Wow, what an exciting weekend it was. Sorry that Polaros and myself couldn’t get around to doing the blogging like we wanted. He was having problems getting logged on at the hotel, and I was just too tired at the end of the day to blog consistently on the website. I did get some posting done on the XOC.
Thursday was one of those weird days. My flight to Atlanta was uneventful. They did change my gate from A to B and made eating breakfast a bit of an issue. There was nothing really “good” to eat for breakfast. So I settled for lunch instead.
The flight to Los Angeles was a whole other story. About an hour away from L.A. we ran into turbulence. It was rough turbulence. I’m not Catholic, but I damn near converted. I can handle a little shaking, but the dropping was bad. A couple of big drops would be enough to scare almost anyone.
Even though we left 40 minutes late, we arrived right on schedule (well, wheel’s down anyways) at 1:07 p.m. It took another 15 minutes to get to the gate. I finally arrived at the hotel at about 2 p.m. And my troubles continued. I had no phone and no internet (the internet was apparently down anyways). I had to go down to the registration counter three times before they finally got it fixed that evening.
I headed down to the lobby about 4 p.m. to wait for people from the board to show up. MoyCullen and Unwise Ocean found me first. Then Sais08, LyricSplat, and Amazon Penny. Eventually, LadyLucke, Faith and few others showed up at the meet-up. They all went their separate ways. MoyCullen, Unwise and myself went to the sports bar at the restaurant to have a drink before registration. (I’ll get into that mess of a situation in a bit.)
While we were enjoying our drink, a bunch of the Creation Entertainment people arrived to have dinner at the restaurant. Now, if registration was to start at 7 p.m. and it was 6:30 p.m. who was working the registration you might ask yourself? Exactly! Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Michael Hurst and Jennifer Ward-Leland walk in—they were going to have supper with the folks from Creation Entertainment.
The time was 7 p.m., so we headed down to registration to get our credentials for the weekend. This is where the problem started. It was 7 p.m.—Gold Ticket people were to start registration at 7. Not gonna happen. The blokes at the registration table were letting anyone registration. What is worse is that there was only two people really doing registration. In past conventions, they’ve had an assembly going with someone giving you your bracelet, and your lanyard. But for this convention, they had no one helping giving our the lanyards and one guy was doing multiple tasks that normally two other people were doing. Ugh. To make matters worse, the vendor’s room didn’t open until almost 8 p.m.
The people had four hours to get up and they were still running late.
After registering, getting some goodies, Moy, Unwise and myself went up to the sports bar for dinner. We made plans to meet for breakfast Friday morning before heading down to the convention.
