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The list of states and provinces I've visited has not changed since the last time I did this meme. But my coloring scheme has.

Green is still states I've lived in, and as before every state that's colored in here is also one I've slept in (though in a couple of cases, I think only while passing through on a train).

But I've expanded the set of blue states to ones I've really explored even if that was over several trips, and not just ones I've spent an extended time in all at once. And there's a new distinction between orange and red: this time, I'm coloring a state red if it has been at least 30 years since I spent the night.

Ahead of some international travel in September, I thought I'd apply for Global Entry.¹ I last did this in February of 2020, gotten pre-approved, and then (a) all the interview appointments disappeared for a long time, and then (b) when they did reappear they were in inconvenient places, like Qatar. You have two years after pre-approval to schedule an interview before you have to pay again.

So on Saturday I re-applied, expecting that I probably wouldn't actually get through the process any time soon. I was pleasantly surprised to get a notice of pre-approval on Sunday, and logged in to look for appointments. The nearest site that had any appointments at all was in Baltimore. The nearest site that had any in the month of August was in Minnesota. Oh, well.

Then at one minute after midnight that night, I logged back in, and lo and behold there was an appointment for noon Monday at Logan Airport. I booked it, and then yesterday morning biked over there (it's a 45 minute ride from my house via the new bike lanes on the Alford St bridge, the newly repaved Beacham St in Everett, and the new East Boston Greenway). Fifteen minutes after arriving at the airport I was all done, and this morning I woke up to a notice that I'd been approved for Global Entry, could start using the number immediately, and would be getting a card in the mail.

Whoa.

The only downside to this experience was that both Seabiscuit and Katz Bagels are closed on Mondays.

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1: I'd think twice about giving the man my fingerprints for a little bit of convenience, except long ago I sold them to the man for a fair chunk of cash in the form of a security clearance, so they're already there. But that is its own post.

Scattered across the American southwest are trading posts. Not the Hudson's Bay company fur trading posts that mostly closed in the 1840s; these are trading posts founded to trade with the Navajo and other tribes in the 70 years after the Long Walk. At their peak, just before World War II, there were nearly 150 of them, of which dozens remain in operation -- I don't know exactly how many as there is no comprehensive list, nor a category in Wikipedia. I've been to several: Hubbell, Cameron, Gouldings, Ismay, Twin Rocks, McGee. They're all different, sometimes drastically so: Cameron's Trading Post is absolutely enormous with tour buses pulling in to it every few minutes, whereas there wasn't much sign that anyone other than myself went into Ismay's Trading Post at all on the day I was there, towards the very end of its 90+ year existence. Hubbell is now a museum; McGee is mostly an art gallery. Each has taken its own path.

But for all their differences, they have some things in common, so much so that when researching this post, I read yelp reviews stating "that's not a trading post" and nodded, because the establishment in question didn't fit the pattern. I'm not sure I can exactly put my finger on what the rule really is. In my experience generally they're right on a political boundary, right next to at least one stunning landmark, and buy things as well as selling them. But I don't think this is what those yelp reviewers were talking about and there are exceptions to these and any other rule you might come up with.

So it is, I think, with the sorts of science fiction conventions I like to work on. DragonCon and WesterCon are as different as Cameron and Ismay. But there is a kernel of sameness within them anyway. And there's no need to define that essence, nor any one rule that exactly describes what that kernel is.

My cousin Lorna just graduated from UMich's musical theatre program and took an understudy role in Dear Evan Hansen. Yesterday was the main Alana's first day off since then and the theatre is right around the corner from the Port Authority so I booked bus tickets to New York leaving Boston at noon and leaving the Port Authority a little after midnight. I planned to meet up with a bunch of other family at a diner in between the Port Authority and the theatre around 5:00, and fortunately Lorna's call was late enough that I didn't miss her when the bus down left half an hour late. After dinner, with Lorna off to get ready, we all went to City Kitchen for dessert and just as we were leaving the fire alarms went off, and the traffic lights at one end of the block were out, and some but not all of the other lights in the area too. I picked up my will call ticket around 7:15 and hung out in the line with my family until 7:30 when the house was supposed to open, and then until 7:45 when we got a text back from Lorna that they were working on getting a generator going, and then until 8:15 when the house manager came out to say that for the first time in the 30 years he'd been there, the show was not going to go on.

Meanwhile we'd heard that the outage extended many blocks north and west (but hardly at all south and east) from where we were, and also rumors of a fire at the Port Authority, and I got an email from Greyhound saying to call them about my bus. I tried doing that but had very little signal (perhaps some of the nearby towers were down, or perhaps everyone was trying to use them) and couldn't hear what they had to say. The police closed the street for crowding and encouraged people to disperse and most folks did, but we waited for Lorna to come out of the stage door, which she did holding her phone for a flashlight. Some folks from CBS radio interviewed her, and later some CBS TV folks did the same. I headed back to my aunt's house to get some phone coverage before the TV interview so I could figure out what was up with my bus, and because she was the family member present with a spare bed in case it came to that. The buses did turn out to be running, so I headed back across town to get to mine. The fire rumors turned out to just be false fire alarms. While I was waiting to board another fire alarm (or maybe two) went off and everyone just ignored it, which seemed kind of sketchy to me, but then again this is the Port Authority we're talking about. I did manage to get a bit of sleep on the bus, and a bunch more once I got home (4:30 is a little late for me but not all *that* late).

I hope Lorna has a better experience at her next Broadway debut. It looks like that will be a Tuesday, so I don't know if I'll be able to make it. But we all got a hell of a story out of it.

Day 8 by one reckoning, and the first supernumerary day by the other. Either way, the last day of daily updates.

At some point last night, some food functions people dropped off an enormous pile of food, explaining that it was breakfast for the Art Show staff. It was vastly too much food for the five or so people we were expecting, and it was all crap anyway, so we sent it back. This morning I got downstairs for my 8am call to find that it (and some less-unhealthy stuff) had been set back up overnight, squarely in the way of where we were going to need to work, with the explanation that it was breakfast for the entire staff. Kerry had gotten it moved to a less dumb place in the room but was irked that no one had asked or indeed even mentioned that this was going to happen. And of course none of the staff had any idea it was coming, so we'd all had breakfast before coming downstairs. Of the well over 100 pounds of food we managed to consume probably a quart of orange juice before the food services people decided that breakfast time was over and that they needed the coolers and such to go on a truck. This pretty much typifies communication at this Worldcon. There aren't any cons in Chicago that need a staff of more than 50, and indeed few of the home cons of anyone working on Chicon 7 are that large. People, and especially upper management, expect information to propagate by osmosis, because that's how it works when you have a staff of no more than 50. But it's not how it works for a Worldcon, and Arisia would do well to check that we're being explicit enough in our communication as we grow.

We were planned to get four carpenters and two electricians at 8:00. In fact we got two of each. One of the carps was totally awesome, better even than the setup carps. The other was inefficient and surly. So I put the awesome one on taking down spines since that requires interacting with volunteers a lot, and then on taking electrical boxes off of helicopter arms since that's done to only some of the arms, and then on disassembling the electrical trees since there's a right way and a wrong way. The other guy got to take A-frames apart. I set the electricians to taking down lightbulbs and disassembling the rear end cap light fixtures, and gave them helpers to put the lightbulbs in boxes. They unplugged the helicopter arms unbidden, but took off without unplugging the electrical trees or the front endcap fixtures. I waited a while for them to come back in case they were on break but they never did so I just had volunteers do that so we could get the spines down. Not that I really thought they were on break after only half an hour of work.

I had plenty of volunteers to sort pipe and kee klamps, and the union folks stuck around for a little while to put electrical trees in the coffin and a few other things -- I think they hadn't hit their minimum, and even if they had the one carpenter was awesome enough and my volunteers tired enough that it'd have been worth paying him. By 10:00 everything from the Art Show was ready to go and I sent everyone but one volunteer off to help with other things, the rest of logistics now being behind two eight balls instead of only one. But that's another story.

Around this time some folks from the show after us came in to see if they could drop off some fastfolds. I told them fine, as it wasn't in the way and anyway I was pretty sure our teamsters were going to gaily ignore our noon deadline just as our electricians had gaily ignored our circuit game earlier, so I might as well let them ignore the pickup time too. This progressed immediately to setting up the fastfolds, which they started to do right in front of my pallets where the teamsters would have to drive their forklift to get them out of the room. But they were willing to move over and set up not in front of the pallets when I insisted, even knowing as I'm sure they did that there was no way the teamsters were going to be there on time, being as how they shared with the setup electricians a total freedom from arbitrary hotel rules.

Kim from Logistics and I spent another hour or 90 minutes putting some last minute treasury boxes on the pallets, and tie strapping and pallet wrapping everything, and putting a few more pieces of paperwork together. At 11:30, just as I was finishing the last of the paperwork, a couple of teamsters came in, looked around approvingly, and said they'd be back at 12:30. I headed upstairs and got lunch with Eugene and Crystal and Lucky, and then Crystal and Lucky headed for the airport and Eugene and I went upstairs to grab the last of our stuff from the room. We got down and checked out at 12:58 on a 1:00 late checkout and settled the bill. I'd joined Hyatt Gold Passport on this trip to get a week worth of free wifi and sure enough there was no charge for internet access on the bill. I put my suitcase in the back check that the hotel had set up on the skybridge and spent most of the next couple of hours hanging out in the lobby, punctuated by checking to see if the teamsters had moved anything in the Art Show. I'm not really sure why I bothered as I knew the con had dragooned the teamsters to help them load their truck, but it made me feel better to see that the incoming group, despite now legitimately having the space, had not managed to hide my pallets behind anything especially large.

I love the move-in/move-out days of a convention. I'm often working, often hard, but I also often have time for great conversations, and so do the people I want to have conversations with. Besides Eugene and Caycee, I had a long conversation with Dave Cantor. He's the second person in the last month to try to convince me to join MCFI, and I laid out what I think the problem with MCFI is: Mark and Priscilla Olson. (Priscilla, if you're reading this, the backstory of why I think you are the problem is in an unlocked post about six years ago, but I'm writing this on an airplane so I'm not able to go find the link.) I don't think MCFI is really going to be able to dilute Mark and Priscilla away. There's some chance a new member of MCFI might piss them off enough that they stormed off in a huff the way they have done with Boskone, but I don't think I am that new member, and I don't think that MCFI is likely to offer membership to someone like Crystal who is. We also chatted about a bunch of other things and I have a lot of food for thought, particularly as to whether it is a good idea to sign up for things -- like taking on the title of assistant Art Show director at Chicon -- that I can only give partial attention to. I did this with Cashier in Montreal, really, in that I counted on my staff and the Treasurer to handle the last bank run. Perhaps it is better to agree only to the things I can follow all the way through on, even if I think having part of my attention would be better than having all of the alternative. (This was certainly true for assistant ASD, the alternative being leaving the position empty.)

I didn't really have much to do after Dave went off to get ready for dinner with his Chicago cousins, but I ran downstairs to check on the Art Show one more time. Most of the stuff was out of the room, including two of the pallets. A couple of teamsters were trying and failing to get one of those into the freight elevator on a motorized pallet jack, and nearly managed to tip it over trying. Really? This is not rocket science. They eventually gave up and went in search of a manual jack. Unimpressed as I was, there was only one useful thing for me to do and that was get the hell out of the way, so I headed out to the airport. I got there a few minutes before checked-baggage closing time for my flight, so that made me less nervous even though I'd known it was going to be delayed. Having left behind some things that came out to Chicago with me, my bag was down to 48 pounds from 49.8, so it got another HEAVY tag. There's a reasonably good non-chain greek restaurant airside at MDW so I had a little bit of dinner, and a bit of computer time too. In the end the flight took off a little more than two hours late, and my seatmate offered me a free drink coupon. And on that note I think I'm going to close my Worldcon blog experiment and finish my drink.

Airside at DCA on Talk Like A Pirate Day. Not so many pirates in evidence here. I suppose that's not very surprising.

miss_chance and I took cameras on our trip, of course, since it was going to be so scenic. But we went a little overboard. We each took a point-and-shoot, and we also each had cameras in our phones, and there was at least one other device with a camera in it along for the ride for a total of I think five. Taking both point and shoots was silly, especially since mine isn't waterproof.

But what made bringing all of these cameras really silly was that none of them had any wide enough angle lenses available. The vistas, especially in Vermont, just don't fit in what you can have on a cell phone -- and the widest angle on the point and shoots was about the same. To really take art shots, we'd have needed much more serious equipment than we were carrying.

I haven't gone and looked at the phone shots to see if, exposure-wise, I'd have been happy with just that. The camera on the Droid is pretty decent for a cell phone camera, and I'm not going to be showing or probably even printing out any of my shots. As a reminder of the beauty we saw I imagine it will more than suffice. Even if I have to look at several shots next to each other on my screen.

As many of you are probably aware, miss_chance and I have just returned from bicycling from our home in Somerville to Montreal and back. This was a longer trip by days (12, plus 3 in Montreal) and miles (a little over 700) than anything either of us had ever done before, and I've got a lot to talk about, but rather than tell a narrative, I'm going to break my posts up by topic, starting with ( what might be the craziest thing about this trip. )

Since the last time this meme came around, I've visited a couple of new states.

I'd flown through MSP before and not counted it (likewise, I don't count Peru in my countries list), but this May, roozle and I had a three-hour layover there, so we hopped on the T (even the logo is the same) to the Mall of America, rode the rollercoaster, and had lunch at a little crepe stand before heading back to the airport to catch our connecting flight. I figure this counts as having visited the state.

With that, there are no longer any states I've been through without visiting at least a little. But there are quite a few I haven't slept in.
( maps behind the cut )
As always, the link to make your own:
create your own visited states map

After a month of nothing, I've posted three entries (not including this one) in not much more than 24 hours. Can you tell I'm procrastinating on something? In this case, it's packing for a trip to Wiscon. Looking forward to the trip, but packing just isn't interesting.