MediaWest III - the gathering storm

So we get the room, fling clothing and possessions about at random, and then...we have to buy a TV set. Actually, Susan has to buy a TV set. I'm just there for...um...I think I'm the little dangly chibi thing on the car mirror. This is a working weekend for Susan, or at least that's her story and she's sticking to it, and this necessitates having a television, computer, and VCR on her dealers room table to demonstrate some kind of software thing that allows one to do cool things with one's TV set and the Internet, and take down NORAD. She also has tchotchkes. First hundred people to fill out a survey get (this will be important later) a mousepad, leather coaster, pocket knife, calculator, or teeny teeny bar kit. Everybody goes in a raffle for the TV and VCR, so Susan doesn’t have to take them home.

This will come back to haunt us later.

So...Sam's Club, for TV, VCR, some kind of mystery cell phone thingie, and a two-pack of pillows. She's got this obsession with extra pillows. I push the cart. Steak and Shake for dinner. Meijer's for booze, soda, coffee, milk, plush toys, and snoring medication for Herself. "Have you used this before?" "Nah." "Then why...?" "I snore." "Dude, that's why I sleep within whacking distance." Ms Senior Thesis on Lord Byron becomes very excited when she finds some kind of Sno-Roff that contains belladonna. "I've never done belladonna!" "Maybe it'll make you pale and interesting." "Maybe!" She very kindly got me a plushie Tuxedo Mask, and I'm running on three hours' sleep, so I don't question her too closely.

Hotel, back to, drive. Find another Cart Guy to haul boxes, giant, two, upstairs. She tests out her new equipment (and the TVs - thank you, I'm here all week!), while various and sundry folks come in to visit. Tara “Love Me Fear Me” O helps me finish the X-Files drawing I’ve been working on forever. Susan swears a lot and keeps leaving voice mail for her tech guys because somebody, somewhere, has screwed with the one bit of software she told everybody to be sure not to screw with.

Bed, eventually.

MediaWest IV - A New Hope

Friday. Registration purgatory. Nobody can get signed in, so those of us who have business in the dealers room get our hands stamped…with a little stamp of a hand. Susan sets up her equipment at her table and enjoys many cell-phone conversations with the boys and girls at tech support. Bonita and I do art show paperwork and eventually we schlep downstairs to the home of the Overworked Art Show Staff[TM] and get hung. 'Nita's done some really cool stuff with rubber stamping and collage and turpentine transfer and nailing very small animals to hang tags. I have done my usual assortment of desperate crap. A very nice show this year. The traditional stuff is very high quality (fab portraiture by Kate Neurnberg, whose name I've probably just mangled, and Jesse McCain, ditto), and there's a lot of cool odd stuff - Waldo's checkers sets, and amazing stuffed gargoyles by someone whose name was unfortunately erased from my brain by Susan's booze. We offer up small prayers to the art gods that our work will not be dropped and shattered, and that we will be showered with big piles of cash for it. The art gods, in return, giggle.

Back to the dealers room, alternating shopping with asking Susan if she needs anything ("Tea! Bring me tea, damn you!"), which requires considerable bravery as she is fully in Work Mode, and it’s like the bits in Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes goes apeshit and starts sniffing walls and taking samples from Persian carpets. The survey thing is going well, with MediaWesters eating up the mousepads like the lunches that the hotel restaurant seems unable to deliver. Cool shopping – while the dealers room, as usual, features more Sentinel fanzines with color covers featuring Blair and/or Jim’s naked behinds than any sane person should ever have to look at, one can also find cool movie freebies and near-freebies (the best by far is the fur-covered Planet of the Apes luggage tag with the legend, “Get your paws off my luggage, you damn dirty ape!” – though ironically the large solid metal logo attached to it means that nobody will ever be able to get it through an airport metal detector), toys new and used, homemade goodies of various sorts, art prints, and giant neon penis candles. That’s candles in the shape of penises, not candles designed to be attached to…never mind. My haul for the weekend will be: 1 cool Mummy Returns promo parchment notebook, 2 Kate N bookmarks, a set of the new XF trading cards, a l’il Gabrielle pin, a half-dozen West Wing fanzines that I am still afraid to read, a copy of the last Modesty Blaise hardback (thanks, Gretchen!), and a copy of The Secret Confessions of Rustin Parr, and a big flickery Storm trading card, and an Avengers bookmark. The TV show, not the comic.

Sharon, the third of our four roommates, shows up sometime during the day. Eventually I remember that hey, Gretchen (Roomie #4) rang up from California earlier and that someone sort of needs to get her at the airport. I know how to find the airport, and Susan is still looking for people to kill via cell phone, so I'm volunteered. Bonita volunteers to bodyguard. We head off down the freeway - "I'll be there - FUCK YOU!!!" - and actually manage to find the place. Bonita sets off the metal detector with her change and convention badge, then alarms the X-ray guy with the tiny bar kit (corkscrew, knife, bottle opener, and...I'm not sure what the hell the fourth thing is, an IUD or something) Susan gave her earlier. "I can't take you anywhere!"

Turns out Gretchen's plane arrived early, and we have to track her to baggage, and finally spot her waiting on the front walk. We shove her into the car - "I'll be there - FUCK YOU!!!" - make the obligatory Meijer's stop for booze, which doesn't work because Gretchen leaves her ID in the car and the Booze Lady is in a foul mood and will not sell wine cooler to someone who is very likely older than she is. "I can't take you anywhere, either," I tell her. Bonita points out that smugness is not becoming, especially since it seems that I'm next. Which turns out to be true, since Gretchen wants Taco Bell, and it takes me three attempts to find the correct way in.

We drive back to the HI - "I'll be there - FUCK YOU!!!" - and turn in for the night.

Except Susan has her laptop set up and shows me how to play The Sims...

MediaWest V - Sim Hell

You know how, on mailing lists and BBSes, every couple of weeks somebody makes a post about how they just got The Sims, and it invariably ends with the phrase, “And the next thing I knew, it was 3:00 a.m.!”

This would be one of those stories.

MediaWest 6 - There is NO Episode 6

Saturday. I think. I steal the car and drive – “I’ll be there – FUCK YOU!!!” –to Target, because we’re having a baby shower for Amy in the afternoon, and I sort of need a present Real Soon. You remember Amy. Very, very pregnant feel-me Amy. In fact, Amy’s baby, little Thelma Louise (who by this time is sporting her own membership badge), actually dropped at some point on Friday. I’m not entirely sure what this dropping business entails, but apparently it’s rather startling to the maternal unit, and a sign that the sprog is moving into its little escape pod and if you haven’t bought a baby manual of some sort, you’d best start browsing Amazon.com for Episiotomies for Dummies. I was gonna go with a gift card, on the grounds that they’re handy and that Target is open late for those unexpected diaper missions, but made the mistake of actually looking at the…the cute little baby stuff. **squeal!** I am completely undone by the little shoes. I leave with a gift bag containing socks and bankies. I am a huge sucker.

Amy has gamely pretended to have no idea at all that we are preparing any sort of surprise (or she’s unbelievably thick), even when we all disappear to decorate the party suite and Jennie is leading her around on urgent yet surprisingly unnecessary errands to distract her. We deface the suite with crepe paper (I have to talk Sharon through hanging crepe paper – it is an alien concept for her) and balloons, and I find a nice hiding place under the bar which I am allowed to use for only a few seconds because the door opens and it’s time to yell surprise. Not too loudly, mind, because we don’t want any spontaneous birthin’ on a carpet that we can’t afford to replace. So…cake with that neato fake icing, baby and mommy prezzies, etc. You know the drill. No baby shower games. Thank you, thank you God, no baby shower games.

Susan still hasn’t gotten the software thingie sussed out, but has at last found actual humans to yell at, so we take this as a sign of progress. She has the laptop set up on her table now, and after a few more attempts to get my shiftless lazy-ass Sims to go out and get jobs (“I don’t want to look for a job right now. I’m too depressed.”), I decide that they have to die. I sell enough of their furniture and wall fixtures to build them a small swimming pool, then tell them to go out in the yard and swim. They like this a lot. Then I take away the pool’s ladder and add on hopeless maze-y bits. They love it. They swim around. Their fun quotient skyrockets. They earn body fitness points. Then they ask to go to bed. Then they sink beneath the water, and tiny tombstones pop up in the yard.

I sell the pool, and put their little stones in the side yard in hopes that Graeme and Martin Sim will one day come back to haunt the game, perhaps possessing Susan’s little Sim Mulder or Scully. Heh.