WisCon Day 0: Driving, Kith, Kin, and Zar

[bcholmes]

I'm not a morning person, by any stretch of the imagination. But on Driving-to-Wiscon Day, I was out the door by 8:15, and off for adventure. The nearest adventure, in this case, involved lunch with my grandmother when I stopped in Sarnia.

It was a good lunch; my grandmother is still sorting through stuff that my grandfather had collected and gathered in his lifetime. He apparently had every bill he'd ever paid in his life in a filing cabinet. Out! Shredded! Away!

Question for librarians on my reading list: my grandfather has a complete set of an internal company (Imperial Oil) magazine going back to the '30s. My grandmother was going to chuck them. I suggested that she consider giving them to a library. Do libraries want stuff like this? Or is it just more crap?

My Aunt Bev dropped in: I hadn't seen her in about 15 years. She still a hoot, and a bit of a wild child. And I got news of a crop of cousins and other relatives. She was asking me about what I do in Haiti -- a question that I'm never sure how to answer concisely. I do a lot of things in Haiti. And I ranted at her. The topic that set me off was "Maybe the earthquake will mean that Haitians will learn to help each other instead of relying on outsiders for so much help." Gah. Where do you start?

But then it was back on the road. U.S. customs was being stunningly slow, and I was sitting in my car at the border for about an hour and a half.

And then it was lotsa driving. I hit Chicago at about 7 (Chicago time), and stopped for my traditional dinner with Mambo T. I met Mambo T on my first trip to Haiti, and we've kept in loose contact over the years. First, dinner was all about catching up on gossip: people we know, Head-Desk stories, sprinkled with copious amounts of "Oh god, she did what?!?" Then we were talking about the earthquake and what that was like for us. I don't think there are very many people in my life who have the same experience of the Haitian earthquake that I have; it was good to be able to talk about that stuff in an environment of comfortable familiarity.

Then it was back on the road for the final leg. I hit Madison around 11:30. No one I knew was hanging out in the lobby, but on the second floor, I bumped into kalikanzara and others playing Zar. Liz, who I only know as someone who knows kalikanzara, was there. I kept meaning to say that I still have the miniature princess rubber duckie that she gave me, randomly, in an earlier WisCon; duckie sits on my monitor at home, quietly observing all of my journal posts.

I played Zar once before, at last WisCon, and I wasn't great with the rules. But it was a few hours of good fun, bad puns, and advice on how to get dates (call the cops! Who knew?)

Now I'm here. It's WisCon, and I'm loving it.

Comments

[j00j]

This isn't really my area of librarian expertise, but a few ideas, based on the knowledge that libraries don't want common things like old issues of National Geographic, but do want materials that are harder to find and of interest to their users... A library might be interested in them if older issues are hard to find, but they may well exist on microfilm or even in digital form. If it's something of interest to researchers and the corporate library hasn't kept back issues (it happens) or doesn't let other people read them easily, maybe a state/public library, or possibly an academic library would be interested? In any case, a library nearest the company HQ or a major office might be most likely to be interested, since many libraries try to collect some material about their local communities.

[wordweaverlynn]

Have a lovely time.

[elainegrey]

http://www.prelingerlibrary.org/ *might* be interested. "The Prelinger Library welcomes donations of materials that help to complete our collections of periodicals and zines in our areas of interest." They have a collection of similar journals that they are saving -- http://www.prelinger.com/periodicals.html -- and they consider "extractive industries" one of their interests. I see they have _The Lamp_ (Standard Oil of New York and New Jersey publication).

Crossing the border

[the_axel]

If you're willing to give the US government your fingerprints and talk to them a bunch, the Nexus program makes that whole border crossing thing vastly less painful ($50 for 5 years, 1 hour of form filling and 1 hour of being at Pearson Airport for an intervew).

I'm a fan, but I had to send my fingerprints to the FBI, RCMP and London Metropolitan Police to check that I wasn't a criminal to get my Canadian permanent residency so I knew they already had a file on me.

Re: Crossing the border

[bcholmes]

If you're willing to give the US government your fingerprints and talk to them a bunch

Heh. No. Very much no.