I was leery about trying the border, but friends who went through customs recently said there was no issue, so I decided not to skip one of my favorite conventions.

It was a good decision. The border crossings were just like usual, or maybe just a little bit lighter traffic. The customs guards on both sides were no more nosy than usual and very professional and polite.

I had a great time at the convention. I spent a bunch of time singing, was invited to do a song as part of the hall-of-fame concert, played a new card game, talked too much and slept too little.

This convention is held in a suburban hotel adjacent to a large Asian shopping area. There's probably a dozen Asian restaurants of various varieties within a 2 block walk. The convention supplied food for lunch (Montreal smoked brisket, courtesy of the 2027 Worldcon in Montreal bid), so I only ate out twice. I've added Mongolian cuisine to my list of sampled fares.

Four of my musical friends (Eric Coleman, Lizzie Crow, Mitch Clapp and TJ Burnside) were inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame, which was cool. I remember meeting Mitch when he came to his first convention in 1986. (I was inducted in 2005. )

A non-music high point for me was a workshop on doing divination with semi-precious stones. I went to see if there might be a way to make this into a story. Aelfred is likely to run into something like this. (And then he'd try to steal the gems.)

The lady sitting next to me was one of my favorite authors, Tanya Huff.

After the workshop leader described how to toss the stones, find the meanings, and handle edge cases, she suggested we pair off and play with doing a divination.

I glanced at Tanya and admitted I wasn't here to learn to do divination, but for ideas on stories.

She admitted that she was there for the same thing.

So I got to play plot ideas with a favorite writer!

We used the various cues like "look to past relationships" on the family line and "the storm swirls around you" and "look for balance" on friendship and money to rough out a plot for a short story. (Or maybe a novel.)

I'm going to play with what I remember of what we roughed out, but I lacked the nerve to suggest we work on the story together. I'll be interested to see if she writes what we came up with and see if anyone would guess her story and mine came from the same set of rocks.

I also got ideas for a new Aelfred story from the demo the workshop leader did.

So, it was a great weekend for lots of reasons.