Penguicon Day 1

WARNING LONG POST IS LONG!

Well, here I am, comfy in bed at the Troy Hilton in Michigan. I've been to one day of Penguicon, and I'm mostly enjoying myself. Yesterday was an adventure, though ...

So, Tene and I left for the airport around 10, our flight was scheduled to leave at around 12:30am. It left on time and all was well.

Ended up falling asleep on the flight. It was uncomfortable but - hey - whatcha gonna do?

Problem #1: My glasses broke in-flight. I'm not entirely certain as to how. I put them in the pocket of the seat in front of me before I fell asleep. But ... When I woke up they were gone. I eventually found them by my seat - apparently run over by one of the stewardess carts. Nothing fell off, but the left side was bent out of shape - the metal hinge twisted, and the plastic cracking. I put them in Tene's glasses' case and didn't worry about them again.

The plane took us to Atlanta, and we had a short layover before finally getting into a smaller plane to get to Detroit. Aside from me having issues with turbulence and general fears of flying, everything went well. I slept better on this flight.

We landed in Detroit at 9am local time. Didn't have to wait for luggage (yay carry on!), found an over-priced cab, and went to our hotel.

I slept in the cab, which hurt my neck.

Finally we got to the hotel. This is where I learned that Tene had not pre-registered for the con, and as a result we couldn't get registered for a while. While this was mostly okay, after some other adventures we could no longer get into the Consuite.

At the hotel I decided to replenish my energy, and had a long nap. I was wakened by Tene, who then asked if I wanted to go pick up one of the panelists from the airport. This panelist was Eliezer Yudkowsky who posts regularly to Overcoming Bias. So, we borrowed one of the Conhosts cars and went to the airport to pick up Eliezer. Everything was fine, I was just there to keep Tene comfy. I fell asleep in this car too.

At the airport I waited with the car while Tene went to go find Eliezer. Unfortunately, I was left in the "No parking, no standing" zone - where there was supposed to be "active loading and unloading, only." After being yelled at by a policeman on a motorcycle, I decided to move out of the way.

I ended up getting lost, and couldn't find my way back to the terminal until I'd gone around the airport 5+ times. I was not happy.

Once my anxiety attack was over, I found myself back at the hotel! Still unregistered, we couldn't find Matt (who owned the car we borrowed). Tene called him, and got permission to borrow the car again.

We went to the mall nearby, and found a Lenscrafters. They failed at an attempt to fix my glasses, but put them back together enough that I could wear them. Now they work okay, the lenses were in good shape, but the side post falls off sometimes

Well, we finally got back to the hotel, registered, and then went off to see the panels. I went to the three literature ones, which were very interesting, and I got to meet Tamora Pierce. That was cool.

I'll go into the panels later, for now, my adventures are hopefully over.