MarsCon DAY 3

It's hard to tell where Day 2 ends and Day 3 of the Con begins, usually thanks in no small part to PARTIES!!

As I mentioned in the previous post it was also my birthday weekend and my boyfriend's gift to me was a 1/4 scale remote controlled "K-9" (the robot dog from the "Doctor Who" series, for those not in the know). He even talks! With all the Brits around the parties that night I had to take K-9 out for "walkies." Of course he HAD to put in some face time at the TARDIS Tea Society party. Later on I was driving him around on the tile in the ConSuite - which apparently makes robot dogs quite thirsty because (as the picture shows) he had a sip of my beer. Or maybe his fuel cells recharge with alcohol like Bender's from "Futurama?" It wasn't long, though, before he was tired (well, his batteries were going flat) and called it a night. I, however, had some more Green Death with my name on it.

Then some other stuff happened, as is often the case when Green Death is liberally applied.

Sunday of MarsCon started waaaaay too early for my liking. "Karaoke Joes" across the hall didn't seem to run quite as late as the previous night, but I'm guessing we still only got about 2 hours of actual sleep in. Had to get up and get going because checkout was at noon and I wanted to get some breakfast at "Snarky's Cafe" before all the yummy stuff was gone.

Caught a little more of the Dementia Music track, went through the Art Show again and a quick turn through the so-called "Science" room. The day actually seemed to be flying by and before I knew it we were up to "Closing Ceremonies." The military group's head honcho was asked to come up on stage and say a few words and thanked everyone for being so respectful and giving them such a wonderful send-off, which I'm sure only those who've been in the military really can understand what it meant to them.

[Note: There was a request from the military honcho to MarsCon, which the convention has been trying to pass on to everyone who is blogging and such about it, asking us NOT to say who these military personnel were or where they are going and to blur their faces out of any photos online. While I'm big on "free speech," don't like governments trying to police the Internet, and highly doubt nefarious bad guys are really monitoring MarsCon Reports - I will nonetheless be respectful to them and have voluntarily redacted anything I wrote which would identify who they were, where they came from, what branch of the military they were, or speculate on where they might be going. After all, the IS a war on, right? ]

A brief announcement about what's coming for next year's con and then MarsCon 2008 was over.

By the time I was loading up my luggage and Con Swag I had become a bona fide "Con Zombie." I wonder how many people take Monday afterwards off just to sleep and recover from these things?

In previous years I've only taken in part of a Con - maybe Friday night and Saturday, usually skipped Sunday because it seems like a throw-away day without much going on (though MarsCon really made an effort to actually HAVE things going on for Sunday to make it worthwhile); or I've done Saturday and part of Sunday if there was a music act or something I wanted to see. This was the first time I've done a Con from front to back, and actually stayed at the hotel - which was great to not have to worry about driving home (just had to worry about finding the room! LOL).

Oh, yeah, pictures? Well, I had my camera at the Con but only took one picture with it. I seriously need to get a smaller camera that fits in a pocket - my digital SLR is just too darned big to lug around at a convention. The photo with this post is courtesy of my boyfriend, who has a more "Con-friendly" camera. :)