The contest for the Official RinkWorks Thing went beautifully, I thought. It actually worked out as it should have, and everybody seemed to enjoy it. Considering that I made it up offhandedly a couple days prior, I was quite proud of myself.

The poetry reading was one of the earliest activities I had planned for the convention, and although it was something I wanted to do, most of the reason I was so much behind it was that it was something we could do that would take up some time and that most of us would be able to participate in. I never imagined how wonderful an experience this would be. I read my own poetry first, and that wasn't a particularly personally fulfilling experience. But then Balanthalus read two of his very short poems, and with just a couple of lines, he managed to make a connection with his audience. When Issachar read his first poem, a comic one, everybody laughed. When Dave read Mina's first poem and supplied a humorously exaggerated tone of voice, well, it may not have been what Mina had envisioned, but it was funny. Then Mina read her second poem herself. It was the first long serious reading -- one most of us had read before in the Poetry Pool, even -- and yet I was utterly spellbound by it. The combination of her words and her reading combined to make essentially a new work in and of itself. I was stunned by it and elated that this was working out so well. The remainder of the poetry reading worked out as well: I had a similar reaction to Darien's and Issachar's poetry and to famous' Keys poem, and we laughed at her The Terrible Tale and Stephen, Start Talking. When I read Howard's grandfather's poetry, I was still a little spellbound, for although I'm sure my reading of them didn't do the poems justice, the power of the language was almost tangible. The experience completely sold me on verbal reading of poetry. These works had so much more potency when read aloud, to a group, than when printed on a page and read silently. The thoughtful poems are all the more thoughtful; the personal poems inspire all the more reflection; even the funny poems elicit more laughs. This part of the convention was, for me, an unexpected highlight.

Watching Sinbad of the Seven Seas was another. That was one of the things I was most anticipating. It was great to see those that hadn't already seen the movie getting into it and finding it as funny as Dave and I do. The laughter got loud enough that I was concerned about disrupting the neighbors, even though we didn't have any that were immediately adjacent to us.

That night, the THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA was as bad as ever. I complained once, and when the DJ turning the music down a thousandth of a notch if anything at all didn't help, I called again, spoke to a manager, and really pushed for a solution to this ridiculousness. We were provided with another room, on the other side of the building, to sleep in, and since I said we didn't want to move all our stuff at 1am at night, we kept it in the old room. (The next night, I was told, the bar wouldn't be open, so we slept Sunday night comfortably in the original room.) It was such a relief, and Darleen and I got right to sleep, but Dave woke up too much in the walk down the hall and had to roam around a while before getting sleepy enough again to get to sleep.