...a whirl 'round the town was her dream (was her dream). Took her dancin', took her dinin'...

Pictures online: Madison Trip part 57: Dinner at the Great Dane (03-Feb-2008)
Madison Trip part 58: Wisconsin Historical Society at UW (04-Feb-2008) et seq.
Madison Trip part 60: Lunch at the Memorial Union at UW (04-Feb-2008) et seq.
Madison Trip part 62: Leaving the campus, shopping on State Street (04-Feb-2008) et seq.
Madison Trip part 65: Back to the hotel, dinner at Noodles & Company (04-Feb-2008) et seq.

More about animelosangeles Friday night. I skipped the AMV Contest, because I'd already seen almost all of them. (I'd loaded them on my computer and uploaded them to our server, to make it easier for our AMV Contest coordinator to fetch them without having to get the discs from me.) I was trying to fix a mess I'd made of some ribbon assignments, and was looking for Joyce Hooper.

She was around, but busy busy busy in her capacity as Speaker to Hotel. See, the storm was really going at this point. If you look at the "Hourly Observations" for that night you can see that by about 6:00 pm the rain was coming down in earnest, and by midnight we'd had two and a half inches of rain. There were big deep puddles in the quad, especially at the doors into the convention center -- the concrete is slanted down to the convention center building.

So people who didn't want to get their feet wet again were going around to the front (parking lot) side of the building, after they'd already learned that every door on the hotel side of the building had a deep puddle in front of it. And, in fact, the water was coming in under the door and making a lake inside the convention center foyer! Happy Bench Land was getting flooded!

Did I talk about Happy Bench Land? I posted a note on the Animé Los Angeles LJ about the benches. We also had two folding chairs, many beanbags (half of them belong to Loscon, the two conventions loan them out to each other), and a "bear chair." The Bear Chair was a fuzzy thing shaped like a teddy bear gingerbread cookie.

The water was coming in, and the Bear Chair got wet! We put it up on one of the benches, and dragged all the benches away from the door. The hotel people came over, swept up as much of the water as they could, vacuumed up the rest of it with a shop vac, and set up an enormous dehumidifier or two. Fortunately the rain didn't come back that night. If you look at the Hourly Observations for Saturday morning you can see that at midnight the rain had dropped off to almost nothing.

Golly. Well, Joyce had dealt with that particular crisis, and she sat down on a bench next to me to catch her breath. Just then we looked up towards the parking lot and saw two firetrucks go by with red lights flashing... Joyce got up, said she'd better find out what's going on, and went down towards the Gaming Room and Rum Party end of the convention. When she came back I asked her whether the building was on fire as well as flooded?

It turns out, no, but the paramedics did end up taking someone who'd been injured in the Rum Party to the hospital. (He's going to be all right, he went back to Canada with his arm in a sling and was seeking medical attention up there.) An exciting night!

The next day I asked im_with_no_name to draw us a sign, in case the flood came back. She made a lovely "Lake District" sign with Ala floating past Registration in a boat. It turns out the rain didn't really come back until Sunday night, during load-out. As long as we were loading trucks it was coming down. But that's Sunday, I'll get to that later!

...'till her blue eyes were shinin' with the sights that they never had seen (never seen)...

Can I say enough about Genny and Dana? Genny, pictured here with her husband Craig Miller, offered to run any department I needed her for. After several months of considering her offer, I asked her to take charge of the Staff Lounge. Genny has lots of experience with feeding people, Staff Lounges and otherwise, and I knew we had to have one this year. The room was for "staff and volunteers" but basically if you could find the room, she'd feed you regardless of what it said on your badge.

She was short on staff for the Staff Lounge, so I asked Dana Ginsberg to help. Dana's amazing. She did most of the work in 2006 when I "ran" the Loscon Con Suite. Basically what I did is I gave her the budget and stood back, and she made wonderful things happen. She also has a posse of about half a dozen loyal friends who'll pitch in and help. So when I recruited Dana for Genny, she in turn called up two of her friends to come and help out as well.

So there was always real food in the Staff Lounge. There was always food in my suite refrigerator, as well -- I was supposed to bring a dorm fridge or two, but forgot, so I just gave Genny and Dana keys to our room so they could use both fridges.

Vic, our VA Guest of Honor, had the suite immediately above the Staff Lounge. When I showed him around, I pointed out the room. He said "I should leave that room alone so the staff get enough to eat, right?" I pointed out that for some of the staffers taking a quick break to get a bite, if they happened to bump into him there it might be their only chance to meet our Voice Actor GoH. He brightened up at that, and he & Michele took a number of meals there including breakfast. I learned later that Michele used some of the zip bags I'd given Vic to get some meals "to go" that she put in his fridge, so he wouldn't starve after she left the con!

A lot of the staff and volunteers got real meals that weekend, thanks to Genny and Dana's efforts. She served breakfast every day -- she hadn't planned to open Friday morning, but our signals got crossed and I thought she'd said she was opening at 8:00 am every morning so on Friday there were hungry fans knocking on her door hoping for something to eat.

The jambalaya on Saturday night was very tasty. The Filipino eggrolls ("lumpia") were delicious, but there was a mix-up in communications there, she hadn't planned to pay for quite that many. They did deliveries of sandwiches to staffers who couldn't/wouldn't leave their post to come feed themselves. I'm very happy with how the Staff Lounge worked out, and Genny has lots of notes on what people ate and what they didn't. I'm hoping I can convince both of them to come back next year!