As I write this on the final Sunday evening of September, I dread going into work tomorrow even more than usual. A critical software upgrade that should have finished successfully on Friday afternoon went awry and kept me at the office until 7:30PM with no solution. Even the vendor’s tech support claimed that they had never seen the situation we encountered, leaving us with unusable software and no recourse. I suspect we’ll need to rollback to the previous version tomorrow morning. It will be misery.
To make my Friday night even more interesting, the contracting company that we hired to replace our first floor shower stall ordered the wrong doors. Had the installer arrived with the proper doors on Wednesday, the job would have been completed in one day. Instead, the installer had to arrange for the correct doors to be delivered from upstate PA and installed two nights later. He arrived at 9:15PM on Friday night and was finished in about 20 minutes.
As a funny aside, part of the shower stall renovation on Wednesday included replacement of the fixtures and plumbing inside the wall. This required me to turn off the main water valve for about 30 minutes. The following morning, when I stepped into our second floor shower and pulled the faucet to send the water up to the shower head, the pressure jettisoned the ballcock in the toilet, knocking the lid askew. I had to rush out of the tub to turn off the valve at the toilet and dry up the water that had sprayed out of the tank.
So, after work on Thursday evening, I purchased a new ballcock from the local ACE hardware and replaced it only to find that the supply line had been damaged in by the sudden burst of water pressure. Fortunately, I had two supply lines in stock and the repair was finished within reasonable time.
These events, as irritating and inconvenient as they were, are insignificant when compared to two far more distressing events that occurred on Thursday. Approximately five hours apart, I lost a friend to heart failure in a New Jersey hospital and an acquaintance to a massive stroke in a Maryland hospital. Both men were prominent in the SF fandom community along the east coast.
Todd Brugmans was a remarkable young artist with a zest for life. He and his wife Annie were active in STARFLEET (the international Star Trek fan club) and ubiquitous at many SF conventions along the east coast such as Farpoint, Shore Leave, and others. Todd created the cover art for well over a dozen convention program books as well as novels written by pals Diane Baron and Lance Woods.
Todd’s final book cover art was for The Fandom Fifty by Diane Baron, a chronicling of the rich history of the Baltimore SF convention scene through interviews with many longtime organizers, guests, and attendees, myself included.
At 10:15PM on Thursday, 9/26/19, Todd succumbed to heart disease after five trying days in the hospital.
Lew Aide was a veteran SF convention attendee and volunteer in the Baltimore region for decades. After suffering a massive stroke last weekend—and spending days on life support—Lew passed at 5:01PM on 9/26/19. A few of Lew’s closest friends noted that 5:01PM in military time is 1701, the registry number of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. Lew, they said, was a true fan to the end.
As if those losses were not devastating enough, there was a third. Ken Giroux, owner of Next Generation Toys, is one of the most popular dealers at SF conventions. If you like action figures, Ken is your guy. For many years, his wife Kathy attended the cons with him. We learned on Saturday that Kathy departed this plane of existence on 8/22/19.
It goes without saying that I hope never to see such a horrible week as this ever again.
For ten weeks in the early 1950s, Harlan Ellison joined a notorious Brooklyn street gang known as the Barons as part of his research for his first novel, Web of the City and later, his crime collection, The Deadly Streets.