Plan C

Mrs. Dr. Phil took a day trip to Chicago to visit with a grade school classmate before they go back to Germany. Chicago is just on the other side of Lake Michigan, but getting there is another problem. There are two ferries which cross the lake, but one goes to Milwaukee and the other much further north in Wisconsin. (I'd love it if there was a direct ferry to Chicago.) I don't remember what Plan A was, but Plan B was to drive Mrs. Dr. Phil to Michigan City IN and take the South Shore electric train to/from Chicago -- particularly handy because that line also serves the Illinois Central/Metra line to Hyde Park. Then I pointed out that she could take the Amtrak train from Holland in the morning and the South Shore coming back, and we wouldn't have to get up nearly so early, so that became Plan C.


Spectacular weather for the 8:20am EDT arrival of the Pere Marquette, making its first stop in Holland after starting in Grand Rapids. Heavily funded by the State of Michigan, the Pere Marquette not only gets Superliner coaches, it gets a lot of passengers. Lots of people crowding the platform and the parking lot looked full. So I dropped Mrs. Dr. Phil off and then circled back to the lot to sit and wait to photograph the train.

A Strange Visitor

But what's this hanging on the end of the train? A private dome car?

A former Burlington Route stainless steel streamliner dome car, Silver Splendor.

Turned out it was being used by some group -- they were loading on a bunch of coolers and looked to be ready to make a party out of it.

The platform at Holland isn't all that long, so after they boarded the Amtrak passengers, they pulled ahead, blocking 8th Street, and then boarded the private dome car. There's a guy who's a regular railfan and sometime stringer for the local newspapers that I've met before at the Holland station -- and he was really surprised that the grapevine hadn't alerted anyone about the CB&Q dome car. (grin)

And Later That Night

There are two Michigan City IN South Shore stations -- and I've never been to either one. Or ridden the South Shore for that matter, despite all the years I was in Chicagoland. However, the Caroll Avenue station not only had many more parking spaces, it was closer to the freeway, so we decided to rendezvous there. Mrs. Dr. Phil's train was scheduled to arrive at 11:05pm CDT. Google Maps pegged the drive from Allendale at 119 miles and 2 hours 16 minutes. So I left around 9:30pm EDT and with stops for gas and slowdowns for all manners of construction, I arrived in Michigan City just after some rain about 20-25 minutes to spare.

The South Shore has always struck me as a very practical little railroad. The parking lots for 200+ cars are stuffed around a series of crossing railroad tracks and late at night on a Saturday were surprisingly full.


I turned the flash off to get this arriving blurred shot -- the guy in the reflective safety vest is from the car shops down the track. The four-car train was split in two and he took the back half to park overnight, while the remaining two cars went on to South Bend. He said they run over 80% on time, with a ±4 minute window, and they were right on the outside edge.

Anyway, Mrs. Dr. Phil had a lovely time. Amtrak was delayed twice on the way to Chicago -- once to wait for a long coal train to pass on the hill south of St. Joseph MI and once for the inevitable delays at the complex interlocking at Porter IN -- getting in about an hour late. So by the time she got home, she joked she was already running on about Plan G. (grin)

Just past midnight Eastern and it was still near 80°F and muggy. Got home around 2:30am. Nice to see some trains. (double-track-grin)

Dr. Phil

The Good News

The company we briefly had at the beginning of the week made it back towards Chicago on Tuesday. Not Wednesday. Because by Wednesday the route to Chicago late in the day was a mass of pink on The Weather Channel -- and that meant freezing rain and slush. Ugh.

"Biggest Christmas Storm In Eighteen Years"

Or so I read from someone in Wisconsin on Facebook. Parts of Wisconsin are expected to get two feet (or more) of snow. If you're doing a Wisconsin Christmas, I hope you're already there.

Sliding Into Ho-Ho-Ho

Meanwhile, in West Michigan on this side of Lake Michigan we're on Winter Watches for tonight, with some freezing rain passing through. But Christmas Eve during the day should still be clear -- Christmas Eve Eve started out with bright sun and clear skies. Then from 5pm Christmas Eve to 5pm Christmas we're going to get more freezing rain and crap, changing to rain and warming up to 37°F on Saturday. So it'll be slick and treacherous here, and our driveway will be a wet sheet of ice. And then it'll melt off before the next snow? Maybe?

We're on the southern end of the storm and are not supposed to get the big snow in Milwaukee. That's what they say. We'll see.

Tuesday and Wednesday next week should be clear. Maybe.

Anyway, we're not going anywhere on Christmas. Let it frain. Let it drizzle. Let it freeze.

Dr. Phil

Friday The Thirteenth

Continuing on with my coverage of WindyCon 36, I had planned on leaving West Michigan around noon EST, with 2004 Clarion and WOTF XXIV classmate albogdan Al Bogdan driving over from East Michigan. But that would suppose his car was working. He told him me to go on without him. So I actually got out of town by about 12:30. (grin)

Last year I ran smack into a massive construction rebuild project on Chicago's I-88 Reagan expressway (East-West Tollway) -- in the rain and at rush hour. Crawled the last four miles or so. This year I was running early. Now WindyCon's planners decided to route all the directions away from I-88 and Highland Avenue. But given we're across Lake Michigan from Chicago, I've got WBBM-AM News Radio 78 (and WGN Radio 720) on presets. So I was able to get traffic info every ten minutes and they kept saying no delays on the Reagan. I-290 near Austin was, as usual, more of a bottleneck. No further problems and I arrived at the Westin Lombard around 4pm CST. Also heard from Al, he'd gotten ahold of a vehicle and was driving all the way in from metro Detroit.

Checked in and hit my first panel at 5pm, "So What Is Steampunk?" (see picture of panelist James Ballard Smoot here), then 6pm, "I Could Kill You With My Mind", started with River Tam from Firefly and talked about morality and moral codes about killing -- and insanity.

Meat Up With Mattw

7pm, Opening Ceremonies. Some people like them, some people don't. If I'm there, it's fun to see the various con invited guests. Afterward, the 8pm presentation was the "Gaslamp Fantasy" Girl Genius and "Revenge of the Weasel Queen", projected artwork by the Guest Artists Phil and Kaja Foglio and voices by the same bunch of crazies who did the little play at last year's Opening Ceremonies. Then at 9pm, former Hubble Space Telescope worker Christian Ready did a lovely presentation on the Electromagnetic spectrum and the various space telescopes searching the various bands. (Really hard to do a Google search on "Christian Ready".)

Amongst all this, I heard someone behind me say, "Dr. Phil" and fellow UCF member Matt came up. He was even wearing a UCF logo T-shirt. (grin) Naturally, I thought I'd commemorate this meat-up, but holding my little Sony out in front, there was no flash. No picture?

Camera was firing, but no flash -- because of the very bright indirect lighting of the ceiling.

Dr. Phil: "Uh, is this thing working?" (FLASH!)

Matt and I talked, and then I went up to the room to see if Al had made it. Actually, he was coming out of the room just as I turned the corner from the elevator. So we went in the room and talked a bit, then we headed down to see if I could still grab a hamburger or something, having not had dinner. Alas, as 10:20pm the kitchen had closed. So we went by the ConSuite, where I had a traditional con peanut butter & jelly sandwich (with Ruffles potato chips) and a Coke. (extra special grin) Such is con life.

Saturday 14 November 2009

The Westin's hotel restaurant is superb -- Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse / Holy Mackerel -- and they do a more than complete breakfast service. Pancakes it is. (triple-stack-grin) On to panels!

10am, "Baen is for Men, DAW is for Women". Eric Flint (Baen Books) started out by reading the title as a question, then saying, "Yes." But of course he wasn't serious and it was all more complicated than that. Jim C. Hines was supposed to be on the panel, but was double-booked with the writers' workshop and only showed up at the end. The panel seemed to feel that the perception of the title was more on the reader than the publisher, though Baen covers were thought be recognizable from across the room. 11am, "Doing the Science in Steampunk", was similar to the panel I was on for Sunday on Alternative Tech in Steampunk, and it has a lot to do with a consistent vision by the author. Because armored zeppelins ain't never gonna fly. (steel-plated-grin)

Quiet lunch by myself in the restaurant with a turkey club sandwich and a coke (Pepsi). This year the restaurant also was offering a lunch and dinner buffet by the con itself -- buffet lunch was $13, dinner $15. My lunch in the restaurant? Exactly $13.00. (smile) 1pm, the Christian Ready show continues with a presentation and half-hour video of May's fifth and last Hubble Space Telescope's repair and upgrade mission. Interestingly, today NPR was reporting that the Wide Field Camera 2 pulled from HST is now on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

Take A Break

SF cons, Physics and Chemistry conferences -- I can usually fill up the whole day with sessions. But sometimes you need to take a nap and definitely take some time to regroup before you're up. With say a reading, perhaps. So I wandered back to the room and caught the last 30 seconds of the Northwestern game (NU beat Illinois, they're 7-4 and bowl eligible!), the last 3 minutes of the Michigan State game (MSU beat Purdue right at the end), saw that Michigan got beat up by Wisconsin (snort), and turned off the Ohio State-Iowa game after it started. Took a nap for a while. When I woke up, it was 10-10 in the 3rd quarter, and I told Al, who'd also come in for a nap, that we hadn't missed anything. OSU won in OT, completing a brief survey of Big Ten football on the room's decent LG HDTV.

Read through my story one more time, then headed downstairs...

Next up: Dr. Phil's reading and Steakpunk!

Dr. Phil

Blue Sky, As Blue As... Blue Skies

Glorious ride into Kalamazoo today. Bright blue sky with just a few high hazy clouds to remind you how big the sky really is. Too bad tomorrow's weather is not going to be quite as sunny, as I head off after noon to Chicago for Dr. Phil at WindyCon.

Saturday 6pm CST - Willow Room

Finished my story "Z.P.D. (Zeppelin Police Department)" Version 1.01 late last night. It came in at 6900 words by Microsoft Word's count, or about 7900 words in 32 pages by the 250 words/page method. I was shooting for about six thousand, so it is properly long by Dr. Phil's standards. (grin)

This morning I read it aloud -- amazing how useful that is for catching word errors -- and it clocked in at about 32 minutes. I've been told that a good reading is about 20 minutes, but I'd like to be able to read the whole story to whomever shows up. And if no one does, I'll still read it. It's good practice. (grin)

I'd finished Version 1.00 just before dinner last night, printed it out as a 2-up on the LaserJet and did a quick read-and-edit. Then worked on Version 1.01 with the edits and a bit more. One thing that's funny is that it was only in finishing it up, in like the last three paragraphs of Version 1.01, I suddenly revealed an interesting side to a main character that I hadn't seen before. And after reading it this morning, I emphasized that twist a bit more, so I am pretty pleased with this story.

Of course none of the markets I would send "Z.P.D." to first are available to me for submissions at the moment -- either closed or they have a story from me right now -- but this will be sent out as soon as I can.

But if you are at WindyCon and can come to my reading on Saturday evening for "Steakpunk", you can be the first to hear "Z.P.D." And maybe hang around for a good dinner, too.

Dr. Phil

While My Friends Go Off And Play

Quite a number of my real and online friends are off to World Fantasy in San Jose CA -- have fun, kids!

An Upcoming Appearance

Chicagoland's WindyCon 36 will be held at the Westin Hotel in Lombard IL (same as last year), starting on The Friday The Thirteenth Of November Two Thousand and Nine. Why yes, the con's theme is Steampunk -- whatever gave you that idea? (grin)

2004 Clarion classmate and fellow WOTF XXIV'er albogdan Al Bogdan and I will share a room once again -- hell, we'll share the drive from West Michigan to West Chicagoland. (grin)

I had suggested some panels and volunteered to be on them quite early -- a change from my usual last minute queries -- but alas, my early emails got lost somewhere. So I've only two events: one panel and a reading.

   Saturday 6:00pm

          Dr. Phil will be reading from his current work, "Z.P.D. 
          (Zeppelin Police Department)", in honor of the Steampunk theme.
          Note: This isn't in the preliminary schedule online yet. 
          Possibly Walnut room?  Afterwards I'll be heading to dinner at the 
          marvelous Harry Carey's Steakhouse in the Westin -- I'm sure 
          they'd be happy to seat a larger table if you want to join me. (grin)

    Sunday 12:00 Noon-1:00 p.m.

           Junior Ballroom B:  Alternative Technology
           What assumptions are made about steampunk technology?  What is 
           possible from a materials engineering standpoint and what breaks 
           the rules of physics?
           E. Hunt, P.E. Kaldon, H. Spencer, M.Z. Williamson

Fiddlesticks

My panel is the same time as Jim C. Hines' reading. (sigh) Guess I'll just have to go to Jim's book signing and reading tonight at Schuler's Books and Music on Alpine at 7pm. (grin)

This will be my third WindyCon -- 2007 was the last year before they outgrew the Wyndham O'Hare (with its odd divided basement level due to an underground river) and 2008 was the first year at the Westin Lombard (who puts a hotel in the middle of a shopping mall parking lot?). Fun to be in a Chicago crowd instead of a Michigan or Wisconsin crowd. Not better, mind you, just different. (double-edged-grin)

Dr. Phil

Friday's Adventures

Storms were forecast for Friday morning, but as one TV station said the rains would come later than expected, another said earlier. Earlier was right. About 3am there was a BRILLIANT flash of lightning just as I looked out the window. Lights flickered a couple of times but we didn't lose power. Such wasn't the case in Kalamazoo, where the traffic lights were dark at Drake and West Main -- major intersection, no cops. Yet everyone behaved themselves. Such was not the story in the next two lights, where most of the drivers seemed to forget that a dead traffic light is to be legally treated as a four-way stop. Geesh.

Odd that apartment complexes without power look dead in daylight. Can't explain it. Campus had power.

Those traffic lights were still out after 5pm, though people followed the rules at the smaller dead lights and they had two cops directing rush hour traffic at Drake and West Main. Evening rains mostly held off until I pulled into the garage at home.

Into The Night

Friday night we watched WOOD-TV8 go into "Storm Team 8" mode as a series of heavy volume thunderstorms trained across a swath of West Michigan just south of us, from Holland and east. 5-8 inches of rain, 60-70mph gusts, and the storms hitting the same places over and over again. It was described as a once-in-a-century storm, but of course June 2008 hit Holland MI hard, too, and in a very similar way. Yeah, it was the second year in a row that kayaks paddled in downtown Holland.

Leading Into Saturday

Of course we had to make a run from West Michigan to Chicago and back again on Saturday. Blue skies don't fool me. Given the flooding and reported road closures last night, I figured there was no point in taking US-31 through Holland to I-196. Holland is just too low and too prone to flooding -- who knew the settlers took their namesake so seriously? Likewise I didn't want to take 68th Avenue to 72nd to Chicago Drive to Byron Road, because it meant driving through the low-lying black dirt onion fields. Figured the roads would be closed.

So we drove all the way east into Standale and took Wilson down to I-196. From the freeway we saw numerous farmer's fields flooded with brown water. US-31 northbound into Holland was closed off by the police, vindicating my decisions. And Holy Crap! Batman, taking I-196 over the Kalamazoo River was one giant high brown lake. Never seen the water that high there before.

Coming home? No problems on US-31 back through Holland and home at 2am.

A Bashed Bash

Over at the Ionia Fairgrounds, the 17th annual B93 Bash had to break up on Saturday as the Grand River came flooding up. They tried pouring gravel on the access road, but they lost the South Parking lot and hundreds of cars had to be abandoned to the flooding. They won't get in there until Wednesday to see the damage level. Red Cross housed a bunch of people in a local school. Not a good weekend to be a country music fan.

Wonder About The Morning

Sunday night the weather people were explaining that three tornadoes hit West Michigan during the storm, one in Allegan County and two in Kalamazoo County. We'll see how messy the driving is tomorrow -- and whether they've got those lights running again. (grin)

But it's all only once in a century.

Dr. Phil