...we can build a snowman, then pretend that he is Parson Brown. He'll say "are you married"...

Trying to wrap up my winter notes! Starting right after animelosangeles, library_lynn and I had been trying to schedule a meeting with divine_sage and her parents. It's been tough, I'd get over being sick and then Carolyn's dad would go out of town. He'd come back, I'd be sick again, then there would be some random minor family crisis, rinse lather repeat.

So finally, a few weeks ago, everything lined up. It happened to be the same day as a cosplay picnic day down in San Diego at Old Town, organized by Kitsune on cosplay.com. I'd already committed to that too, though. Early Sunday I headed down to San Diego. Another grueling drive, but it's always fun to hang out with the San Diego fans. Not that they're one homogenous group, mind you. But "Questionable Kristina" was there, dressed as The Doctor complete with glasses and sonic screwdriver. (Did I mention about Doctor Who fans in anime fandom? Okay, good.)

It was cool when the sun went behind the clouds, and warm when the sun came out. Many us brought food, including lots of home-made goodies -- cookies and cupcakes and yaki soba and salad and so forth. I brought my picnic supplies kit. I was too pressed for time to cook, so I brought chili and my little cooker, and Spicy Cider which is good warm or cold. I had some on hand, because two weeks before I'd brought the same stuff to the cosplay.com Valentine's picnic out at Whittier Narrows.

How did I miss telling you guys about those pictures? Photos uploaded last month: Cosplay Picnic in El Monte, at Whittier Narrows (09-Feb-2008) Part 1-22. Here you can see Martin Young, who brought his daughter Eris (not pictured here) and his ex-wife's dog.

And we ran into Rachel Turtledove, too. (Who also turned up at an Inland Empire cosplay day that I missed.) Another Loscon regular, she and her sisters and her folks usually show up at our local sci-fi convention. She went to Animé Los Angeles this year, although I didn't see her myself.

The picnic took over a public portion of the Whittier Narrows Regional Park. Unfortunately, some of the other groups in the park that day made enough complaints about some of our people carrying on that we've been invited not to return to the park. The organizers of this picnic are working on getting a reserved space at another park, so they're not giving up at all.

Lynn and I had a nice conversation with Suzanne Sperber. Suzanne had made a nifty suggestion at Animé Los Angeles, which she told us FanimeCon had passed on, but I think could work well: a live audience voice-over panel for a game of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

Most of the Phoenix Wright games have a wide cast of characters. And the game itself is basically a text adventure with illustrations. Suzanne said we'd probably want to figure out how to let fifteen people (or at least, fifteen voices) all be heard. I'm thinking we'd need a line of five small cocktail rounds with three chairs each and five mics, one in the center of each table, and some sort of projector arrangement so that the game illustrations and characters' lines can be seen by all.

So it would take some work. But it would be an interesting project. I don't know whether this would count as a "live program" item or an "event," something we might discuss tonight at our exec meeting.

Where was I? Yes. Two Valentine picnics in February. (The usual month for them, I hear.) They had 70 or so people at Whittier Narrows, and ten or twenty in San Diego. We went through two big #10 cans of Stagg Chili at Whittier, and about half a can in San Diego, if that -- should have brought a smaller can. One of my favorite topics, I talked to Suzanne and Kristina about this, is self-organizing events & structures. Picnics like these, small and large, and fan-run conventions, and the Grilled Cheese Invitational (which I'll have to miss this year) are all examples of this. I like to participate in these kinds of things. So do a lot of other people, of course!

By the time I finished in San Diego -- I had to pack up at 3 o'clock in order to have any hope of getting home in time -- it was getting tired, and I didn't want to get late. Shawna Slate here helped me carry everything back out to the Napmobile.

I pushed up as best as I could, and came up on the top of the toll road two hours later just as Lynn came home and realizing she was locked out. So she didn't have long to wait for me to let her in. (We'd swapped vehicles, and I'd left my keychain with the truck key for it. She didn't realize it wasn't my full keychain until far too late, after leaving her own keys home.) We headed out to Cozymel's -- yes, Cozymel's again -- to meet with Carolyn, her folks, and Evan.

Carolyn's a copy editor for her school's prize-winning newspaper, High Tide. I've seen an issue or two, and I'm impressed. I'd asked her to meet us to talk about a department that I want her to take on for next year. It would have her reporting to Publications Division, which is why Evan James was involved. (And he presents really well, which I hoped would help reassure the folks.)

And I wanted her folks to be there, because they needed to know more about the convention and Carolyn's involvement. Plus, Lynn came along, to show that Chaz isn't just some creepy old guy, he's half of a nice married couple and we're really quite harmless. It took a while, but eventually I think we managed to convince divine_sage's dad (left) that if she stays up past her bedtime at the convention, it won't be because of the other departments that she'll be interacting with.

I hope. In any event, I expect I'll find out more tomorrow. Carolyn, see you at the meeting?