Busy rut

Nothing really new. I'm working 6 days a week now. This week I have to do a couple of 12 hour days and will probably have to work Saturday again. Oy. I'm already tired and it's only Tuesday.

I play Rockband 2 several nights a week with my brother (a bit of a shocker) and my nephew. Other nights are watching TV: House, Fringe, & Supernatural. I passed on Chuck to play Rockband 2 tonight.

That's all.

random ramblings

Blog 091508

Things in general and most likely randomly stated.

After I arrived at Bradley International Airport on my trip home I found my car battery dead. Some phone calls home and an attempted jumped from a passer-by later didn’t help. Through my brother’s advice I found the garage’s office and they gave me a jump. I made it home but the next day my battery was just as dead. They I noticed my tire was almost flat. Oy. So I spent about half my day trying and failing to get my battery out. I stripped the bolt head! My father gave me a lift and I ended up getting a new battery and my tire fixed. It all cost me $100 and took about 2 hours.

I arrived at work that night to learn I had won the bid for a job in a new department. The union rep I work with was a real ass about the whole thing. She was giving me shit the whole time and was really negative about the whole thing. When another co-worker left early because he was sick of her bullshit about leaving to chat with friends she got REAL pissy. Her sights turned on him after he was gone and she bitched the rest of the night. Strangely, she had to work the rest of the night instead of wandering. Maybe a coincidence? She even claimed that she did 2/3rds of his job for him. HUH?! I almost laughed in her face. Another friend of mine won a bid to leave the department and she got all pissy with him too. She was going to file a grievance with the union against him getting the job because she wanted her friend to get it. Nice. And she still never misses a chance to take a shot at the boyfriend that dumped her over a year ago. I don’t think she’s had a boyfriend since. Newest rumor is the union is talking about removing her as a rep. It would be a good move I think.

Fantasy baseball has been good to me. I won the wild card play-off and followed that up by beating the overall 2nd place team the next week. It took a lot of player movement though so my team took a whole new look for players. Now I’m just starting our ‘World Series’ which is two weeks long. It’s a re-match of sorts. The guy I’m playing beat me in the round to see who goes to the World Series. He ended up winning the whole thing. I finished 3rd. This year, I’m guaranteed to finish at least 2nd. So in the 3 years of this league’s existence I will have finished 2nd, 3rd, 2nd or 1st. Not a bad run considering 10 teams played and this year 12.

Fantays football has been tougher. I’m probably going to lose both games this week. I happened to face the biggests scorers this week. Jay Cutler threw 350 yards and 4 TDs against me in one league. In my other league I ran into two receivers that combined for 5 TDs and over 250 yards. Ouch. And I had some good scores myself. Just unlucky timing is all.

My new job in my new department is challenging. I always make the first few weeks challenging for myself. I try to be perfect and I end up being a perfect disaster. This sort of happened on my first over-time day. I made a lot of mistakes and felt really dumb. I was very happy to get out of work that day. Today I had more problems and possibly created a lot of scrap golf balls but it was still a better day as it felt like I was doing okay overall. The new job is fairly important overall for me. It is a pay raise of about a dollar. More importantly I’m back to being ‘skilled’ labor. Once I go to third the shift differential should make it a $2+ raise. This means that a 30 year employee cannot bump me from my job is their job is eliminated. Also, the department seems to be expanding a bit and it feels secure. So while I’m having a tough go of it at the start the benefits should more than pay-off in the end for me. The job itself is a bit boring but I like the people I’ve met so that’s terrific.

I’ve been playing Rockband with my nephew a lot this past week. We’ve been teaming up for about 40 or more minutes a night and we’ve been having a lot of fun. Because my living room gets so hot we end up being sweaty pigs by the time we are done playing the game. I was surprised that my brother joined in on a few songs. Not sure if this’ll be a regular thing but he did seem to have fun which is what it is all about.

I went to the local fair called The Big E this past weekend. It was last minute so I brought $50 with me. Parking was $10 (unexpected) and the entrance fee was $15. Oof. With food usually $3.50 to $6 my money didn’t last long. I wish I had had another $20 with me. I didn’t buy as much as I wanted to as I waited what I wanted more. I still had a decent time. With showers coming and going the fair was slow which made it easier to get around. The fair attracts over 1 million people over it’s three weeks and is like the 5th largest fair of it’s kind in the U.S. They even get some decent big names in music to play like American Idol people and 2nd tier groups like Heart and such. On a strange note, Mickey Dolenz was there the day I was there. He was the drummer for the Monkees, a sixties group. It’s weird because he was also at DragonCon.

I had a neat dream or two this past morning but I can barely remember them. It had to do with magic like Merlin and witches. I could do some or something like that. There was a house where people would go to the basement and step into a wall and teleport to a new destination. I got into some trouble or was worried I wouldn’t be able to do it. I was able to do it a couple of times though. I remember the wall seemed to be really thick as I moved through it. It was like 20 feet thick. I was tempted or maybe even stuck my tongue out to lick the wall for whatever reason. I know I was dressed weird. I think part of this is because I often try to think of Jaina stories as I drift off to sleep. Some woman was giving me crap like she was a guidance counselor. This I think was after I teleported with difficulty to a new place. I think it was like a museum or court hall or something. I remember the floors as dark polished cement or stone like in a great hall. She was giving me static searching me for the real answer I was having trouble teleporting. It was a personal reason that I didn’t want to reveal. Again the teleporting was very like in Harry Potter. I would literally walking INTO the wall or a doorway and appear some where else. When walking through the wall though I could feel it like walking through water in a pool and there seemed to be a breeze in my hair. It was really quite cool. It’s too bad I had to get up and go to work because I wish I could’ve written the dream down.

I’m having trouble concentrating on this since my brother put on the great 50’s terrible movie Kronos. It’s about mind controlling alien force that takes over scientists and sends down a big square robot that gobbles up Earth’s electricity and sends it to the space ship in space. It’s god awful horrible fun.

DragonCon part 2!

Blog 090708

DRagonCon Part 2

On Saturday I met a bunch of people for lunch. These were people I had talked with on an internet forum. At lunch we were seated and had a fun time. Bert was getting the guys to show their tits and he also got pictures of a lot of women’s mostly exposed breasts at lunch. The lunch was cool and fun and I had a good time.

After lunch, Bert, Troy and Solaris were going to check out the dealer’s rooms. It was still 3 or so hours until my 6pm gaming slot and asked if I could tag along. Or they may have offered I can’t recall. So I agreed because I liked them all and knew I probably wouldn’t see them again since I had a lot of gaming coming up.

Walking around with the trio was fun. It was fun because it was like walking around with a celebrity. Solaris was quite striking in her PVC outfit and I was watching everyone – or at least A LOT of people – checking her out. This one guy wouldn’t stop looking at her. He was staring despite his full face mask. Then he came up to Bert and asked him his name. Whoops! Guess they all were looking at Solaris.

The dealer’s rooms were fairly crowded. Troy and Solaris bought some new clothes. It was funny watching Troy get some new dudes. He was just standing there like some noble waiting for his serfs to do everything. He raised his arms to allow shirts to be put on him but that was the limit of what he did. Like I mentioned, all I could think of was a noble being dressed by his servants.

I ended up buying the soundtracks to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Terminator. Later, I found the Massacre one to be disappointing. It was mostly just sound clips from the film including dialog and sound. I’m not sure if it was a true soundtrack or something a dealer just through together. The Terminator is decent despite it being all 1980’s synthesizer. The 80’s were a really big on all synthesizer music. A lot of it sucked too.

After an hour or two I had to leave to go get my stuff for gaming. I bid farewells and hustled back to my hotel.

I played two slots of D&D – about 8 hours and went to bed back at my hotel.

I skipped a gaming slot to draft my football team as best I could for my buddy’s league. If I draft my team I go to the Super Bowl. The one year I let the computer draft because I had to work I didn’t even make the play-off’s. So there was the Kinko’s place that I could rent a computer. 50 cents a minute though!!! The former WWF wrestler Virgil needed to use a computer to and was stomping around outside the door. For whatever reason there was only one clerk and she was on lunch or something and had to lock the joint up until 1pm when she returned. Not trying to be cruel, I really wasn’t impressed by Virgil. I expected him to be bigger even though I’ve seen him at several cons before. He also didn’t seem the smartest tool in the shed from what I witnessed. But I suppose I could be wrong in that limited time frame. In the end, I was about to draft a little over half my team before I stopped because it cost me around $20. We’ll see how I do this year.

Sunday was all about gaming. Or was supposed to be. There was a gaffe in that I played a game that I was originally suppose to be later because of lack of players. So I forgot I had played it and sat down at a table to play what I thought was a new game. In 3rd Living Greyhawk, you cannot play the same game twice. In Forgotten Realms you can but you have to play it with another character. I was playing 3rd LG and got booted from my table. This really sucked as it was late enough in the slot that I couldn’t join anything else. So for the next three hours I wandered the hotels. This actually didn’t turn out as bad as I thought. I found the art show and some other areas of the con tucked away in hidden corners. I sat in for a moment on what seemed like one of the most boring panels of all time. The guy talking almost put me to sleep instantly. I left after 10 minutes or less. At some point I also sat in on a sword play demonstration. The jokes of the presenters were weak but got laughs anyways. But I found the real sword fighting info really cool. They ripped up 300’s combat sequences pretty badly. 300 is an okay movie and highly stylized and in my opinion vastly overrated. So I was really into these guys tearing down the swordplay in it. Actually, I think I caught this demonstration just before lunch with the YABster crew. I’m forgetting what I did and when as I write this.

For the game I got booted out of I did do a lot of walking around. I sat in on a Lord of the Rings books vs the movies. That was at least somewhat interesting. When that ended I found the originally King Kong movie playing. Some guy was showing it on a vaguely big screen. Kong is one of my all-time favorite monster movies. Maybe even my favorite if I was forced to pick. So I sat in just as he was fighting the T-Rex on his home island. I stayed until the end and enjoyed it immensely. Only later was I really pissed. I found that I could have sat in on How to Make Your Webcomic Profitable in its entirety. That was a real bummed to discover but there is so much to do at DragonCon that I missed it in the pre-reg book despite me circling it! In fairness to myself I had about another 10 to 15 panels circles to and the print in the book is quite small with several ‘tracks’ which is why I missed it. Tracks guide people to certain types of presentations from autograph signings to panels to screenings. I can’t recall all the tracks but they were like: horror fantasy, anime, Star Trek, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, and more like that.

I played some more D&D and had fun and got my character to reach third level at the end of my scheduled games. As I headed back to my hotel on Sunday night actually early Monday morning I ran into Solaris and Troy again. This was cool as I really didn’t expect to but had hoped to. They were dressed in costume again. Sorry Troy, I sort of forgot what you were dressed in. Solaris was dressed as a faire/pixie take your pick. She had done a ton load of swirling eye make-up that must’ve taken forever. We talked for about 30 minutes about various things. One of the girls that sat next to me at lunch came by. She looked terrific in her little black and white leather dress. Her skin is really pale and she had her zipper down showing lots of cleavage. She seemed a bit drunk and was staggering a bit in her strappy heels. I might steal her outfit for one of my super-heroines! She looked quite good though and I was sorry to see her leave so quickly.

Troy and Solaris intro’d me to a fetish photographer who gave me his card so I could check out his website. After some good-byes I finally headed off to my hotel. I think I crawled into bead around 3am Sunday night. With all that went on and my noisy ass AC unit that I thought was really pounding drums from a higher room I stayed awake until around 5 am! Gah! I forgot that my room card wouldn’t work and I couldn’t get into my room. My timing on this was horrible. I went back down to the front desk. This family was checking in at 2:30am. It took FOREVER because one guy was really chatty with the front desk woman. I think I stood there for like 10 minutes. The desk woman was very nice and ended up giving me two new room cards which I actually needed since one didn’t seem to work. But that took awhile only because someone driving around Atlanta called as she was helping me looking for directions to the hotel. Oy!

On Monday I eventually rolled out of bed around 10am. Room services asked to clean my room but I asked that they come back. I showered and packed as checkout is usually around 11am. I headed to the front desk and asked if I could store my luggage. While the hotel room kind of sucked, the staff was extremely friendly and gave me no shit. I was allowed to store my luggage and play tourist for the remainder of my time.

I headed in for a late breakfast an encountered Charles RB there. He was the English fellow that was part of the lunching crew from Saturday and ended up being roomed next to me. We chatted as we ate. He ate his Frosted Flakes dry! Ugh! He didn’t like them getting soggy though. I had my usual of an apple and a banana and a cup of milk and O.J. I snarfed down some Frosted Flakes too. Charles told me they called them Frosties in England. Charles looked pretty exhausted. I was hoping for a good story but he had been tired from a late night and had just gone to bed. Nothing spectacular. Darn it.

I blew off the con and bade farewell to Charles and walked down to the Georgia Aquarium. I could see CNN in the distance and it wasn’t a long walk. Unfortunately, because I had started so late I opted for the Aquarium and the World of Coca Cola since it was right next door.

The aquarium was pretty cool. My favorite part was this glass window that as about the height of their main tank. So this window was like two stories tall. I found it really creepy seeing fish, live, that could swallow me whole. It was a new experience. And fish are REALLY ugly. Sharks look cool but fish are otherwise exceptionally distasteful to look at.

The 3-D show was done well for a 20 minute cartoon and getting hit with droplets of water caught me off-guard. It’s aimed at kids but I found it enjoyable to watch.

They had a thing of Titanic there so I bought a ticket. It was a little boring as everything was just reading and looking at mundane artifacts. They had a couple of interesting things in it but I could’ve missed it and not worried about it now knowing what I know.

My three favorite things in the aquarium were the sea otters since they were active and fun to watch. I also liked the penguins but except for one active one they were pretty subdued resting in their environment. And I like the octopus the best. They had a plexiglass box in his tank that had waffle balls or something in it. He was climbing on the box and pulling them out through the small hole with his tentacles. Later on when I walked by he was in the plexiglass box having squeezed inside.

I spent about 2 or 3 hours at the aquarium including lunch. It was a small pizza coke and I knew it would hold me for a good long while because I could tell it would take a long time to digest. And it was decent.

A little anxious about the time I headed into The World of Coca Cola. It’s about a 90 minute self guided tour. It was okay. I think I would have enjoyed it a bit more with out the time rush. It also felt a bit repetitive since I had just spent about 45 minutes reading and looking at stuff the same format wise in the Titanic presentation. I ended up skipping the 4-d movie because of time although I probably could’ve seen it without a problem. I barely watched the commercials through the years.

The neat thing about Coca Cola World is the tasting center. They have soda fountains set up so you can sample their products from around the world. So I was drinking stuff distributed from Germany, Japan, the Houndurus and around the world. Some were decent and some were god awful. Pretty much the non-sweet ones were fairly nasty to me. Italy ranked as my number one disliked beverage. It made me shiver. One of two others did also. The stuff from Japan wasn’t even carbonated!

After that was the gift shop. It was decently sized and I liked a lot of the stuff in there. I made sure I had a decent chunk of time for that so I wouldn’t have to rush through it. I ended up buying some over-priced stuff but oh well. I bought a simply red t-shirt with Coca Cola in white across it so I look like a big soda can. It’s a heavy shirt which is decent. I bought some sleep wear pants. I didn’t see a changing room and bought large. They hang about 6 inches past my foot upon later discovery! And I bought a soda can glass Christmas tree ornament to go along with my Coca Cola Christmas tree ball. I find the red of the ornaments very striking and eye pleasing.

After that I headed off back to my hotel regretting I didn’t have time for the CNN tour. I grabbed my bags and headed for the MARTA for my trip home. While rather hot and humid the walk & ride to the airport was simple enough. I had a little trouble checking in out of ignorance though. Still, I got through it without much trouble. I did find out my flight was leaving a bit earlier than expected so I was glad that I gave myself a comfortable margin to get to my plane.

The trip home was fine and I got the window seat again which was cool. I was smart and kept my glass ornament in my hand after I got on the plane. This guy showed up with this MASSIVE backpack. This thing was like something you would use for several days of hiking. He shoved and shoved and shoved it in the overhead compartment until it finally fit. I was so happy I didn’t keep my ornament in my backpack. Later I noticed both my music CD’s cases were damaged like they had taken a severe blow. I can’t recall if I had them in my suitcase of my backpack. At least the CDs themselves were fine.

My ended ended arriving home and heading out to my car. I started my car and it shrugged in half life before dying. Uh-oh. I tried again and it made a clicking noise. Dead battery. I called my parents house for my brother who knows about these things. I got some guy to try and give me a jump but it didn’t work. So under advice I wandered around looking for the service people of the garage. They gave me a ride back to my car and jumped it no problem with a big pick-up. I was on my way home with only about a 50 minute delay which was not so bad.

Since this is just over 5 pages long I’ll end this here. But I still have my battery to write about, my training on first shift that starts tomorrow which is Monday. I’m also a little down that I’m not at the local air show because it’s a gorgeous day in the upper 70’s and sunny and the sky is a radiant blue and I hear airplanes very close but just out of sight flying around. Doh! It’s also opening day for most football teams in the NFL and my two fantasy teams are ready to go! And my baseball team is clinging to an 8-6 lead in the wild card play-off race in my fantasy league and today will determine if I’m eliminated or move on.

Okay, done for now but the full tale has not been told!

DragonCon part 1!

Blog 090208


DragonCon was terrific!

I left my place on Thursday afternoon around 12:30pm. I had the usual travel jitters of ‘did I forget anything?’ I hadn’t because I had planned everything out some time earlier.

The trip to and through the airport of Bradley International was easy. I parked in the garage right across from the hotel which was nice. Ended up being $70 for the 5 days though. Ouch.

I got to the airport so early I ended up waiting like 90 minutes to 2 hours for my flight. ZZZzzzz. So I made up my 4th ed D&D character as I waited.

The trip down was fine. Good weather and I had the window seat. Bradley’s runway seems rougher than most though so it felt like I was being jostled around. The direct flight through Delta was nice and quick and we arrived on time. The MARTA in Atlanta brought me right to the hotel although I was probably 100 feet below surface streets. That was one long escalator.

The pre-reg line for DragonCon was HUGE. It stretched from inside the hotel to all the way wrapping around 2 or 3 sides of the hotel. I was so happy I was able to walk right in and into the on-site registration. This is the third time I’ve taken this approach and have not had to wait for 2+ hours in line to get me registration. I think I waited about 40 minutes and part of that was a gaffe on my part for waiting in the wrong line. Damn Ticketmaster line! After getting my registration which I believe was $90 I headed over to the third hotel of the con and snapped up all the D&D games that I had hoped to get to and play. I was happy. J

By then it was approaching 11pm and I had been up since early morning so I went to my hotel and crashed until Friday. Friday was the official first day of the con anyways. My hotel, after review sort of sucked. But the hotel staff I encountered were terrific. Even though I was only on the 5th floor my toilet had little water pressure. This meant that even after a piss the water would hardly go down. Dropping a deuce sometimes took three flushes to get the water clean again. My heater/cooler was also really loud. On the last night it was thumping deeply to the point I thought someone was having a party with loud music and the bass was shaking my room. Only when I turned it off did I find out otherwise. The cable for the TV was really shitty. Not that I was there to watch TV but if I have cable I don’t expect bad reception. And finally, and I couldn’t tell from where exactly the noise was coming from, it sounded like people were constantly moving furniture around. The sound was that of a chair or table’s legs being dragged across the floor. It was highly annoying. The continental breakfast was decent and I was able to load up on OJ, milk, apples and bananas (green ones) each morning. They had other stuff but the one donut I had was pretty weak so I avoided them thereafter.

Friday was gaming day. The gaming hotel was the farthest from me but still a quick walk overall. I could either walk through the other hotels or go around. Because there is so much eyecandy at the con I usually walked through the hotels. I ended up playing Living Forgotten Realms 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. I hadn’t read the rules at all so I felt really stupid. Still, my game was fun and I had a fun time replaying my favorite D&D character, Fallon Dawnrising, a priestess of Lliira. The other players were pretty cool about helping me out with things and I had a good time. The next 4 hour slot was another Forgotten Realms game and I had another good time. The con was off to a terrific start.

My third game of the day was Living Greyhawk. This Living campaign is ended at the end of the year. I had planned to play around 6 slots of it but in the end only ended up playing 2. Because I had so much fun with 4th edition though I didn’t really miss the 3rd edition Greyhawk. I also prefer the Forgotten Realms world to the Greyhawk world. I ended up playing my deep Halfling character Brownie. She’s a lot of fun to role-play. She’s a foul-mouthed multi-classed character who dislikes most humans because they enslaved her when she was young. So I really get into mouthing off as a player. The table usually cracked up too so it was hopefully good role-playing as opposed to look how awesome I am and worship me role-playing. Unfortunately, because Brownie is so spread over so many character classes she kind of sucks as a fighting character which is essential to success in Greyhawk. It didn’t seem to hurt me too badly this game although the party had a lot of trouble of a flying opponent which could barely touch. I had A LOT of fun with this game because of the role-playing I did.

For my last game on Friday I went back to playing Forgotten Realms, the new living campaign. Because I knew almost nobody I was a single player in search of a table. It’s not a bad thing but can be troublesome because I can get stuck with a group of all friends and kind of left out of the loop at the table. While in the end I still had fun with this game it ended up being average to slightly below average. This was due to two players apparently a couple. I wasn’t sure if they were married or boyfriend-girlfriend. Right off the bat the guy was very verbal in directing people in what to do. They were tagged along by a teenager that seemed new to the game. The guy almost ditched him from the table when tables were mustering before playing. I was put off by that because it felt like they didn’t even care about him. So this guy was all kind of pushy and making suggestions of what everyone should but I ended up playing my own game. Later, the girlfriend and also the guy where constantly debating the rules with the DM. This really sucks at a table. It really hampers the game and it seemed to be a pissing contest for the guy and girl to be right all the time. I found them somewhat unenjoyable to play with as they seemed more about the rules and than having fun. Strangely, the guy seemed a lot more normal and likeable away from the table as we happened to be getting food at the same place during a small game break.

After that game it was walk back to the hotel and needed sleep.

Because I had a luncheon meeting at noon on Saturday I didn’t slot a game for Saturday morning. I ended up going to the DragonCon parade and ended up enjoying it very much. The only drawback was the people lining the streets with cameras ending up trying to trump one another for the good photo and ended up moving into the street ahead of everybody blocking views to get good pic’s. My favorites of the parade were Silver Sable and huntress as they were really hot! There was a guy that had modified a Powerwheels vehicle that kids drive around into a being driven by a robot. It was really neat. And the zombie pushing the hearse. He looked terrific and stayed in character as far as I saw. I did feel bad for some folks though. There were numerous people fully clad in heavy looking costumes from head to toe. These guys ranged from Stormtroopers from Star Wars to Stargate army fatigue folks. I was hot as hell in the sun and I was just standing there. These people must’ve been dying. A lot of women wore high heels in the parade. I’m not sure how long the distance they walked was but a lot of them were wearing stiletto boots or boots with heels 4 or 5 inches high. Their feet must’ve been killing them by the end. I saw one girl a few hours later walking in just her socks and carrying her knee high stiletto heeled boots with 3 or 4 inch heels. For photos of the parade, just punch up DragonCon parade 2008 on flickr.com. I’ve found over 1000 photos so far.

Talking about high heels, a TON of women and even some guys were wearing high heels. I was surprised by how someone’s walk could kill the effect of a great looking high heel. I saw a pretty good looking Ms. Marvel. She’s a Marvel super-heroine that wears a black one piece bathing suit combined with evening gloves and thigh high boots. This attractive blonde was dressed as her and had on 3 or 4 inch stiletto boots. Except she stomped. I mean she REALLY stomped around. Her walk made her look like a parading horse or even a guy more than a woman. Later on I saw a chubby Catwoman in stiletto boots with spiked heels. She was obviously not as good looking as the Ms. Marvel but her walk was much more of a sway and I found her more attractive than the better looking blonde even though her form-fitting PVC emphasized her pear-like body shape.

After the parade I wondered around a bit trying to promote my comic that I had with me. This is my The Necropolis Chronicles comic on Drunkduck. I made sure to carry my comic so that people could see the cover and title. As I wandered through the various dealer’s rooms and then the comic pro’s I kept and eye out for eyes scouting my comic. It worked as some people checked it out but nobody actually asked me about it.

I headed off to the first hotel to meet up with the Comicbook Resources crew for lunch. CBR.com is a comic book website with many forums on comics. I usually hang out at You’ll All Be Sorry which is comic writer Gail Simone’s board. I was really hoping to meat some people from there. I was little nervous because I wasn’t sure where to go or how I would recognize people. I somewhat knew what two different people were looked like. I scouted by a group that I thought might be them. I skulked by once or twice more and decided to ask them if they were the YABS crew. They were. I totally missed the somewhat small CBR sign Perry was holding. Oops.

I met Bert first. Bert is quite a popular person on YABS and I had seen his picture. He is very friendly and quickly introduced to the rest of the crew. This was very handy as I can clam up pretty good around new people since I know sometimes I piss people off with my dry humor that can seem very serious. So I got to meet around 6 people very quickly and most I recognized from screen names. Charles RB was the first I believe to converse with me. He was really cool .He’s an Englishman still in college. His voice is awesome. He’s this skinny guy with this deep ass voice that sounds perfect for voice acting or commercial announcing. I couldn’t understand everything he said because of his accent but it was a right treat to listen to him speak. I found him engaging and enjoyable to talk to.

Soon the announcement came that Solaris and her husband were due to arrive. This I was really looking forward to. I think I’ve spoken the most with Solaris at YABS. She has been very kind and good to me and very helpful and engaging. Geez, I even have a small crush on her. Then I became enamored because she showed up in her ‘vinyl bitch goddess’ outfit. I’ve seen this outfit before in photos and loved it. She wears tight PVC highlighted by chains and metal clasps. I think it’s a halter top combined with a leather mini-skirt and a corset with lacing in the back. She was wearing platform PVC thigh high boots with 4 or 5 inch heels. She also had on cool shades. She’s in her 40’s and looked terrific! Her hair was cut really short and layered getting closer to her head with each layer. Her top most layer was blond, then about an inch of pink and then a darker color. She really looked quite fetching.

Behind her was her husband. I was happy to meet Troy and found him to be very friendly towards me and pretty cool to boot. We ended up talking a lot. He’s a pretty big dude over 6 foot. Solaris is tall too, about 5’10 normally and over 6 in her boots. Troy was still taller. He had on a kilt and had a sort of Highlander theme going on that he pulled off quite well. His arms are thick and not spindly like mine so I’m sure a punch from Troy would hurt pretty bad.

I got a nice hug from Solaris and a hearty handshake from Troy. After some more chit-chatting our troop of about 15 people headed off to the eatery Bert had reserved a table for.

Since this is 4 pages in Word I’ll continue my DragonCon exploits over the next day or so.

DragonCon was awesome but,...

coming home to a dead battery was not. So I spent today rushing about doing car repairs since I discovered I also had a flat tire.

Sigh!

And now I'm off to bed very soon before work.

I hope to post a huge post soon about DragonCon!