Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

This photo was actually taken on Sunday, games being a popular pastime among this group of people

This weekend, The Gryphon and I went to a planning retreat for Otakon in a Baltimore area hotel. Of course, we couldn't bring Una, so we'd arranged for a pet sitter.

When we got to the pet sitter's house, Una was happy to see the pet sitter and the her dogs.

I found out later from the pet sitter that Una did very well. She didn't panic too much after we left but just ran to the door to see if we were, in fact, gone. Over the weekend, she had fun playing with the other dogs. She tried to sleep on the water bed but decided against it. And she ate her food and behaved. Good doggie!

Friday night, there wasn't much planned and when I got there, not many people were there. If they were, they were out to dinner. The Gryphon and I had stopped at a Baja Fresh on the way there for a late lunch, and I'd had a large salad. Neither one of us were hungry enough to eat again, despite the fact that we arrived close to 8 p.m.

So after fruitless searching for other people to socialize with, we went back to the hotel room and I did some work on Wild Violet. The Gryphon got me set up on his lap top, and after playing around a bit with the design, I was on a roll. After turning on NBC for me, The Gryphon decided to try to find some other people to talk to and also start taking care of some business. He's in charge of human resources this year for the convention.

I stayed in our room and finished the entire fiction and poetry sections, which was all the material I'd brought with me to work on. So I shut down the computer and headed downstairs to see who'd arrived.

We had a large room we'd set up for the purpose of socializing Friday night, and a number of people were there. Several were deep into complicated board games, which I was too late to join but which were fun to watch.

One of the games was sort of like a visual version of Scrabble: You'd select squares from a bag and then put them down to form medieval villages, roads or churches. Then you could put your playing pieces on them, and you'd get points depending on what sort of land you were claiming.

On the other side of the room, I believe people were playing Boggle, which is extremely difficult to win when you're around so many people with high linguistic skills.

I was getting a little hungry, and fortunately, someone had brought some fruit and nuts. But I wasn't terribly hungry, so a few handfuls of nuts and an orange filled me up. I amazed my friends by peeling the orange and keeping the peel in one spiral, an old trick of mine which, for some reason, I can only achieve with my left hand.

We ended up staying up much later than I thought we would, just talking to people until about 4 a.m. But we had to get some then, because we had an early day ahead of us.

More on the Otakon planning retreat:

October 19, 2004 - Flying Pikachus

October 20, 2004 - Time Drifts

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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