Seattle - the Sightseeing Part

I'll write about Conpac separately. This entry is about all the other stuff I did while out in Seattle.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I drove down to Olympia to do the capital volksmarch there. I stayed down that way overnight, the only notable part of which was my difficulty in finding the hotel since their directions omitted a crucial turn. On Wednesday, I drove up to Tacoma and explored the Museum of Glass. The architecture of the museum is interesting. as are the outdoor installations around it. The most famous of those is the Chihuly Bridge of Glass. The bridge connects the museum with downtown Tacoma (which has a few cool old buildings, notably Union Station, and is lined with niches filled with Dale Chilhuly's work.

The exhibits inside the museum were organized into three gallery spaces, plus the hot shop where you can see glass artists at work. Having seen glassblowing many times (and taken a glass blowing class myself), I didn't stay long in the hot shop. Instead I moved on to the galleries, which had three exhibits. The first of those was a mid-career retrospective of Preston Singletary's work, which is focused on translating traditional Tlingit designs into glass. I particularly liked some of the sand carved glass pieces. I also thought that some of his work, e.g. a figure of raven stealing the sun, did a fine job of highlighting glass art as sculpture.

The second exhibit was of pieces from the museum's permanent collection. As one would expect, this covered a wide range, though all of the art is contemporary. The final exhibit was my favorite. The museum has children design creatures (in crayon) and then selects one each month for their in-house artists to make. The designs are, not surprisingly, often colorful and whimsical. They are also particularly challenging for the artists since the children aren't constrained by expectations of what glass is supposed to look like. By the way, the artists make a second copy for the child's family. Aside from this being fun, I think it has interesting things to say about the creative process.

I returned the car and took the (newish) light rail to downtown Seattle for the con, which worked well. There was time on Thursday to do a downtown Seattle volksmarch, which covered most of the obvious things to see in the central part of the city. The route wound through Seattle Center before going to waterfront and I detoured through Olympic Sculpture Park (part of the Seattle Art Museum) along the way. That was somewhat disappointing as I am not particularly fond of modern sculpture. There's the typical Calder stabile and the obligatory odd object by Claes Oldenburg (in this case, a typewriter eraser), but too any of the pieces look like somebody randomly threw large blocks of metal on the ground. I was particularly annoyed by an untitled Roy McMakin piece that consists of a concrete bench next to a "plastic" armchair and a "cardboard" file box (rendered in metal and enamel). I'm not about to start the "what is art?" debate here, but that piece is definitely not my sort of thing.

I was also disappointed in the aquarium. (The walk passed by it, so I stopped in.) The best exhibit is their giant octopus and the outdoor area has things like puffins and otters (both sea otters and river otters). I usually favor the colorful coral reef displays and, of course, seahorses. There were just a few of the latter (and none of my beloved leafy sea dragons) and, while the coral reef tanks were fine, the area was filled with screaming children. I'd probably have liked the whole thing better had I been there when it was less crowded.

From the waterfront, the route continued up to Pioneer Square (with a checkpoint at the Klondike Gold Museum), through the International District, and back to downtown. Overall, it was a good way to fill a few hours and walking made me particularly appreciate the Pacific Northwest weather.

Most of the other things I did were con-related, though I did also fit in an excursion to Archie McPhee. And. after the con, miz_hatbox was kind enough to invite me to hang out with her and her family. I will tell you that should she ever invite you to dinner, you should definitely accept, as she is an excellent cook as well as a fine conversationalist. Our conversation ranged from a parlor game involving bad combinations of conventions (e.g. allergists and cat fanciers) to potential uses of stainless steel wool to the idea of people wasting their talents to, well, pretty much everything. By the way, we had made an excursion to the supermarket and I was able to buy lapsang souchong tea! My colleagues will once again have to endure that fine smell of burning rubber tires in the morning.

As for the trip home, United failed to upgrade me, but I did have an exit row aisle. When I discovered that the reading light didn't work, the flight attendant refused to give me a skykit (United's compensation mechanism) because the middle seat next to me was empty and had a functioning light. (That it also had a large man sprawling into it was of no interest to the FA. I will check with the Flyertalk crowd before dashng off an email to customer service to ask for compensation.) At any rate, the flight was otherwise as fine as a redeye can be (i.e. barely tolerable). Due to the holiday schedule, I had a long wait at Dulles for the first Washington Flyer bus, which I used to get breakfast. And then I had a 20+ minute wait at West Falls Church for the train. So I was especially exhausted by the time I got home and immediately took a nap.

Now it's time for grocery shopping and unpacking and possibly another nap.

3 a.m. Pacific Con Time

I figured that if I don't write about Conpac now, it will become like one of the travelogues that I am really truly definitely for sure going to get done real soon now. If anything here is particularly incoherent, you may kindly attribute that to the lingering effects of sleep deprivation.

The whole idea of a puzzle convention may sound odd, since solving puzzles is usually thought of as a solitary pursuit. But there is actually quite a lot of value in collaboration and taking advantage of people's differences in background, knowledge, and solving style. That came out right away in the mixer puzzle at the Welcome Picnic, which involved finding the "odd man out" in a group of four items. (The mixer aspect was that you had only 2 of the items on your card, so had to find the person with the matching card.) While finding the matching person was a matter of luck and persistence, the collaboration made for a fun puzzle, with a clever answer.

A non-puzzle official event was the Underground Tour. I had done this previously, 20 some odd years ago. It seemed to be pretty much the same, but that could be my fuzzy memory. There's not really much of anything to see, but the banter of the guide makes it entertaining.

Thursday night started with introductions. Everyone had to tell the group who they are, where they're from and what their favorite book is. Answering the latter is, of course, impossible, so I went with the logic of naming the book I have given the most people copies of over the past several years. Namely, Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson by George Alec Effinger. (In case you wondered, other possibilities I contemplated naming include Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man, Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales or From Heaven Lake, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, or pretty much anything by Tim Severin.) Not surprisingly, there are a lot of science fiction and fantasy fans among NPL'ers. More surprisingly, there are actually people on the planet who like Charles Dickens.

The intros were followed by a mixer in which you got a tile and had to match it with other people's to come up with a two word phrase. The tile I had let me use "any time word," offering numerous possibilities. The most difficult ones for people to match were ones with a single specific word on them. That was followed by a true / false trivia contest. But that's just the official activities. I stayed up until about 2:15 a.m. playing various games (mostly trivia).

The combination of sleep deprivation and airplane travel had its usual effect on me and I had a bit of a cold, so I skipped the Friday afternoon mini-extravaganza in favor of taking a nap. I did drag myself down for the American Cryptic Crossword Tournament. There were 7 puzzles, of which I finished 3 completely, got all but one or two clues of another couple, and barely started on the rest. Which is fairly typical for me with cryptics - I either see answers right off or have to mull over them for a long time before reaching the "aha" moment. Friday night's games included a cute one involving writing down opposites for words which don't have obvious antonyms (e.g. "bicycle" or "scissors"), team hangman (in which your team had to earn the chance to guess a letter by first solving one of the sort of challenges that you'd hear on NPR), and a team anagram game based on the World Cup. My team made it to the semifinals of that one and I was slightly relieved that the team we lost to went on to win the whole sheband. (By the way, has anybody ever heard of a partial shebang?) Then there was more unofficial puzzling, with an emphasis on trivia again. I don't think I can remember the last time I was up until after 3 a.m.

By the way, the various trivia games somewhat blend together. The Jeopardy game by jeffurrynpl was notable for my actually getting two sports answers, as well as having a final Jeopardy I thought particularly clever. And my team for one of the pub trivia games was astonishingly well-balanced, with one person who knew a lot of pop music, one who was good on movies, and so on. (I am good on history and literature type questions, but pop culture is not my strong suit.) There was also a live Learned League game, which was well-organized and challenging.

Saturday's daytime competitions were more conventional puzzles, including the annual flats competition that I have no hope at. (I am doing well to solve a third of them. The other puzzles were easier, but still not ones I finished in the amount of time allotted. From that, you might gather that I don't race through puzzles and, hence, signed up to be a "stroller" vice a "runner" for the evening extravaganza. This was built around the auction of an estate and solving puzzles to obtain items from the manor. Unfortunately, my team did not have particularly good teamwork and, while I enjoyed several of the puzzles, I was frustrated by the solving styles of two of the people. I feel that if I have done 3/4 of a given puzzle, it is rude for somebody to respond to asking for help by more or less grabbing it from me and then pretty much refusing to let me work on it more. (This was particularly irritating as she got it wrong because she wasn't able to get that last little bit, which I think I would have deduced.) I heard similar issues about teamwork (or lack thereof) from a few other people, so it may have been that the style of this particular extravaganza was really just more geared towards the way runners might work. I was glad to stay up late again because trivia games make me feel somewhat smarter, except when I manage to answer something I know incorrectly.

There are any number other things I could mention, from the after dinner talk Saturday night by Ken Jennings to the various puzzles people set out for the weekend to the brilliant board game I created in a dream Friday night (which is, of course, completely lost to conscious memory except for the shape of one corner of the board and it involving the color "green") but I need to get myself back on Eastern grown-up work time. Next year in Providence.