I’m in Calgary, which is–from what I’ve seen so far–an extremely nice city. Unfortunately it’s also frickin’ cold, so I doubt I’ll ever be moving here.

I had a very nice trip up here. I splurged on skymiles and went first class for the New Orleans-Salt Lake City leg of the trip, and I’ve decided that I need to become filthy rich because OhMyGod is that the way to fly on long flights! Then I ran into L.E. Modesitt in the Salt Lake airport, and since the flight to Calgary was only half-full we shuffled seat assignments and chatted the entire way to Calgary. And to complete the good-trip experience, Lee had a rental car reserved, so he gave me a ride to the hotel, which saved me the expense of a taxi. Woo!

Once at the hotel I ran into a number of savory and unsavory characters, including (but not limited to) Jeremy Lassen, John Picacio, and Jay Caselberg. I also got to meet some new people, such as Marjorie Liu (who is just awesome crazy beautiful and nice!) and Todd Lockwood–whose art I’ve admired for quite some time. Later I joined a group for dinner in the hotel, but my energy died out right about 9pm, so I paid my portion, made my excuses, and crawled back to my room where I died for several hours.

Unfortunately my far-too-efficient internal clock woke me up at about 5am (sigh). This morning I took a walk to find someplace (other than the hotel) to have breakfast, but after about six blocks I decided that I didn’t give a crap about food anymore, I just wanted to find a place to warm the &^$! up! It also took me far too long to figure out why the hell it was still full dark at nearly 8am. Finally my coffee-deprived brain kicked into gear and reminded me that Calgary is quite a bit further NORTH than Louisiana. Duh. (Actually I think this is the farthest north I’ve ever been, but I’ll need to look at a map to be positive.)

More later, hopefully with pictures.