Online Cabin Fumigation Evacuation

A lot of people who’ve already signed up for Camp Nanowrimo have been waiting as patiently as they could for their camp cabin assignments to show up on the website, and find out if they’ve been matched with the campers who they requested, or campers in their age range and genre, or if they were very brave and clicked the ‘Surprise me’ option, to find out about cabin-mates that they knew nothing at all about.

Sometime yesterday evening, a few cabin assignments started to show up – or so I believe. I actually wasn’t checking. But then, Heather Dudley posted a new Sticky thread in the Campfire Circle forum on the Nanowrimo website, calling attention to the following news:

There are bugs in the cabins! Everybody out! Dan the Man is performing mandatory fumigation on the cabins… So grab your sleeping bag, save anything you don’t want to lose from your cabin message board, and we’re sleeping under the stars tonight! 

Over the course of the day, the website has let me into a cabin, booted me out, and let me back in again – with the same other five campers – four campers that I had requested, and a buddy of one of the four. From the thread of discussion following Heather’s announcement, there’s been all kinds of excitement, joking around, frustration, disappointment, and curiosity from excited wannabe camp writers. At this point, things seem somewhat stable for many of us, but I’m going to keep a can of bug-spray next to my sleeping bag just in case. 😉

Anybody else out there looking forward to Camp Nanowrimo? Have you checked on your cabin assignments at all today?

On clicking the refresh button.

There seems to be a lot of people struggling with their impatience, waiting for digital news around, and I’m one of them.

Over at Camp Nanowrimo, the server has been assigning cabins for a while now, and ever since August 1st camping writers have been anxiously waiting for their cabin doors to open and find out who their cabin-mates are. There’s a thread on the Nanowrimo forums for campers to commiserate about the angst of waiting in, and some of them have also shared stories of woe about waiting for things like job offer emails, responses from agents and publishers, and getting into exclusive Harry Potter websites or something.

Myself, I’m waiting for something else in my email. While I was at Polaris, I volunteered to help with setup, and got a little slip of paper inviting me to the staff thank-you party. I promptly managed to lose track of both the slip and the date for several weeks, and only found both this morning. The party is this Sunday, but the slip said to please RSVP by July 22nd. 😦

So, I sent an email to the RSVP address asking if it would still be okay for me to come by and meet the crew, and I was thinking that if I got a reply today it would be kinda cool to book a hotel room in Toronto for the weekend and go to a few other social events – Nanowrimo Odd Fridays at Runnymede, and a Karaoke for Cancer charity thing. But I didn’t really want to make those plans until I heard back from the Polaris volunteers people.

And there’s been no response in just over 12 hours. 😦

Sigh. I’ll probably be able to go in even if I keep my options open – it’ll save me money on the hotel and mean more travelling time, one way or another. I can live with that. And maybe, if I get the word soon, I can manage to swing the hotel thing anyway.

Wish me luck!