It’s been up and down, good luck and bad all day. Good luck: My friend Jorge volunteered to drive me and my con pal Bonnie to the airport at an ungodly hour this morning, when there should have been no traffic to speak of... and we got caught in a major traffic jam when the cleanup of a really horrendous car accident stopped us cold in the middle of the Major Deegan Expressway for half an hour, which more than ate up all the extra time we had allotted ourselves. We just made our flight, after being delayed some more by JetBlue, who had neglected to inform us of some basic check-in procedures... like if you’re checking cardboard boxes, you can’t do online check-in (JetBlue’s Web site, which lets you check in online, doesn’t mention this.) We had cardboard boxes, because Bonnie was hauling art to the Worldcon art show, where she’s showing her work. (You can see some of her stuff at her Web site; oh, and she just published a piece of short science fiction in an anthology called Watching Time.)
Oh, and guess what else you can’t bring in an airplane cabin these days? Butter. As in butter on the bologna and cheese sandwiches you might bring because JetBlue doesn’t serve meals as a cost-cutting measure but does encourage you to bring your own food. Just don’t bring anything of a gel or paste consistency. Like butter. Or peanut butter. Or mayonnaise.
But you can bring a laptop on a plane. Which proves that no one is really serious about airline security. I mean, I’m glad I could bring my computer, because I wouldn’t be talking to you now otherwise, but why the fuck can’t I bring a bologna sandwich with butter on a plane?
Anyway, Stephen Colbert was on the plane. Well, not his corporeal self, but his televised self: I was able to catch up with last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Report on the live DirectTV, which was cool:
Yeah, you can bring a digital camera on a plane, too.
But even though I could barely sleep on the plane -- even though I really needed it after running on about two hours of sleep in the last 24, at that point -- I was totally refreshed walking off the plane in Long Beach, California. Because this is the airport:
The terminal is like something out of the 1940s, the whitewashed building and the tiny airport at which you walk run off the plane onto the tarmac like you’re Grace Kelly or something. If you really wanna feel like you’re stepping into old Hollywood, fly into Southern California via Long Beach.
But then the handle of my bag broke right in the airport:
This is the bag that I need to carry around all my crap during the con -- my laptop and phone and camera and copies of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride and business cards and flyers for my Web site...
But I was in such a good mood anyway with the palm trees and the feeling like Grace Kelly in a movie that I even let Enterprise Rent-a-car scam me into upgrading to a nicer car than the shitbox Dodge Neo I had reserved:
The one time before I’ve been to Southern California with Bonnie, we had breakfast at Denny’s when we got off the plane, so of course now it’s a tradition:
Yum. Grand Slam...
More palm trees around our hotel and the convention center:
Our room is a disaster after checking in with all our crap, including a hundred copies of my book, boxes of new cards and flyers that we had shipped directly to the hotel (which Hilton charged us for accepting, even though they said they wouldn’t), Bonnie’s art stuff, our luggage, and so on:
But it looks like a good place to have a couple parties, which we’ll do on Friday and Saturday nights, especially with the beautiful courtyard right off our room:
And so we headed out to shop for party stuff... and for a new bag for me. Target... with palm trees!
Grocery cart navigation is so difficult when you’ve only slept a few hours in as many days:
We thought we might head out to some parties Wednesday night, but the moment we sat down after hauling two parties worth of groceries up to our room and trying to figure out the puzzle of fitting all the cold stuff into a cube fridge, we were both unconscious...
(Technorati tags: Worldcon)
2 Comments
Leave a comment