We're in Toronto, and boy, are my arms tired!

1:02 PM CTS -- I'm sitting on flight 1252 from Dallas to Toronto with the Bodacious Brit snuggled in beside me, snoozing (I think we got about four hours of sleep last night). We're currently somewhre above what looks like farmland, judging from the checkerboard pattern of the ground. Illinois, maybe.

So far, the trip's been quite uneventful -- after turfing the cats out of the luggage one last time (and oh, what a pitiful sight they were -- JJ kept giving us these reproachful looks, and Jordan mewed piteously while trying to stow away in my bag), we tossed everything into the car and made our way to the airport, where we met up with Teresa Patterson, an artist/writer and fellow pro on the Texas con circuit. She's currently sitting three rows back from us, and we'll probably share a taxi to the hotel, bless her -- anything that helps cut down on costs this trip is great in my book.

I'm still moderately miffed about American cancelling the earlier flight -- it means I'm going to miss the Discworld panel at 4:00 PM (damn spit dirty socks), and we probably won't even get to registration until 4:00 PM. Oh, well -- this is what comes of doing Worldcon on a budget. Next year in Boston, we're going to have a decent con war chest if I have to sell a kidney to do it.

10:47 PM EST -- I have been wrestling with this stupid fukaktah laptop for the last two hours. Dreamweaver has gone totally doo-lally and won't show any images (but they show up fine when I test the HTML page in a browser), I can't download documents from Wordsmith, and every time I open Word the whole computer locks up.

Needless to say, I'm not a happy camper at the moment. Before this computation contretemps, the afternoon was actually rather cool -- we got to the hotel, checked in, headed two blocks over to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to pick up our badges (and ran into the snafu I knew was going to happen with Lyndon's badge -- we bought his membership from someone who was selling an extra one, but Membership never processed that and we had to jump through a number of hoops before they gave Lyndon a badge. However, they DID give him one, and were quite polite and helpful throughout the whole thing, so kudos to the Solutions team).

In between dinner stops and a search for an ATM machine that took Texans Credit Union ATM cards (finally found a Royal Bank ATM near the hotel, which spat out money obediently), I also wandered around the convention center just in time to see the dealer's room close, introduced myself to the KC in 2006 team and volunteered to tablesit sometime tomorrow (they were very happy about that -- it seems they're a mite undermanned at the moment, in which case I'm happy to help out. "A Worldcon You Can Drive To," indeed!), attended Elizabeth Moon's reading, and escorted a wan Elizabeth down to the bar where she could sip on soda water and try to soothe her unhappy tummy (she got hit by food poisoning early this morning. After what happened to me last year, I was more than sympathetic). We were joined by Wil McCarthy, my friend Harriet and Her Maj Herself, Esther Friesner, as well as a fast pass and hand kiss by John Steakley, so naturally the conversation turned to disasterous plane flights, bizarro scheduling quirks, and Musketeer events for the weekend.

Eventually, Bill Seney (the quartermaster/guardian angel of the Musketeers) led Elizabeth off to her last panel for the night, and I returned to the room to do battle with this stupid fukaktah laptop. Arrgh. I give up -- I have a KC in 2006 party and a SFWA suite to cruise before the night is out. I do have pictures from the day, but uploading them will have to wait until I get this fixed or decide to just do everything in Simpletext. Blech.

I'm outta here.

1:35 AM EST -- first off, thanks for calling, Steve. I appreciate the offer of backup, especially when I'm about to set my laptop on fire and give it a Viking funeral on Lake Ontario.

Okay, I'm an idiot. I upgraded my Photoshop last night so that it was the latest version in my possession, forgetting that when I did this I also had to upgrade QuickTime. Thus, I essentially broke QuickTime when I upgraded Photoshop. Since Dreamweaver uses QuickTime to manage jpgs, it started malfunctioning, and that may have caused it to grab a lot of memory, which caused Word to start going berserk.

The short version is, after stomping around a couple of parties, swearing under my breath and being a right royal pain, I came back up here and remembered that this exact same thing happened to my eMac when I upgraded Photoshop on it. Lyndon heard my muttered oaths and woke up (he's been asleep through all of it), checked a couple of things on the computer and confirmed my diagnosis. After spending 30 minutes downloading the latest version of QuickTime, the laptop is now functioning perfectly again and reports will continue unabated. Phoo.

Oh, the parties were LA in 2006 and KC in 2006. Both fairly well-attended, with the KC party offering a raffle of t-shirts and other goodies, and the LA crowd doing their space cadet schtick again and being very entertaining, despite my foul mood. Due to various problems connected to border delays, the SFWA suite was bare of everything except a knot of determined people. Jane says that it'll be in full swing tomorrow, so I'll give a better report then.