Dwarf Planet in Purple

Thanksgiving weekend was quiet but tasty. The boy toy made a great meal for the holiday itself and found some innovative ways to use the leftovers. (Turkey and stuffing quiche is surprisingly good!) It was a little weird not going to Chessiecon, but since last year's convention was such a bust, I'm not surprised there wasn't one this year. I have no idea what's going to happen next month.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I had a great time at Atlantia's Holiday Faire, while R. went by his lonesome to Philcon. I don't think any of his friends were there. (Well, one longtime friend of ours from Massachusetts, a fellow named Phil, died at the end of October, so he's not going to any more SF conventions.)

My last year of serving as a church trustee is proceeding apace. Things have been a lot less hectic -- i.e., fewer emergencies. Granted, we are having a special board meeting tonight, but that's to decide what kind of arrangement we will have with our next minister -- someone in the UUA's developmental minister program, which would mean a four-year commitment to trying to fix our flaws, or a contract minister, who would just be an employee who does the ministerial work for a given period of time. We are now too small of a congregation to call a settled minister, who would be a permanent minister staying for an indefinite period of time.

The boy toy and I have some Christmas decorations up, including our new Christmas tree. (The old one was a pre-lit model whose lights stopped working, so we abandoned it in the move.) But we still have more holiday stuff, including the ceramic tree my Aunt Bev made for my parents and my mother's Santa pitcher, are still in our storage unit up in North Laurel. Little by little, we are emptying out the unit, but some of the stuff will have to wait until there's a new floor in the bedroom (long story).

Movies: I would like to see The Holdovers in the theater, because a film stylized to look like a quirky 1970s movie should be seen on technology that existed in the 1970s. I really, really want to see Maestro on the big screen, but it's not playing that close to me. Sigh.

I just realized I've been a very bad Dreamwidther (is that a word?).

Busy month. It began, really, in late May with Balticon. Once again, I roomed (platonically) with Mike T., who is still doing pretty well despite his Parkinson's diagnosis. I had not seen him in person since the previous Balticon, so we had plenty to talk about. I was there from Friday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon, because I took the MARC commuter train between New Carrollton and Baltimore. The fare only $8 one-way, so it's cheaper than parking in downtown Baltimore, plus the arrangement let the boy toy have the Tucson for the weekend. I didn't hang out with R. much. R. was very focused on helping his friend Ira sell his used books in the dealer's room. So I didn't have to contend much with R.'s reactionary views.

The following weekend was Storvik Novice Tourney. For the first time in a long time (duh, pandemic), I camped at an event. And ... I had forgotten what a BEAR that wooden IKEA twin bed is to assemble. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I will bring it to Pennsic, if indeed I go (and that is a story for another night because it's getting late), but for weekend events, I definitely need a folding camping cot. The comfort of a wood-framed bed is great for Pennsic, but I just don't have the energy to put into assembling it for 36 hours of eventing.

The weekend after Novice was the Baltimore Lithuanian Festival. One of my high school classmates, the one who lives on the north side of Wilmington, drove down with family members and we had a GREAT time together. My classmate presented me with an insulated water bottle inscribed with our high school emblem, a souvenir of that 45th class reunion I missed last October.

And then we had our church's annual meeting and elections ... but that is a big can-o'-worms that I don't want to open tonight. Need some sleep.

I really need to dust this journal off! Let me summarize here:

ELECTION: I worked as an election judge for four of the eight days of early voting and for Election Day itself. Same as the Maryland primary -- same-day registration during early voting and provisional ballots on Nov. 8. Fortunately, no giant windstorms and power outages this time around.

CHURCH: We finally have a place to hold in-person worship services! We are meeting on Sunday afternoons at the University Christian Church in Hyattsville. (This started only on Nov. 20.) Despite having the word "Christian" in its name, the church is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is pretty ecumenical. The Hyattsville congregation welcomes the LGBT+ community, and when I drove by it just before the election, I noticed that one of the messages on its outdoor LED sign was "Reject Christian nationalism." I can go along with that.

PHILCON: Even though I would have liked to have gone to Holiday Faire (an annual SCA event), I used the free membership to Philcon 2022 that I won at Costume Con 40. I rode up there with my fussy friend R. in his shiny CR-V. (Before our trip to Cherry Hill, he'd owned that vehicle for about 18 months and put a grand total of 3,200 miles on it.) For some reason, all the people I already knew at this convention were male, and they have been getting steadily more conservative. By the end of the weekend, I was craving the company of female friends.

CHESSIECON: Now this is a convention that is all about female energy. But it was dreadfully small ... *maybe* 120 people. And since it was at that Hunt Valley Inn that used to host Balticon, which is something like 10 times that size ... it felt empty, full of ghosts. The con committee rented way more function space than they could fill with programming, and they didn't sell out the room block, so the committee is now thousands of dollars in debt. Most of the (few) attendees believe that this was the last Chessiecon, sadly.

And now Julia is demanding her nightly treats.

P.S. I am definitely NOT missing the Virginia congressional candidate commercials.

Been a long time, been a long time...

In fact, it took me a long time to actually start getting emails from the Golden Dolphins. It didn't help that the current Order principal had a parent who had just undergone open heart surgery (and believe me, I know what it's like to be the adult child of such a patient). Finally I whitelisted the email address for the mailing list and, presto change-o, I received a huge pile of emails welcoming me to the Pod. So, all is well on that front.

My finances continued the same roller-coaster trajectory until I finished up my latest feature article at the start of December and received my payment for it a week later. Yay, I can finally catch up on some bills.

Except ... I ended up NOT going to Discon III, the World Science Fiction Convention or Worldcon. You'd think that, after hoping for Worldcon to show up in DC for three decades, I would have been first in line. However, I always seemed to be lacking in money for a Worldcon membership every time I went to another convention and saw a Discon III table or party. So I kept putting things off. And then the damned pandemic hit. R. kept dithering over whether or not he'd attend. Mike T. was abruptly diagnosed with Parkinson's disease earlier this year and abruptly moved to Pennsylvania over the summer (did I ever mention that?). Finally, the con was upon us, and even though I now have money in the bank, I honestly could not justify spending $325 on a five-day-long convention. Not when the last in-person Balticon, back in 2019, cost only $77 at the door for four days.

Fortunately, before Discon III started, I was able to spend a Saturday evening and a Monday with my friends Chris and Richard, visiting from Palo Alto. I had not seen them in person since their elder daughter graduated from Drexel University, and it was a total delight!! I received some of their camera and film shipments through the mail, so they didn't have to schlep it across the continent, and they saved some sales tax too (heh heh heh). I drove them out to the Udvar-Hazy museum, which is not on public transportation, and we had a couple of fabulous meals together at Asian-style restaurants. I was SO incredibly glad to see them again, possibly more so than any attendance at the Worldcon.

Let's see, what else is there for me to dish about?

The boy toy painted the "spare room" (the second bedroom), and I rearranged the bookshelves and released some books I'll never read again through Bookcrossing. Gaah, I still own so many books I have never actually read. I need to READ more.

I didn't go to Massachusetts for Christmas again this year. My cousin Tim's wife canceled Christmas Eve after Tim ended up in the hospital for non-covid pneumonia (he was in only for a couple of days, but still). With this new omicron variant of covid-19, I wasn't keen on a long road trip anyhow.

R. is having a prostate procedure tomorrow. Something about sticking microbeads in some of the arteries leading to the prostate to shrink it to a more normal size. It's supposed to be less invasive than regular surgery.

Over the Christmas holiday I have been taking care of a neighbor's three cats (at her house, not mine).

The boy toy and I seem to have avoided all variants of the coronavirus so far. We both have had our booster shots (Moderna, on top of Pfizer for the original two jabs).

I'm sure I'll think of something else once I finish this post. Ah, well.

Over and out.

No further news on the Discon/Worldcon situation, except that the Hugo Award nominations will be out on April 13. But I know of two other midsummer events that won't be held in 2021. A science-fiction convention in Pittsburgh, Confluence, has been canceled, and the Lithuanian folk dance festival that was originally supposed to be held in July 2020 and was moved to the first Sunday in August 2021 has been rescheduled to July 3, 2022. Hey, at least that would have been my parents' wedding anniversary.

The Pennsic mayor has stated that he will be announcing the fate of the next Pennsic at the end of May, but I am not holding my breath that it will happen in person. And even it does happen in person, I don't think it will attract the usual crowd.

Today I became eligible for a covid-19 vaccine here in Maryland. I have already pre-registered on the state's Web portal, but I probably should be signing up in more places. I have an annual checkup with my doctor on Thursday, so I'll ask him. I would hope he knows more about the vaccine situation than the average guy on the street. (I've been seeing this doctor for more than 20 years now. He bears a strange resemblance to that Dr. Romano character on ER, but he is considerably nicer.)

I have a friend here on DW whose spouse has been in the hospital with serious non-covid issues, and this weekend one of my high school classmates -- the one who lives in northern Delaware -- got into a horrific car accident. Totally NOT her fault. She was driving to work at her job in the county's 911 call center. Meanwhile, some woman jumps out of a Jeep where the male driver is smoking crack and screams that the guy is trying to kidnap her. Cops come, crack smoker drives off at a high rate of speed, police chase him, crash happens, crack smoker smashes an officer in the face before they cuff him. Meanwhile, my classmate is in the hospital with something like 15 broken bones. I can't even imagine the pain....

Over and out.

So, Worldcon 2021. GAAH!

For those who don't follow science-fiction fandom, Worldcon is the World Science Fiction Convention, held each year in a different city. In 2019, Washington, DC, won the bid to host the 2021 Worldcon. DC was the host city twice before, in 1963 and 1974, according to Wikipedia. Yes, that's a gap of 47 years there.

My friend R. (who is not a "joiner" by his own admission, who doesn't belong to any clubs or organizations, who never does volunteer jobs at SF cons, but is keenly interested in SF and SF fandom nevertheless) has always been opposed to holding Worldcon in DC. He claims he would rather travel to distant cities for Worldcon (not that he's traveled to once in 30 years, I think) and that fandom in Our Nation's Capital was tainted by that one time that people dressed in Star Trek uniforms showed up to a congressional hearings on space policy. (He says that was in 1974, which was the year of the second DC Worldcon. Honestly, are any officials who were at that hearing still even alive???)

Personally, when I heard that DC was the only city bidding on the 2021 Worldcon and the bid was approved, I was happy. I don't have much of a travel budget and do not expect to, and even if I did, I have lots of other places I would like to visit for reasons that do not involve SF conventions. I have been to three Worldcons: Boston in 1989 and 2004 and Philadelphia's 2001 Millennium Philcon in 2001. (Baltimore held a Worldcon in 1998, but I spent the week on a job-interview trip to southern California.)

So, yay, the DC Worldcon (also named Discon III) was supposed to begin 10 days after Pennsic 50 ended. Originally. That seemed as if it would be a hectic (and expensive) month for yours truly.

But then the pandemic happened. Pennsic 49 didn't happen in 2020. It may not happen in 2021 -- we shall see. (The next Pennsic will be #49, regardless of year.) And Pennsic is an outdoor event. So, what will happen to an indoor event like Discon III?

Frankly, I have no idea. When the pandemic started, the main Discon hotel, the storied Marriott Wardman Park, closed down. Probably permanently. Which sucks, because it was one of the largest hotels in the city, with tons of convention space. Without dwelling on this, there's some sort of bankruptcy suit going on and the contract between Discon and the hotel is considered an asset.

None of that is the convention's fault, to be sure. But ... other things have been happening. Some Hugo Award policy was changed, which caused lots of anger, so the policy was changed back, and two of the main organizers of the convention, including one of the co-chairs, resigned. You can read about that here. The co-chair who resigned wrote:

In my years of growing responsibility of working for Worldcons, I have become increasingly alarmed and upset at the level of abuse and vitriol spewed at the all-volunteer staff. So much so that I have now abruptly walked away from probably the best chance I had to improve matters ‘from the inside.’

As of this writing, we still don't know whether the convention will be held in August or December (one of the options discussed, however briefly) and whether it will be virtual or in-person. Putting the whole thing off until next year, as the 2020 Summer Olympics did, isn't really an option because Chicago fans will hold *their* Worldcon in 2022.

And then the feces REALLY hit the fan ... but that will be described in a later entry.

Over and out.

First of all: Happy Birthday, wookiemonster!!!

The year 2020 is rapidly going away, or at least the parts of the year that spice up life. The SCA's governing board made it official today: no in-person events in North America until next February. That relieves some of the stress associated with uncertainty. Also, it heads off any possible problems with people flocking from state to state in search of that one event that didn't get canceled. And virtual events are perfectly permissible, so we in Atlantia will have an online "Pennsic in Your Backyard" weekend in August and another virtual University of Atlantia in September.

But still. This is a long, long time for an organization that relies so heavily on interpersonal social events to pause those events. How will this affect membership numbers? Obviously people like me are hardcore diehards, but what about the people who usually attend events once or twice a year and don't have time for a lot of the activities that happen between events?

So, no SCA events for the rest of 2020, and Chessiecon (which didn't happen in 2019 because the hotel's management imploded) is apparently going online only, though this hasn't been widely publicized yet. And no Christmas pageant by the Washington Revels because the group would have had to start rehearsing a couple of months ago. The huge Toastmasters international convention will be virtual, not that I could have afforded to go to Paris, even though I have a valid passport.

Right now the only thing still "on, as normal" is Philcon, and I wonder how long that's going to stay that way. I know that it's a pretty small and cozy convention these days, and the urge to memorialize the late Hugh Casey (a pillar of the Philcon community) will be great. But, despite the name, Philadelphia's SF con happens in Cherry Hill, NJ, and both Maryland (where I live) and Virginia (where R. lives) are both on New Jersey's list of travel restrictions. So we would have to self-quarantine for two weeks to attend a two-day convention. Uh, I don't see THAT happening....

Don't even know where to begin....

Yes, the novel-coronavirus pandemic is still raging, the U.S. death toll is now in six figures, and the horrible excuse for a president thinks that businesses should rush to be open, virus-spread be damned. Then on Monday, white Minneapolis police officers lynched a black man who was being investigated for a non-violent offense. Yes, I said lynched. That's what they did. The cops killed a man while someone was taking a video of it, and now Minneapolis and other cities are burning. And the pathetic excuse for a president cannot tell the difference between actual leadership and egging on a race war. More and more cities are devolving into chaos and, even though I don't like violence, I can't say I blame the protesters. That lynching was beyond appalling.

Yes, I had a nice time during the Virtual Balticon sessions last weekend, plus a nice chat with Sonya/Patches on Wednesday night. I am plugging away with the church budget team, Toastmasters, and plans to teach a class through the Virtual University of Atlantia in two weeks. But my own concerns seem so damned petty. Pathetic, really.

Now it's the summertime events' turn to go away.

Pennsic fell on Thursday. It wasn't a surprise, really, but still, a number of my SCA friends reported (through Facebook) that they cried. Pennsic 49 will now take place in 2021 and there will be a year-long gap in the numbering of the wars. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go this year, but still, it feels like a big gap in the year.

A local (well, Maryland) media convention called Shore Leave, which is normally held in the summer, has been canceled for the year. The big Lithuanian dance festival, Sokiu Svente, that is held once every four years? That has been postponed for one year, until 2021.

No word on when baseball will resume, or when the NBA and NHL playoffs will take place, or anything like that.

Protesters call for the economy to resume, but the "curve" of cases and deaths is still on the way up. Maryland just had its worst day in terms of deaths from COVID-19. We're NOT ready to reopen yet.

So much sadness.

Today makes two years since my grad-school adviser died and 100 years since the solar eclipse that provided the first big test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Monday also made six years since Pedro died.

This year I enjoyed the first two days of Balticon, then spent time with the boy toy on Sunday and Monday. These days, science fiction conventions seem so expensive compared with SCA events, because of those darned hotels. I grumbled about going, but eventually I dragged myself there and then I was fine. I think I struck a suitable balance between hanging out with the "old gang" (R., Mike and Phil) and the "new gang" (people I know through the SCA and Balticon itself). I really wish R. could mingle with my newer friends, but sometimes I think he doesn't know how. I worry about him as he ages (he's 67).

I have three more weeks to decide whether I will go to Pennsic this year. My editor has dangled a plum feature assignment in front of me ... due August 15, which is right *after* Pennsic. There is also the possibility of some work from another freelance employer, and again, it's in the mid-July to mid-August range. *sigh* I really need money. But I also don't know whether I would be going to Pennsic in 2020, because it's a Sokiu Svente (Lithuanian dance festival) year. But it's not guaranteed that I'll be dancing in the festival, either. *sigh again* (More on that in a future entry.)

Plus, my 60th birthday is looming ever larger ... who knows how long I'll have the energy to go to long SCA camping events? At what point will my flesh become too weak for my willing spirit?

Anyhow ...

At least I have been watching some interesting TV. While the rest of the world was obsessing over Game of Thrones, I followed The Red Line, a fascinating drama about the spreading aftermath of the fictional shooting of an unarmed black man by a white Chicago cop. It touched on practically all the major issues of today, from same-sex marriage to coming of age, racial identity, adoptive families, women in politics, casual racism, youth activism, dysfunctional families ... I could go on and on. Tonight I just finished watching the dramatization of The Hot Zone, which as a book fascinated and repelled me back in the 1990s. By the time I'd finished reading it, I honestly thought that I'd rather die of cancer than Ebola....