The exercise thing worked, it seems, as I got something like four hours of sleep; I’ll remember that, I hope, should the Dread Insomnia raise it’s ugly head again.
As it almost certainly will.

~ sigh ~

Free Breakfast today, thanks to a confusing card which arrived on Sunday.
I heard a scrabbling at the door, and an envelope addressed to me had been slid underneath; Inside was a nice hotel card, presumably from the room servicing department, apologising for the inconvenience caused by the toilet, and giving me a card for a free breakfast, tip included.
I have no idea what it’s about, as the toilet seems fine; It’s not fountaining raw wastewater to the ceiling, or even failing to flush.
Still, free breakfast.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks to the nice people at the FedEx in the JW Marriott, I’ve got some classy little cards with the details on the Big Red Couch, as seen below;

These turned out way better than I’d hoped for.

I was tired enough a handful of hours ago that I was nodding off while typing; Now I can’t sleep at all, and am reduced to sending blog updates to amuse myself.

Somewhere below there is a security patrol car doing a slow sad lap of the car park across the road.

Creepily, I have just noticed that the bedside light projects an image of everything on the bedside stand onto the ceiling. I can make out my US cellphone in some detail, though the TV remote is a featureless shape, as is the alarm clock radio thingy.

Part of the sleeping problem, I think, is that I’ve still got a low-grade illness going on, so there are intermittent bouts of fever, making it damn near impossible to get the bed at a comfortable temperature. I picked up some aspirin yesterday, blithely ignoring the “OMG, Asthmatics Beware!” notation on the box I might add, so I’m thinking I’ll take another one of those, try getting back to sleep, and if I’m still awake in another hour, I’ll say ‘enough’ and hit the hotel fitness centre for a while.
If I’m going to be involuntarily awake, I may as well get something out of it.

~~~

Well, there may have been fifteen minutes or so of uninterrupted sleep in there, but overall I’d call it a failure.
Off to the gym.

A combination of jetlag, bad sleep & some sort of cough made chunks of today a bit of a blur. As I type this, I keep zoning out, and the plan is to make it to 8pm or so before going to bed, to try to hurry along the adaption to a new time zone.

Thus, the high points;

I’ve got a new SIM for my American cellphone, and have already had a wrong number. So that’s working.

The missing FATE die turned up in the General Population section of my bag. Turns out that a black die doesn’t show up all that well against predominately black t-shirts.

Finished reading Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and am trying to resist buying another book before Gen Con. Book was pretty good, as it happens.

Did some wandering around in the Convention Centre. There were people around, but sometimes they’d be out of sight, and you’d be walking through some creepy empty hallways with indistinct noises coming from Somewhere.

OK, I keep zoning out here, so I’m going to post it & go for a pre-sleep amble

Turns out I was way off in my guess as to when the case would be delivered; Got picked up from the airline at 8pm, assigned to a driver at 11pm, and delivered, by ‘Matt’, at 12:31 am.
The hotel, mercifully, elected not to call and wake me, so I checked to online tracker while involuntarily awake this morning at Oh Dear God a.m., wandered down & collected it from reception.

I guess now’s the time to open it?

Yep; All the important stuff is there.
not sure why I only packed three FATE dice though

My best guess for the arrival of my suitcase is tomorrow morning sometime, given that it’s Sunday & the suitcase hasn’t yet been assigned to a driver.

Having a change of clothes in my carry on was useful, though it’s only one day’s worth, so I’m hoping on an early delivery of clean stuff.

Kevin & Tonya, you’d love the JW Marriott experience at the moment; There is what looks like a sign language interpreters conference happening, so there are people signing away all over the lobbies.
There also seems to be the remnants of a drumming regatta, or whatever the hell one of those is called*, in town as well; It explains the two white guys doing pretty good Polynesian-styled drumming in Indianapolis Airport.

( * a ‘noise control violation’, perhaps? maybe a Bonham or a Watts, or even a McBrain or a Collins? )

I’m currently killing time in the lobby (2nd floor, with the Starbucks, FedEx/Kinkos & Hamster Tube) while waiting for;
(a) my room to be ready. It’s no big deal, as I got here at 11am-ish, so I’m WAY earlier than the standard check-in time
(b) my luggage. I’m here, my carry-on is here, my suitcase made it to Chicago but didn’t make it onto the last leg of the trip. This, I’m told by both the airline & the hotel, happens a lot.

The nice hotel concierge gave me a card for a free coffee at the aforementioned Starbucks, so 20-some fluid ounces of Mocha is working it’s beany wiles upon me.

~~~ time passes ~~~

OK, I now have a room on the 28th floor with a view of the city. Am contemplating a very long shower, and feel quietly pleased that I packed a full change of clothing in my carry-on luggage for just such a contingency.
(I’m also considering, once I’m back home, doing a test-pack to see whether it would have been possible to put all of the essentials into carry-on)

~~~ edited at 4pm-ish ~~~
Apparently the bag just came in when I called, so they’ll send it to my hotel. Probably.

~~~ the 7:30pm edit ~~~

Bag Tag Number(s): IND NZ xxxxxx has arrived and has been scheduled for pickup by the delivery service on Aug 11 at 08:00 PM local time. It will be delivered to the address you provided within approximately 6 hours* of pickup time.

Yay?

Forgot to include a picture of the send-off party of K-T & The Dread Pirate Tamsin, so here it is, in glorious cellphone-camera-o-vision.

Trust me, they’re in there somewhere.

There was an actually funny TSA chap at the American Airlines terminal, putting across “this is what you need to do” in a relaxed ‘shall we all just get this done’ way, which was nice.
Even the guy who did a contact search of my back after the scan-o-tron was polite, and gave me some warning.
My hair sets off the body scanners as an item of unexpected density. Last year, at San Francisco, the scanner flagged the hair-tie specifically, and the place where I’d sewn up my jeans because they’d worn through. This time it was just the whole neck & upper spine.
Oddly, the tiny bits of metal in my knee never set anything off. Too small, maybe?

Roughly 4.5 hours to go until the flight to Chicago.

Sitting in the food court strip mall at the Tom Bradley(?) International terminal at LAX.
The airport wifi … Isn’t, as near as I can tell. Lots of ‘connecting’, but no actual connection. Then again, it doesn’t want any money, so I suppose I’m getting exactly what I’m paying for.

I’m definitely feeling more stressy/anxious on this trip, though its happening in waves. Waiting for the plane in the Gate Lounge at Auckland was bad, though hanging out with Kevin/Tonya/Tamsin before that was fine. Most of the flight was stress-free, if bumpy, except for the last hour or so.
Immigration & Border Control was a long slow wait & a short ‘direct’ interrogation by the CBP lady, who was … professionally polite.
No issues, which is good, but I didn’t get mistaken for being in my 30’s, which is what happened last time. 3:)

I kind of wandered for a bit, and took a long time to figure out that I needed to actually buy some water, as opposed to just thinking about doing so. Drinking that now, & contemplating how to kill a few (6+) hours before the flight to Chicago.
There was a vague plan to go and see Andrei if I was awake enough; Don’t think that’s happening.

In-flight sleeping did happen, sometimes during movies, but I’ve now seen The Croods, Oblivion (the Tom Cruise SF thing), Skyfall, and most of Die Hard 5.
Oh, and a minute of a live-action Detective Conan, which, not being subtitled, did not hold my interest.

found the LAX wifi in the American terminal, thus this post

The current plan is to do the check-in & boarding pass bit, as they couldn’t issue the US passes to me in Auckland, like they did last year, and then probably go on through to the air side.
Currently not hungry, but if there’s no food service places airside I’m in for a long-ass wait. Seems unlikely though.

Last year I did my Holiday 2012 journal posts on LiveJournal & on HoardeNet, and it became something of a pain in the arse to build a travel journal from the two sources. Said travel journal is still not finished.
This year I’m going with a one-stop shop here at CraigBlog, and I’ll just link here from FaceBook/Google+/LiveJournal. We’ll see whether it works any better at getting everything in the one place.