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Well, Further Confusion has come and gone…

Thursday was, for me, mostly hearing about eBay being slow about getting out of the hotel, and causing all sorts of havoc to FurCon’s schedule in the process. Me and Smudge‘s biggest contribution was getting BackBreaker’s custom set of panels set up for use as the charity auction’s display.

Friday started poorly, I just didn’t want to wake up properly, and my nose was a bit drippy. This got worse throughout the day.

That night was the first of three nightly panels featuring me, Smudge, Baron, and Dave. Friday’s panel was Getting Ready for the Con, or as the schedule renamed it, Con Prep. Overall, it went well enough, but attendance was very low. We narrowly avoided panel-itis. By the end of it I was doing pretty poorly, and I did my best to hold together through the night.

Saturday, I planned to stay home for the morning, get extra rest, and then come in for the rest of the day without totally KO’ing myself. I realized I was running a fever, and did my best to stay warm. However, I just couldn’t get truly warm, my toes insisted on sending ‘I’m freezing’ signals. Around 3:30 I awoke from a nap, cold, with a sore throat and slightly achy. I decided that the sore throat was probably from laying on my back and coughing. It was also possible that I was overheated from being in a warm bed next to a heater. So, I got up got on WoW with another heater nearby (and bundled up) to see if I could pull myself together. The sore throat faded, showing my diagnosis was right there, but I was still extremely hot when feeling my forehead and cheeks. By five I had admitted I wasn’t going anywhere for the day. Around about nine, I realized I was warm. Too warm. My toes weren’t cold. My forehead felt normal. Half an hour later I realized I was hungry.

The real bad news about the above, was that at seven we had another panel. This one on medieval history (our title, Between the Ancient and the Modern, was dropped). A subject I could really discuss, and not feel like I was a panelist because I knew all the other panelists. I had spent the last few months rereading books to try and have a few things more current in my head. And I was too sick to go. T_T I understand it went well, and I had been missed.

Sunday I took the morning easy again, and went in just after noon. I grabbed the two books I’d meant to get the day before (one from each bookseller present), and helped around the table. I carefully avoided promising that I’d make it to tonight’s panel, because I was still stress testing myself. Breakdown of the table and the associated workout didn’t slow me down at all, which showed I was pretty well recovered.

Sunday’s panel was Coffee, Tea and Memes (Smudge’s idea) where we sit around and yak about a subject (supplied by the audience) for about a quarter hour and then move on to another subject pulled out of the hat, while everyone in the room nibbles on cookies, coffee and tea. The last step of getting ready was picking up the order Baron had placed with Starbuck’s. Baron called to tell them we were on our way and we set off. When we got there, we didn’t even get to the door before we were intercepted by an employee and told ‘your order’s waiting’. That’s service.

The rest of the panel went just as well. The audience was a little small, but still a good size. They all reported being very happy with our experiment, so we will offer to do it again next year. The bad news was that Smudge has come down with what I’m recovering from.