DragonCon 2006, Part 1
Sep. 7th, 2006 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinjiforeDay 0: Thursday, August 30, 2006
Arriving on Thursday night is still the best idea ever. Even though I had to rush off to meet my sister and didn't get to register on Thursday, arriving on Thursday meant that, instead of getting to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, struggling with getting luggage and car stowed, and only then getting around to registration, all I had to do was show up Friday morning and stroll through the line. Awesome.
I drove down with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sunshinedew, Boo, and the Luggage of Doom. Seriously, the back of my van was full. Mind you, it was, for the most part, nothing but essential equipment. We had to have air mattresses on which to sleep, yarn with which to knit, food to eat, and booze to drink. We actually set off from Nashville by the time we'd planned, which was amazing. We met my mom in Chattanooga and had lunch there, then transferred Boo and her things to my mom's car. She had been wanting her mommy all through lunch, but when she found the doll sitting in her carseat in my mom's car, I could barely get a good-bye kiss out of her. Very good grandma strategy, there.
sunshinedew will try to tell you that she packed too much, but given the amount of stuff that was more or less needed, a couple of extra cubic feet of clothes was nothing. Besides, I didn't have to haul it upstairs. I dumped sunshinedew at the curb with all my crap and hers and shadowmancer_x's and toodled off to my sister's. Easy as pie.
I had supper Thursday night at Sushi Avenue in Decatur with the aforementioned sister and her fiance. Getting the chance to visit with my sister is one of the primary perks of DragonCon. Afterwards, we went back to her place and watched Sports Night, still one of the awesomest shows ever which should never have been canceled in order to show Who Wants to be a Millionaire five nights a week. No, I'm not still bitter.
I spent most of the TV time winding a hank of yarn into two enormous balls. Unfortunately, I had the brilliant notion of winding said hank from both ends in order to avoid rewinding one ball into two. This meant that it took me approximately three times as long to wind the second ball after I'd hopelessly tangled the hank. Fortunately, I did learn from the experience.
(Yes, my sister is getting married. No, it's not the guy she brought to dinner at last year's DragonCon. This guy, Fred, had worshiped her from afar for many moons, and after she broke up with the guy from last year's DragonCon dinner, waited an appropriate amount of time before declaring his love. Very sweet. They're getting married December 30th.)
Day 1: Friday, September 1, 2006
I'd decided the night before that I could save myself some mega-bucks in parking by leaving my van at my sister's, so after I got up in the morning Fred drove me to the Marriott for the official beginning of my con experience. I ran intoshadowmancer_x almost immediately, and was able to dump off my backpack and set off in search of my badge. Alas, melissagay was sick all that day, which sucked. She spent the day in bed, consoled only by a laptop with the first three discs of Doctor Who.
This year, my knitting plans went off famously. Well, except for the part where I once again did the math wrong and had to rip out four inches of sock cuff and start over, but that's just normal. What did work out was my scheme of carrying nothing around but my little Circular Solution wrist bag. I even transferred my wallet essentials back to my tri-fold wallet so I could carry it around easier than the checkbook/wallet I'd been using. I also decided to make Christmas socks for my nieces instead of socks for me, since I was using a slightly thicker yarn for them and figured the socks would go a bit faster.
This year, registration was in the old Open Gaming space at the Hyatt, and one had to walk outside along Baker Street to get to it. Unfortunately, at the time I arrived there were no actual signs to this effect (well, at least not anyplace I happened to be), and I spent some time wandering around in the bowels of the International Tower before I found someone with a badge and, based on the theory that they'd managed to find registration to get it, got directions. The longest part of registration was walking through the maze of barriers. There was no one there, so we had to walk about ten times farther than the actual distance before getting to the start of the line. It felt silly at the time, but it wasn't much of an inconvenience.
Once again, the registration folks had recalled that, while few people would have their badge numbers memorized, it was highly likely that most would be able to remember their own name. I got in my appropriate line without having to ask someone to look up my badge number (which I'd hauled all the way from Nashville but had left upstairs in the other hotel), and had my badge in a matter of moments. Bliss.
Friday turned out to be my biggest panel day. I went first to the opening ceremonies of the Stargate Offworld track. It was pretty much the only Stargate panel I could go to, since I hadn't seen the last two years of SG-1, or any of Atlantis. But I wanted to show my support, so I went and added to the person count.
Afterwards, I went to Cassandra Claire's first panel, and I'll admit freely that it was mostly just to see if she had the balls to show her face. (She did.) It was actually a really good panel about recommendations for classic young adult stories, and I got a lot of good authors and titles out of it.
Next was my first and only Doctor Who panel. Ostensibly, it was about favorite Doctors from the whole of the show, but most people seemed to want to talk about the new Doctors, which was fine with me even though I hadn't actually seen any of them. There were four people on the panel, but one guy did most of the talking. Luckily, he was informed and eloquent and made efforts to not hog the panel. He was very good about taking questions and allowing others to talk when they had something to say, it was just that he seemed to have the most to say. I learned an awful lot about how the new show was being received (very well, apparently), and about current happenings in the Who fandom.
I also ran intokailara_me, whom I didn't recognize because she had on a sparkly jester's hat with rainbow-colored hair. I saw her (not surprisingly), but all I saw was the hat and it wasn't until I made a comment about Lalla Ward's knitting book that she spotted me and we had mutual recognition.
After the panel, I headed back towards the Marriott, but never arrived. There, in the bowels of the Hyatt, I met my doom: The main video room. It hadn't actually occurred to me that they might be showing the new Doctor Who, but as I passed by I took a glance in and saw it. I wavered for a moment, because I was supposed to meet my sister to get a book on tape I'd left in my van, and I was also supposed to be meeting Lisa and Hunter, but I concluded that if I left my phone on meeting mode, there was no harm in sitting in front of Doctor Who while I waited.
So I did.
The episode that happened to be running was David Tennant's first episode, and I saw about the last fifteen minutes. I'll have to gush elsewhere, at length, about my love for the new show, so I will only say here that it was made of awesome. And that the comment I'd heard recently about the Doctor having the attention span of the concussed goldfish was pretty darn accurate.
I was able to watch for about half an hour before my sister *and* Lisa phoned to say that they were nearby. I waited in front of the Hyatt for my sister, then walked around to registration to wait for Lisa and Hunter. After they had registered, and we had gotten their stuff up to the room, Lisa was quite amenable to returning to the video room for more Doctor Who. I actually got to bed fairly early, around midnight or so.
Day 2: Saturday, September 2, 2006
I didn't wake up until 11:30. Let me repeat that: 11:30. I slept for nearly twelve hours. It's really amazing how long one can sleep when one is not awakened by the call of "Mommy-O! Open the door!" (For the record, my daughter's door is, in fact, never locked. She simply has gotten the notion that she can't open the door in the morning without permission. I'm not really sure where she got said notion, but it's not really a bad one.)
I made my first trip to the dealer's room, and fulfilled my urge for trading card sets. I got Seasons 8 and 9 of Stargate SG-1, and Season 1 of Atlantis. No, I still haven't seen the show. But I've got the card sets, dammit! I went up to the room afterwards, found Lisa awake, and we went in search of lunch. We found a neat little place called Kameel's in the food court, which was essentially a meat and three with some nice and healthy selections.
It was somewhere around this time that we made a trip to the dealer's room and bought the second season of Doctor Who. Unfortunately, it turned out that said set didn't include Tennant's first episode, "The Christmas Invasion." I'm not sure of the exact details, but apparently "The Christmas Invasion" was a sort of special episode, and not, technically, part of the second series/season. Lisa had given me a copy already, so it didn't really matter, but it was a pain to not have it with the rest in DVD format. Oh, well. Live and learn.
After fortifying myself, I spent most of Saturday in the video room. Again. I'd wondered that the schedule seemed to be running through the Doctor Who episodes much faster than the times stated, but found out why when they started showing the Doctor Who Confidential episodes after each episode. Apparently that had been factored into the schedule, but for some reason they hadn't actually shown them the night before. Anyway, it was nifty seeing all the behind the scenes stuff, even if they did break up two-parters to show the Confidential for the first part in between.
I emerged from the video room long enough to go out to eat with Hunter and Lisa, then went to a Lord of the Rings fan fiction panel with Lisa. We stayed for about an hour of the two-hour panel (during which I finished sock number one), then went back upstairs and foundvaklam's laptop and Doctor Who discs of the Eccleston series unguarded. That took up the rest of the night.
Arriving on Thursday night is still the best idea ever. Even though I had to rush off to meet my sister and didn't get to register on Thursday, arriving on Thursday meant that, instead of getting to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, struggling with getting luggage and car stowed, and only then getting around to registration, all I had to do was show up Friday morning and stroll through the line. Awesome.
I drove down with
sunshinedew, Boo, and the Luggage of Doom. Seriously, the back of my van was full. Mind you, it was, for the most part, nothing but essential equipment. We had to have air mattresses on which to sleep, yarn with which to knit, food to eat, and booze to drink. We actually set off from Nashville by the time we'd planned, which was amazing. We met my mom in Chattanooga and had lunch there, then transferred Boo and her things to my mom's car. She had been wanting her mommy all through lunch, but when she found the doll sitting in her carseat in my mom's car, I could barely get a good-bye kiss out of her. Very good grandma strategy, there.sunshinedew will try to tell you that she packed too much, but given the amount of stuff that was more or less needed, a couple of extra cubic feet of clothes was nothing. Besides, I didn't have to haul it upstairs. I dumped sunshinedew at the curb with all my crap and hers and shadowmancer_x's and toodled off to my sister's. Easy as pie.I had supper Thursday night at Sushi Avenue in Decatur with the aforementioned sister and her fiance. Getting the chance to visit with my sister is one of the primary perks of DragonCon. Afterwards, we went back to her place and watched Sports Night, still one of the awesomest shows ever which should never have been canceled in order to show Who Wants to be a Millionaire five nights a week. No, I'm not still bitter.
I spent most of the TV time winding a hank of yarn into two enormous balls. Unfortunately, I had the brilliant notion of winding said hank from both ends in order to avoid rewinding one ball into two. This meant that it took me approximately three times as long to wind the second ball after I'd hopelessly tangled the hank. Fortunately, I did learn from the experience.
(Yes, my sister is getting married. No, it's not the guy she brought to dinner at last year's DragonCon. This guy, Fred, had worshiped her from afar for many moons, and after she broke up with the guy from last year's DragonCon dinner, waited an appropriate amount of time before declaring his love. Very sweet. They're getting married December 30th.)
Day 1: Friday, September 1, 2006
I'd decided the night before that I could save myself some mega-bucks in parking by leaving my van at my sister's, so after I got up in the morning Fred drove me to the Marriott for the official beginning of my con experience. I ran into
shadowmancer_x almost immediately, and was able to dump off my backpack and set off in search of my badge. Alas, melissagay was sick all that day, which sucked. She spent the day in bed, consoled only by a laptop with the first three discs of Doctor Who.This year, my knitting plans went off famously. Well, except for the part where I once again did the math wrong and had to rip out four inches of sock cuff and start over, but that's just normal. What did work out was my scheme of carrying nothing around but my little Circular Solution wrist bag. I even transferred my wallet essentials back to my tri-fold wallet so I could carry it around easier than the checkbook/wallet I'd been using. I also decided to make Christmas socks for my nieces instead of socks for me, since I was using a slightly thicker yarn for them and figured the socks would go a bit faster.
This year, registration was in the old Open Gaming space at the Hyatt, and one had to walk outside along Baker Street to get to it. Unfortunately, at the time I arrived there were no actual signs to this effect (well, at least not anyplace I happened to be), and I spent some time wandering around in the bowels of the International Tower before I found someone with a badge and, based on the theory that they'd managed to find registration to get it, got directions. The longest part of registration was walking through the maze of barriers. There was no one there, so we had to walk about ten times farther than the actual distance before getting to the start of the line. It felt silly at the time, but it wasn't much of an inconvenience.
Once again, the registration folks had recalled that, while few people would have their badge numbers memorized, it was highly likely that most would be able to remember their own name. I got in my appropriate line without having to ask someone to look up my badge number (which I'd hauled all the way from Nashville but had left upstairs in the other hotel), and had my badge in a matter of moments. Bliss.
Friday turned out to be my biggest panel day. I went first to the opening ceremonies of the Stargate Offworld track. It was pretty much the only Stargate panel I could go to, since I hadn't seen the last two years of SG-1, or any of Atlantis. But I wanted to show my support, so I went and added to the person count.
Afterwards, I went to Cassandra Claire's first panel, and I'll admit freely that it was mostly just to see if she had the balls to show her face. (She did.) It was actually a really good panel about recommendations for classic young adult stories, and I got a lot of good authors and titles out of it.
Next was my first and only Doctor Who panel. Ostensibly, it was about favorite Doctors from the whole of the show, but most people seemed to want to talk about the new Doctors, which was fine with me even though I hadn't actually seen any of them. There were four people on the panel, but one guy did most of the talking. Luckily, he was informed and eloquent and made efforts to not hog the panel. He was very good about taking questions and allowing others to talk when they had something to say, it was just that he seemed to have the most to say. I learned an awful lot about how the new show was being received (very well, apparently), and about current happenings in the Who fandom.
I also ran into
kailara_me, whom I didn't recognize because she had on a sparkly jester's hat with rainbow-colored hair. I saw her (not surprisingly), but all I saw was the hat and it wasn't until I made a comment about Lalla Ward's knitting book that she spotted me and we had mutual recognition.After the panel, I headed back towards the Marriott, but never arrived. There, in the bowels of the Hyatt, I met my doom: The main video room. It hadn't actually occurred to me that they might be showing the new Doctor Who, but as I passed by I took a glance in and saw it. I wavered for a moment, because I was supposed to meet my sister to get a book on tape I'd left in my van, and I was also supposed to be meeting Lisa and Hunter, but I concluded that if I left my phone on meeting mode, there was no harm in sitting in front of Doctor Who while I waited.
So I did.
The episode that happened to be running was David Tennant's first episode, and I saw about the last fifteen minutes. I'll have to gush elsewhere, at length, about my love for the new show, so I will only say here that it was made of awesome. And that the comment I'd heard recently about the Doctor having the attention span of the concussed goldfish was pretty darn accurate.
I was able to watch for about half an hour before my sister *and* Lisa phoned to say that they were nearby. I waited in front of the Hyatt for my sister, then walked around to registration to wait for Lisa and Hunter. After they had registered, and we had gotten their stuff up to the room, Lisa was quite amenable to returning to the video room for more Doctor Who. I actually got to bed fairly early, around midnight or so.
Day 2: Saturday, September 2, 2006
I didn't wake up until 11:30. Let me repeat that: 11:30. I slept for nearly twelve hours. It's really amazing how long one can sleep when one is not awakened by the call of "Mommy-O! Open the door!" (For the record, my daughter's door is, in fact, never locked. She simply has gotten the notion that she can't open the door in the morning without permission. I'm not really sure where she got said notion, but it's not really a bad one.)
I made my first trip to the dealer's room, and fulfilled my urge for trading card sets. I got Seasons 8 and 9 of Stargate SG-1, and Season 1 of Atlantis. No, I still haven't seen the show. But I've got the card sets, dammit! I went up to the room afterwards, found Lisa awake, and we went in search of lunch. We found a neat little place called Kameel's in the food court, which was essentially a meat and three with some nice and healthy selections.
It was somewhere around this time that we made a trip to the dealer's room and bought the second season of Doctor Who. Unfortunately, it turned out that said set didn't include Tennant's first episode, "The Christmas Invasion." I'm not sure of the exact details, but apparently "The Christmas Invasion" was a sort of special episode, and not, technically, part of the second series/season. Lisa had given me a copy already, so it didn't really matter, but it was a pain to not have it with the rest in DVD format. Oh, well. Live and learn.
After fortifying myself, I spent most of Saturday in the video room. Again. I'd wondered that the schedule seemed to be running through the Doctor Who episodes much faster than the times stated, but found out why when they started showing the Doctor Who Confidential episodes after each episode. Apparently that had been factored into the schedule, but for some reason they hadn't actually shown them the night before. Anyway, it was nifty seeing all the behind the scenes stuff, even if they did break up two-parters to show the Confidential for the first part in between.
I emerged from the video room long enough to go out to eat with Hunter and Lisa, then went to a Lord of the Rings fan fiction panel with Lisa. We stayed for about an hour of the two-hour panel (during which I finished sock number one), then went back upstairs and found
vaklam's laptop and Doctor Who discs of the Eccleston series unguarded. That took up the rest of the night.
