

Lisa and I went to Reno yesterday to print a "mini PR" (the single-page/double-folded PRs we've used for PRs 1 and 2) for Westercon 74's members who have requested paper copies or do not have an email address registered with us. Last night, Lisa folded the PRs, put them in envelopes, and applied return-address stickers. I went and got stamps today ( Read more... )

One of the ways in which the Tonopah Westercon bid was different was that we said from the start that we did not intend to have guests of honor. For the relatively low-budget convention we intended to hold, we would not be able to afford them, and we wanted to keep costs down so we could sell relatively inexpensive memberships. Even though we said ( Read more... )

Nobody inquired with the Belvada about the cash I found on the street in front of the hotel two weeks ago and left with the hotel, and they agreed that it was unlikely anyone ever would. Not wanting to spend more than $100 to collect the cash, I asked Westercon 74's newly recruited local from Tonopah to collect it for me, after of course giving his ( Read more... )

This morning we took advantage of the microwave oven, refrigerator, and coffee maker in our hotel room at the Jim Butler Inn & Suites by cooking breakfast (from material we purchased last night at Raley's and also from some other supplies we brought with us for this trip). We did not rush before packing out of the room.

( Good Location )

Lisa and I are on a "field trip" to Tonopah this weekend, partially to do some tourism to another place we would certainly never have time to go during Westercon 74. We also are doing something we would never do in most cases: change hotels during the middle of a stay in the same town. (We did stay in three different IHG hotels during our 2014 ( Read more... )

Lisa and I plan to make a weekend trip to Tonopah next weekend (about which we'll write more later), and it's high time for us to get out and travel a bit. Lisa says she was so bored last night that she was watching videos of old WSFS Business Meetings.

(OTOH, it appears that it was a recording of a meeting that we haven't yet posted to the Worldcon ( Read more... )