My much-delayed WisCon post

I was too tired to do a con report, and then too distracted, and now I'm still too distracted but I figure it's now or never.

So, a random collection of comments, observations, and anecdotes, with woefully incomplete name-dropping, for which I apologize in advance:

1. Last year, I went to the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, and bought a couple of jars of jam. Molly and Kiera loved the jam -- Molly especially. When it ran out, she informed me that I needed to drive back down to Madison and buy more of it. Which I didn't do. So this year, I thought I would stock up. The old guy who makes it sells about thirty varieties, and I bought a dozen jars, including two of the apple/strawberry blend that Molly liked so much. Walking through the Madison Farmer's Market carrying a cardboard box with a dozen jars of jam gets a lot of commentary, from "are you having a jam party?" to "oh HEY where IS that guy? I need some of his jam too" to "ohhhh, I see Jim gave you a sales pitch." It really is good jam, though.

2. I grew up in Madison, and it wasn't until I'd been living elsewhere for a long time that I realized that in most places, the "farmer's market" is just a bunch of outdoor stalls with farmers selling vegetables and stuff, rather than a weekly enormous mass celebration of everything locally grown. It is enormous, and towards the middle of the day attracts the sort of crowd you'd expect to see on a Saturday at the State Fair.

3. Early in the con, Jane Irwin gave haddayr copies of her Vogelein graphic novels, which feature a clockwork faerie who was made in Germany in the 1600s. I borrowed them to read after coming home from the parties (it was 3 a.m. but I was wired), and I loved them. The stories are sweet and a little creepy, and gorgeously drawn. And they have footnotes at the end if you want to know about all the things she worked into the art based on her research that you might not notice if you don't happen to be an expert on clockmaking techniques of the 1600s. I saw Jane on Sunday night and told her how much I'd loved them, and she gave me copies, too. I brought them home and Molly devoured them and is now reading them to Kiera.

3a. Molly immediately asked if I could buy her the third. She was very disappointed that there are only two, and wanted the author's e-mail address so she could write to her and ask her to get cracking. I told her that I would give it to her if she wanted to send fan mail but that she needed to start out by saying how much she'd enjoyed the first two before she demanded more more more. (George R. R. Martin will doubtless be relieved to know she hasn't picked up any of his books yet.)

4. I also bought Pat Murphy's Wild Girls (allegedly for Molly) and really enjoyed it. I haven't read the first Magic Thief book yet, but Molly did and loved it, so I bought her the second. And! Molly has the Pat Murphy / Ellen Klages / some other people who don't come to WisCon classics, The Brain Explorer and The Science Explorer, and I had Pat and Ellen sign them for her. Her favorite of the pile was the Vogelein books, though. She liked those even more than the jam.

5. Scotch is more palatable if you put in an ice cube, because it melts and dilutes it just a little. I'm still not exactly a scotch fan, but it definitely did grow on me as I sipped it. (Ed likes single-malt scotch quite a bit, but I have generally found that it tastes to me like gasoline smells. Note that this is not because Ed drinks bad scotch.) Also, Doselle is really fun to hang out with.

6. The auction was very funny. During the GoH speeches I found out that Ellen has always been the Tiptree Auctioneer, ever since the very first time they tried an auction as a fundraiser, which was interesting to know. Also, the first time she served as an auctioneer was also her very first con (and it was Readercon, not WisCon). She said that they raised a bunch of money and afterwards lots of people came up and asked her where else she'd be performing that weekend.

7. I seriously cannot understand mistaking sparkymonster for Tempest. I actually have a fairly weak memory for faces, as anyone who's said hi to me out-of-context and had me stare at them helplessly trying to remember whether I know them from (a) fandom, (b) church, (c) my daughter's school, or (d) Democratic politics can attest to. I have difficulty recognizing people from photographs. I might not be able to recognize Julia from a photograph but I can at least tell she's not Tempest. She's shorter, she has a different build, she has a totally different hairstyle and a really different face and and and and WTF people?

8. I can kind of understand failing to greet a party host, though. Because people do that all the time at WisCon parties. (I've hosted as well as attended.) But you know -- it really is rude. Anywhere else, if you go to a party, you greet the host (I hope!) Thinking about this made me wonder, what is WRONG with us? Just because we're in fandom does not mean we are required to act like we were all born in a barn! I have resolved to be better about this in the future. (And of course, yes, this is also an issue of aversive racism. But unlike most problems created by aversive racism, this one can be solved with the application of courtesies that are generally considered to be basic politeness.)

8a. I would have flagged down karnythia anyway because I enjoy reading her blog and wanted to meet her, but she spotted me first and came over to say hi. She was EXHUBERANTLY friendly at the Verb Noire party.

8b. I didn't try to schmooze her, though. (There was some discussion on another thread about how geez, if you're an author at a party run by a publishing house, why on earth wouldn't you try to schmooze the editors?) I realized a few years ago that I hated the feeling of Trying to Make Contacts when I went to a con. So I mostly stopped and seek out interesting conversations instead.

9. For the fancy dress party on Sunday night, I wore -- wait, you know, I will back up and tell the story properly.

9. Back at the beginning of May, I went out to Boston with Ed and helped clean out his father's house. His father is moving in with friends who are providing him with some caregiving, and bringing a small subset of his stuff with him. There was a whole lot of junk in that house, but there were also some really cool things, like the journal Caroline (Ed's late mother) kept while on an around-the-world trip in 1963. In the bedroom, buried in a cedar chest, I found this sort of long silk jacket, heavily embroidered with Asian dragons and other cool stuff. My best guess was that she had bought it on that trip.

My sister identified it as an airport kimono. I could tell that it was not a kimono; I don't know a ton about kimonos, but I knew enough to identify this as Not One. "Airport kimono" is a term generally used to refer to things that are not real kimonos that are made to be sold to tourists. Regardless, this was really lovely. It was wearable art and had spent forty or so years sitting at the bottom of a cedar chest. And where on earth could I wear something like this OTHER than the WisCon fancy dress party?

At the party, jiawen, who used to live in Taiwan (and with whom I'd driven down! I could have shown her this while pulled over at a rest area and gotten the probable history of it before I even got to WisCon!) said that it was Chinese, not Japanese in origin, and noted that it had both Buddhist and Taoist symbols on it. Longshan Temple, in Taipei, is both Buddhist and Taoist. And according to the diary of Caroline's trip, she went there. So it seems quite likely that is where this originated.

Anyway, I wore it, lots of people admired it, I told the story of its origin many times, and when I started to fret that I was going to spill something all over it I went and changed into something more easily laundered.

10. Now it's in my closet. I have no idea what to do with it.

11. On the way home, I bought a fresh strawberry pie from Norske Nook in Osseo. I get one of these every year. I arrived too late on Monday for the girls to have a slice, but everyone had a wedge of it for dessert on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Molly was supposed to go on a field trip but had an enormous meltdown on the bus and couldn't pull herself together and so wound up getting left at the school. She told me about this as we drove down to visit my grandmother on Wednesday afternoon, and I called her teacher from my grandmother's apartment to get her version of the story. Then I sat Molly in my lap to talk to her about it some more and as we were talking, I found myself noticing how incredibly squirrely she was. She couldn't sit still. I hadn't seen her so physically agitated since we stopped giving her red dye. So I started thinking about foods she'd had in the last 24 hours that she didn't normally get...

Yes, the goddamn pie had red dye #40 in it. It is held together with strawberry gelatin, which (unless you buy it at a co-op) is basically gelatin, sugar, and red dye #40.

On the plus side, the consequence of screwing up my daughter's dietary restriction is a really bad day or two, rather than anaphylactic shock, and also on the plus side, we took the red dye out of her diet at the same time as we tried a bunch of other things and I had lately been second-guessing myself about whether the red dye was a significant problem. I believe we have now confirmed that yes, it is a significant problem and we should continue to keep her away from it.