Hello, Stana

I attended the Dayton Hamvention this past weekend and I was en femme the whole time.

I began recounting events from the weekend in sequential order with this post  and this post, but then I lost Internet access at my hotel, so summarizing each day became impossible.

Those two posts summarized the highlights of Thursday afternoon and evening. I will attempt to summarize the rest of my Hamvention experiences in this and in following posts.

By the way, I am withholding all names and call signs to protect the innocent.

Friday Daytime

I worked our booth most of the day, but I did attend a forum late in the morning. This was a forum related to a niche in ham radio in which I am active. In fact, I wrote three books about that niche and actually moderated the same forum at past Hamventions.

One reason I attended this forum was to reintroduce myself to any old friends that showed up. I did see a few in the crowd of over 400 people, but managed to only talk to one fellow I have known for years. The others got lost as the crowd dispersed when the forum ended.

Fashion Note: Friday daytime, I wore my black jacquard sheath, black tights, black patent mid-heel pumps with white piping, and pearl jewelry (see photo).

Whereas, last year, I was shy about introducing the "new" me to old friends and acquaintances, this year, I made a point of reintroducing myself especially since my editor revealed that most people at ARRL Headquarters knew about me even though I only came out to three people there.

The fact that the word got out did not bother me in the least. It just felt odd that I have been dealing with a lot of these people for the past year assuming that they did not know; not that I would have done anything different if I knew they knew, but it would have been nice to know that they knew (know what I mean?).

So, I made the rounds looking for people I avoided last year.

Almost everyone I met up with was fine with my reintroduction. Only one person had a different reaction; he worked at ARRL Headquarters and I assumed he knew, but it turned out that he did not know.

When I met up with him, he was very, very surprised and I left him unsure what his reaction was beyond the initial shock. (I e-mailed him and apologized for the ambush, but so far, I have not received a response.)

I go back a very long time with the head man at the ARRL, so I wanted to meet up with him, too. Being the head man, every time I saw him during the Hamvention, he was surrounded by people. So, I waited for a better opportunity.

Saturday morning, before the doors opened, he came walking down the aisle where our booth was located and I waved him over to our booth. Without saying a word, he stuck out his hand to shake mine and said, "Hello, Stana."

What a classy guy! And he even pronounced Stana correctly!