Go West, Young Bug

After e/n/d/l/e/s/s much debate and wrestling with myriad possibilities, both
TAFF admins. have decided that with the cancellation of Convoy, the 2007
Eastercon, and uncertainly about any successor, the 2007 TAFF race will be
postponed until 2008.

Both TAFF candidates, Mary Kay Kare and Chris Garcia, have agreed that this
is the best course of action.

Further information about the 2008 race will be forthcoming.

(The ballots and donations received to date will be returned to the senders.)


Suzanne Tompkins, TAFF NA
Bridget Bradshaw, TAFF UK

Convoy, the 2007 Eastercon, appears to have been cancelled. I am sorry this has happened, and hope that something does arise as a substitute.

This does have implications for the current TAFF race. It is not clear exactly what the implications will be, and they will be affected by the outcome of upcoming discussion at and around Novacon (Nov 10-12), but Suzle and I will be following the situation and looking at options.

Hmm. An average of 2,000 words per day, for 50 days, is 100,000 words. Is that too many?

A plan for finishing:
Every week day I will transcribe 2 days of notebook and write 2 postcards (I'll post the rest from Britain I think, rather than posting them to an American to post back again ;-)
Every weekend I will crop/rotate/label/delete 250 photos.
By the end of October I'll have finished the above tasks.

Then to make first drafts of chapters...

Here's where I went ( See more...Collapse )

Plus New Jersey if you count just going to the airport, and plus Ontario.

Well, sort of. Here is a video of the Best Fanzine Hugo presentation, courtesy of kevin_standlee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNV…

It's nice to see what happened; my mind blanked most of the incident. I felt a lot more rabbit-in-headlights than I thankfully look...

I remind you that the next North America to Europe race is accepting candidates - do let Suzle know as soon as possible if you are interested in standing, or if you have any questions about being a candidate. The full announcement and more information can be seen here.

Even running in itself is a great bit of fanac - make some connections, let us Europeans get to know you a bit better, pub some ishes, do some creative fundraising. Start a bit of debate! - I met so many Anglophiles on my trip; what is it that people find so appealing about Britain? It's only a small country, about the size of a US state...

I went a bit mad in Sainsbury's when I got home - I think I bought one of every vegetable. Yum, yum.

By the way, now that I have visted and been cared for and fed, is there anything my hosts now think I should have added/omitted from the Care and Feeding recommendations? It would be useful to know for future occasions. If you want to comment anonymously I promise to not go look up your IP address ;-)

I feel most bad about leaving such a lot of soy milk in my wake, it seems to come in very large containers and I only use circa 250ml/day.

More than food and accomodation, I most appreciate people taking time off work to go places with me!

I'm giving my US-only cellphone to Farah, so now would be a good time to remove me from your contact lists.

If you need my current cellphone number, or any other of my contact details, let me know and I'll send them by e-mail.

Now to go back and obscure the references to it...

I've copied all my trip photographs from the CDs, USB stick and camera, into a folder. 1,155 files in 15 folders, weighing in at just over a Gigabyte. Eek! When I went to China for 2.5 weeks I only took 36 photos in total (but that was the olden days of 35mm film cameras).

I shall be able to delete several, where I took duplicates with and without flash. Some others were taken as aide-memoires, not for posterity - a way to capture detail quickly without writing it all down in the notebook. There are still people and places I don't have good shots of.

Arriving home and seeing my street through the eyes of a traveller:

OMG, there's heaps of water everywhere! What is that? "Puddles", you say? Weird. And everything is so green. Oh look!- an actual snail, living in the wild, just slithering along the street!

It has been great travelling, and thanks to everyone I've met along the way, who has put me up, or come out for dinner, picked me up from an airport, or whatever.

It is also great to be home, and I expect to calm down at some point. Normal service will shortly be resumed as bugshaw for those of you who like blogs about vacuuming and hamsters, stupid jokes and minor irritations of life. I'll keep posting TAFFrelevant things here.

Rar!

PS: Respect to Doug n6tqs for the suggestion of the direct bus service from Heathrow to Cambridge. It saved a great deal of trouble schlepping luggage across London, and I would have had big trouble negotiating the Underground after our long sleepless flight. It would have been especially inconvenient as there were a lot of rail works going on, and we would have had to use at least one replacement bus service in any event.