Sense of Adventure

Last evening John and Gail Miller were kind enough to let me ride up with them to Santa Fe. Wild Cards writer and all-around great guy Bud Simons was in town from Austin visiting his yoga instructor. Yeah, we thought that was strange, too. It turned out she had recently moved.

Anyway, George RR Martin, the Godfather of the Wild Cards Mafia, put together a dinner gathering at a Chinese restaurant called Chow’s. Due to a bit of a mix-up we went to George’s house instead of meeting at the restaurant. We caught GRRM on the verge of heading out to collect Bud. Both of which were fortunate, inasmuch as none of us had any idea how to get to the restaurant.

We followed George as he picked up Bud, then through a remarkably convoluted route, called a “shortcut,” through various apparently random parking lots of the College of Santa Fe. After much circling and backtracking, we actually arrived at the restaurant. To our surprise.

While many of the Usual NM WC Suspects were absent, plenty of us were there. We joined Melinda Snodgrass, Chip Wideman, and newcomer Ian Tregillis at a table in the back room. They must have known who they were dealing with and wisely chose to isolate us from the general population.

The food was good, the service quick and friendly, and the prices reasonable. We talked about the current WC project and caught up a bit with Bud. Then we adjourned to Melinda’s wonderful new house, which neither Bud nor John and Gail had seen before, to talk a while longer. We talked - as usual - about the state of modern publishing (deplorable. What else?) and Action Gal Melinda and I defended action movies against naysayer and romantic-comedy buff George. It turned out that of a recent list of the 25 allegedly best action movies of all times she read recently, Melinda had seen 24.

Then we headed back while George sought and ultimately found the way back to Bud’s yoga teacher’s house, then followed him back to his lair so the Millers could collect some of their effects that got left there. On the way back I urged John to blog about baseball (his knowledge is encyclopedic and he has plenty of good insights) and he expounded knowledgeably on the classic pulps such as The Shadow and Doc Savage, which I recently got interested in as a result of reading Paul Malmont’s excellent The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

It was great fun and great to see all the people, not just Bud. I don’t get out enough. It’s good to break out of my tendency to lead a hermitic existence, and I intend to do so more and more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.