I mentioned in my coverage of Friday that I’m feeling tired, and that is even more true today. I fly home tomorrow (Sunday) and then back to the day job on Monday morning. And work has NOT been that quiet of late, lots of unusual extra work going on that my boss and staff have been handling over the last month, mostly without me. It’s time I dig back in. Friday was a late night for many attendees, I understand, and things lasted until the wee hours. I was not part of those shenanigans, I am old and boring. And I don’t know anyone, nor do that kind of thing anyway. I digress.ture weeks.
I confess, I would like to stay for parts of Sunday. Or at least, I should say, if I was still here, and I had any energy left, I would do two of the agenda items. There is a set of panels left starting at 8:00 a.m. in the morning and another set at 9:30, and I didn’t get a chance to really hone which of the first four would have made my pick out of six nor which of the three of six would have been my pick at 9:30.
Instead, I packed Saturday night, barely managing to fit everything in the carry-on, and just went to the airport on Sunday morning. En route to the airport, I discovered that the Saints were playing that day, AND that it would have been really easy to get tickets even at the gate, no scalpers involved. If I had known that previously, I would have extended my stay until Monday and bought tickets in advance. Just to go to a game. I wasn’t disappointed though, I was ready to go home. Two hops and I made it around 7:30 p.m.
I survived Bouchercon 2025. I’ll let the dust settle before I decide what to do about future years.
My cold is proving more manageable with antihistamines kicking its ass temporarily, and it should keep me going until it’s time to go home on Sunday. If today is Friday, it must be day 3 of #Boucheron2025 in New Orleans! You can find my conference-related musings on my PolyWogg site at https://polywogg.ca/day-3-of-boucheron2025-in-new-orleans/.
At the lunch break, I came back up to my room momentarily, mostly to use the washroom and mentally regroup (it is REALLY loud in the lobby area). But I went for a quick stroll to grab some food. According to Google Maps, there is supposedly a McDonald’s less than two blocks from my hotel. Except I was pretty sure that I had walked that street area before and didn’t see one. Now, it supposedly closed at 7:00 p.m. that night, so potentially I didn’t notice it, but really? How do you miss a McDonald’s, closed or otherwise? There’s gotta be a big M outside, right? Anyway, I have been a little bit too reliant on eating at the hotel, and I confess that the price of food in New Orleans at any of the local restaurants or the hotel is higher than I expected. Many of the rates are higher than Canadian prices, before the conversion. It’s taking a bit of the fun out of the trip, realizing I’m burning through expenses for food. Even the local markets to get drinks or snacks, or antihistamines, are not cheap. But I digress. I also know that part of my reaction is to the fact that I’m feeling a little conferenced-out today. One of the panelists in another session today basically asked if everyone was tired yet? There was a lot of agreement on that front.
For a mid-afternoon break, I wandered down to the lobby and OMG, they were serving SNOBALLS. So, it’s basically a snocone in a cup, and I love anything with crushed ice, from slushees to simple drinks to snocones. I wanted blue raspberry but they only had that in a premixed alcohol format. Yes, there are tons of snocone things all over NOLA, and most of them are alcohol-based. I settled for Strawberry for a mid-afternoon refreshment. I felt like I should be sitting on a verandah somewhere rocking in a chair.
After my last panel, I came back upstairs as my cold was sucking my energy, and I literally fell asleep for three hours. I knew I was tired, as I had to force myself to stop yawning at several points, but I didn’t realize HOW tired. I skipped Murder Mystery Almost Dinner Theatre hosted by Heather Graham with a cast of mystery authors putting on a soft whodunnit, mostly cuz I hadn’t decided if I was going or not — one of the guaranteed social interaction events that I suck at anyway — but I ended up sleeping well past the start of it.
Let the good reads roll…I’m a bit conferenced out. There were times today when I had my introvert response of “Ewww, people.” It’s time to wrap it up and go home. Is it cheesy to say I miss my wife and son? Oh well, I’m cheesy, nice to meet you.
I had a bit of a rough night with my cold. I woke up around 3:00 and I was really congested. So, I decided to take an antihistamine. As an aside, because of my diabetes and obesity (hey, a two-fer!), I can’t take most cold meds that are decongestants. I learned that the hard way about 15 years ago when I went to see a clinic doctor for a potential ear infection, only to find out my ear was fine — my blood pressure on the other hand was 162/105 or so. Heart attack and stroke territory. Because I had been maxing decongestatant with a stimulant in it. Oops. My BP had never been really problematic before, maybe a little high once in a while, but not alarming. On decongestant, I was JACKED.
In the day-to-day stuff, this generally only presents a problem if I forget to take some meds OR I get a cold. Cuz then there isn’t anything really good to take. Antihistamines help, but they dry my nasal passages out a little too well, and then I start wheezing or occasionally coughing like I have a speck of dust somewhere in my windpipe. With a strong gag reflex, we are starting to get into territory nobody needs from me.
But I took the antihistamine at 3:00, fell back asleep until 9:30, and finally woke up like I was doing a zombie walk the night before and the special K hadn’t left my system yet. Not that I know what that’s like, but as a wannabe writer, I’m imagining it with artistic license.
Anyway. I needed to hook my energy with some yogourt and a fruit cup before tackling the conference. You can see my full-day conference-related annotations on my PolyWogg site at https://polywogg.ca/day-2-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/. There were events still scheduled after I decided a quiet evening around the hotel would likely do me better.
I grabbed a simple burger, read for a while, picked up some snacks and drinks as well as more antihistamine tablets, and then sat down eventually to write my blog entries for the day.
Today was Opening Day for Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans, and my first Bouchercon ever. The commute was easy as I’m staying at the same hotel as the conference.
I am fighting a cold, so I ended up sleeping in the afternoon for three hours, and missed a few panels before going back to the conference. Closed out around 8:30/9:00 and I grabbed some dinner in the lobby, came back to the room, and called it a night. Just in time to write this post and the conference one.
Back at it tomorrow for Day 2. I’ve got better meds for tomorrow, so I’m hoping to be in better shape with more endurance. I’m a lightweight conferencer, apparently.
I woke up still fighting a cold, so decided to take it easy for the day. Other than being a mucus factory, I wrote a blog and posted it — except for some reason, Buffer decided NOT to share it to my networks. Not sure why, but it didn’t share. I know people were reading the blog today, a few had trouble loading the pictures early on, but I assumed it was my longer post, not the “travel logistics” one. Oh well, it’s live and I’ve reshared it to the networks manually. Weird.
I decided I would do the Audobon Aquarium to see the penguins, and if time and body permitted, I would consider airboats or evening cruises or music or late night food cravings. As it turned out, the Aquarium and Insectarium were all I could handle today besides a nap!
I headed towards the Aquarium along Canal Street, a supposed 11 minute straight walk. Well, except I hit a shake shack really fast and they had burgers, so voila, lunch. I have seen mention of snow cones or snow balls, but haven’t seen them physically yet. In the meantime, shakes will do.
I went past Caesar’s casino, a rooftop rotating restaurant, a New Orleans Walk of Fame, and mostly crept along at a snail’s pace in the heat. It was damn hot again today. Our family loves penguins, though, so the only destination that mattered was the Aquarium.
Before I got to the penguins, I got to see a bunch of other marine animals.
American alligators without pigment, baby alligators, even butterflies. Plus birds, fish, sharks, rays, etc.
But the goal was penguins and even saw the feeding (a much more sedate experience than the one in Boston!).
The penguin exhibit was great. You can get right to the glass, the penguins are literally an inch of glass away from you, so you can get up close and see them playing. You can even interact with them — if you put your fingers near the glass, they’ll think you have fish and try to eat your fingers. There were about 23 African penguins and they participate in the broader research program that the Boston Aquarium is part of too. They log every little bit of their penguins’ lives, particularly how much they eat.
Here’s the weird part of the day though. I got talking to one of the staff, relatively new, been with the Aquarium less than a year. Mainly on the outreach side, and according to him, you need to be passionate about animals and articulate, but high school was sufficient for the job. If you work behind the exhibits, you need a college degree. His friend only had high school too, but he was really passionate about insects and bugs, so he got hired on the insectarium side of things (I met him in the butterfly exhibit).
Anyway, I was sitting watching the penguins at one point, and nobody else was there. It was just me and the penguins. It was like NO ONE was at the aquarium. With school back in session, and summer effectively over, attendance was down to about 400 bodies for the day. From an average of 1800-2000 and peak crowds of 3200. It was glorious. Later, down by the large tank, I was sitting in a room staring at fish and sea turtles, and again, for short periods of time as people drifted in and out, I was by myself just chilling.
It was a good day to visit. I did a virtual simulator with tiger shark diving, had my picture taken with the traditional aquarium background, spent too much for snacks at the little cafes, etc. I had my water bottle with me, and I have to say I was disappointed. I had poured REALLY cold water in it earlier, and with the material it is made of, some sort of silicon I guess, I thought it was designed to keep it cold. Not really. It wasn’t warm, but that was about it. And tying it to my bag was a bad idea. I tried drinking from it without removing from the bag and ended up wearing about a 1/3 of what I drank. Oh well.
I trudged back to the hotel, and my feet felt every single step in the heat. My compression socks help in some ways, sure, but they sure make everything that much hotter. Whine, whine, whine.
I got back to the hotel, with a small stop for some extra pop, and crashed for a nap. Talked to Andrea and Jacob to hear all about his first day of Grade 11 (yay penguin!), and then I had to figure out dinner.
I decided I’d settle for dinner downstairs in the lobby area while reading, and then hit the in-hotel pantry which has more snacks than I expected, plus some basic deli stuff. I grabbed some stuff for the morning.
And found out they have cherry snowballs in pint-size containers. Wow, what a find. It took me almost a half of an hour to devour upstairs in my room, chipping away at it with a plastic spoon.
I managed to transfer all my photos to the laptop, or at least copy them, including a ton of short videos. Too much to transfer now to the blog, but I’ll add to future posts eventually when they’re scrubbed, tweaked and uploaded to Flickr properly.
Oh, and just for fun, I got mistaken for Lee Goldberg in the deli area. I don’t look much like Lee, although we both have short hair and round faces. But hey, he’s a successful Hollywood writer, so I’ll take the compliment.
To close out the night, I grabbed a picture out the window at the end of the hall of the waterfront and French Quarter at night. I’ll try to remember to grab one during the day.
Tomorrow #Bouchercon2025 starts. Let the notetaking and learning begin!
