Someone on a Christian BBS I frequent posted a message titled "Go Virginia!"
Apparently, the state of Virginia has decided to resume their experimentation with denying people fundamental civil rights on the basis of misguided religious fervor.
So... Just a reminder to everyone out there: Read Loving v. Virginia. Here's a good starting point:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~kdown/loving.html
This addresses many of the issues we see today. It's the same issue. The same words are used, the same rhetoric... It's the same question, all over again.
Go, Virginia! Go. Far away. Don't come back until you're ready to act your age.
For some reason, you don't get to read about it as much when people are nice to each other. Maybe it's less exciting.
While we were at Animazement, our car's clutch failed. We found out Saturday morning. Our original plan had been to leave Sunday afternoon, but there was no place in town that would fix the car soon enough; Sunday is a day of rest in North Carolina, and Monday was Memorial Day. So, we put up a sign in our booth. "Help! Car broke down 1,300 miles from home."
People helped. You don't really expect this to happen, but it does. We got a couple of people who made rude remarks about our "gimmick", but they were soundly out-voted by the people who threw a bit of money in the little bucket we had, or who told the artists to "keep the change" on purchases.
But the best is yet to come. On top of the $800 or so we had to pay for the car, there was the small issue of staying in a hotel for two or three more days. Worse, the con was at a hotel in a strange little arcology, of wide open spaces and restaurants, with no grocery stores in sight, and nothing within walking distance of anything else... So, we had to budget for another $300 or so just to sleep and eat until the car was ready.
Until Linda came along. Linda said she worked at a nearby hotel, and might be able to get us a room at employee rates. Sure enough, she could. By happy coincidence, not only was her hotel short walking distance from a grocery store, it was about a five minute walk from the service station our car was at.
Fireball's friend Howell also helped us immensely, ferrying us back and forth with boxes of stuff to get us moved from the hotel we were in for the convention, to the new hotel room we'd been gotten. He also brought us medicine (did I mention that three of the four people in our little studio were a little sicker than they normally allow dogs to get?), and brought us a couple of meals during the convention, when we couldn't go get them ourselves.
The net result of this help, and the financial support of all the people at the convention, is that a disaster which could have cost us well over a thousand dollars, and been a source of abject misery, became a cost of $470 or so and some mild inconvenience. The convention people paid a great deal of the cost of the car. We could cook in the new hotel, since it had a stove. Laundry was free at the new hotel. (If you ever have a chance to try a Candlewood Suites, I have to recommend them; it was one of the nicest places I've ever stayed.) And, just to cap everything off, it turns out Linda didn't just get us the employee rate; she also paid for our room.
So... Rest assured, folks. Decent people are out there. The world still contains people who, when they see others in a bad situation, try to help. And they do help. Maybe some people don't bother because they don't think it matters, but believe me, it does.
Well, that was fun. We had multiple disasters, ranging from a sudden and unplanned need for Canadian work permits, to losing a clutch in North Carolina. But... We're home. And, on the whole, I think it was a pretty good, and arguably profitable, experience. More details to come as we get the paperwork sorted out and the dust settles.