They say that if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the day can only get better from there. I didn’t eat a frog this morning, but I did have an early dentist’s appointment to have my permanent crown installed. It was quite uneventful and hardly uncomfortable. Traffic was very light, too – so light that I almost forgot to stop for the red metering light as I entered Highway 85! Fortunately, the drivers behind me stopped, too.
Last year, Diane and I decided we would skip ConZealand, the 2020 Worldcon. We’d been going to fewer and fewer events at the Worldcons we did attend, and we’d skipped 2019 in Dublin, and if we were going all the way to New Zealand we wanted to see more of the country than going to Worldcon would permit, especially given other travel we had planned for this year, and I forgot what else. So in February, we tried to sell our attending memberships – I was successful (closing the deal while on a bus in Costa Rica), but Diane still has her membership.
Today, we got a note from the Chicago in 2022 bid reminding us that, as Friends of the Bid, buying a supporting membership for 2022 and voting in Site Selection would get us free attending memberships and that the deadline was less than a week away. They also reminded us that it was going to be a contested election, since Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was also running.
We thought about it and decided that there was a fair chance we’d want to go, so I bought a new supporting membership in ConZealand (required to vote), and then we each bought memberships for 2022 and voted.
The Jeddah bid is interesting and the site is amusing, but I don’t think they have much of a chance (their bid questionnaire points out that “the sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited in Saudi Arabia”, to name just one disadvantage). If they do win, we won’t get those free attending memberships, so our decision will be easy!