I think I have recovered enough from traveling to catch you up on the last couple of days.
Saturday I arrived in Seattle about a half hour before the Locus Awards banquet was due to start. I’d changed clothes on the train and was wearing an seasonally inappropriate Hawaiian print sundress and cute strappy heels. I say this because Seattle was cold.
Normally there’s a line of taxis waiting at the train station and my plan was to catch on to the hotel. I’d waffled between that and taking the bike but didn’t want to arrive sweaty and have to change at the hotel. A cab would be faster.
If there were cabs.
Unfortunately, Saturday was a marathon and all the cabs were taken. The Amtrak representative said that the people in line in front of me had been waiting for half an hour and he’d called four places already. I headed for the bus, figuring that could get me there faster.
If the bus line I needed weren’t on the marathon route.
At this point, I began calling every cab company I could. None of them had cars. I started walking back to the bus route, figuring I could follow it while calling and eventually we’d get out of the marathon route.
Then my phone died.
About this point a pedi-cab came down the hill and I flagged him down. I asked if he could take me out to the hotel. He hesitated and said, “I gotta tell you that’d be $30 or $40.”
I was standing in downtown Seattle in a sundress, strappy sandals and now had fifteen minutes to get to the hotel. I was also cold. $40 sounded like a bargain. He thought it would be a twenty minute ride and I said, “Done! Let’s go.”
And a cab pulled up.
The pedicab driver actually flagged it down, apologizing as he did so. “Sorry. I didn’t want to climb that hill.”
I was totally fine with that. So, into the cab and away to the hotel where I arrived moments before the festivities started.
And let me tell you, Locus knows how to throw a party. Everyone was in Hawaiian shirts or dresses for the Memorial Hawaiian shirt competition. Connie Willis is a hillarious M.C. and roundly harassed everyone who wasn’t in Aloha-wear. It was great fun.
By this point, the Locus winners list has been propagated through the internet, so I’ll just link to it. My hearty congratulations to the winners, but in particular to Peter S. Beagle who won the novelette category for “By Moonlight.” I was pretty sure that he was going to win and am glad to see him honored for such a lovely story.
After the awards we went over to the SF Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony for Octavia E. Butler, Richard Matheson, Douglas Trumbull and Roger Zelazny was really lovely and quite moving.
I got to meet Mr. Trumbull who has been a huge influence on my puppetry life because he’s the one who pioneered the real-time cgi backgrounds for Book of Pooh. That technology’s existence led to the cgi world we worked in for Lazytown. Plus he created so many other fantastic developments in the world of FX. He was also totally charming.
Sunday was mostly about traveling back to Portland. Jeremy Lassen gave me a ride to the train station, which is good since Seattle was swamped for the Gay Pride parade and the bus line was again missing.
My train home was filled with girl scouts who were extremely loud.
Yesterday I napped, wrote, and then went to the recording studio to work on the Shades of Milk and Honey audio book.
