Saturday

Saturday with a trip to the waterfront Mariott for their famous breakfast buffet --the breakfast chef has been making waffles and omelets there for 29 years! I consumed far more than was good for me, then zipped back to the con hotel (zipped in a waddling, pleasantly bloated fashion) to my first panel, pros at cons. As sometimes happens, no one showed, so after a suitable time, Bob "RadCon" Brown called us canceled, so Joan Gaustad, Andrew Nisbet, Suzanne Tompkins and after a bit some other folks who wandered in just chatted about cons past until the next panel showed up to displace us.
Next was a flash fiction panel with Ayne Blythe, Ray Vukcevich, and Edward Morris, with fantastic help from the audience from KC Ball, Mr. Green and others. Being on a panel with Ray will earn me huge cool parent points with my oldest soon, who is major fan. The panel itself was one of those near-perfect things, fast-paced, inforrmative, and great audience participation.
My final panel of the day was one that is always a favorite, Ask Dr. Genius. Panelists included Guy Letourneau, Jordin Kare, Dr. Anne Prather, Amy Thomson, and Janet Freeman. This time we were very engineer heavy, so the puns were rapid-fire and thick upon the ground. The *lies* explanations on these panels tend to congeal around themes, this time many references to lost socks in the dryer. The room was packed, and many of us had done various iterations of this panel before in some combination or another, so it was like one of those all-star band concerts, with everyone taking a turn at *promoting a pack of lies* a solo, then jumping back into the resultant chaos.
We sat in a fun and informative panel on Christian SF and fantasy, spent some time wandering the halls, and then to a very cool ultra techno decor Chinese restaurant, then to the room for a quick post-prandial coma before returning to the con to visit parties and the dance. Saw Brenda Cooper in the hallway but didn't get to chat, caught up with Bruce Taylor at the same transitory venue, exchanged hugs with Mary Rosenblum in passing. Many of our long-time con friends we only got to wave at, but at least we got to visit a few minutes with the lovely Judith Hermann at the dance. We gave Nisi Shawl a lift to where she was staying, and made it an early night.