The Other Sandy

So I'm very late in posting this in that day 3 was actually last Sunday. In my defense, I drove directly from the con in Wisconsin to my BF's in Illinois for an evening of The Avengers on Blu-ray. I didn't get home until after midnight. Monday was spent paying many bills, running errands, and squeeing about Hawaii Five-0 because I am a multifandom ho'. ::nods::

Anyway, Sunday was a day of multitasking. I listened to many interesting panels while reading H50 spoilers and looking at pretty, pretty pictures of Chris Evans on my laptop.

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This is the first year the con hasn't been held a short drive from my apartment, due to the Ryder Cup people taking up all available hotel space in the Greater Chicagoland area. We're currently in Madison, Wisconsin. This is actually okay with me because I live just a couple of miles down the street from the Ryder Cup venue and my neighborhood has been a three-ring circus all week because of it. Too bad traffic on I-90 sucked so hard. There was a solid 62 mile segment that was under construction, followed shortly by a lane closure because someone had spilled something fluorescent yellow all over the road. The two hour drive took me four and a half hours. Hopefully, it won't be as bad headed home on Sunday.

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It definitely makes me sad that this con keeps getting smaller and smaller, but one of the side benefits is that panels are starting later in the day. No more dragging my butt out of bed at the crack of dawn to attend an 8:00 a.m. panel, only to discover that no one else had managed to drag their butts out of bed at the crack of dawn and I was the only one there.

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The adventure begins.

I had a reservation at the Dad's Inn (formerly Day's Inn South) where I have stayed for something like seven of the last eleven years. My first clue that there was going to be a problem this year was when I pulled into the parking lot and it was nearly empty. Granted, hotels do most of their business Friday through Sunday, but I've checked in on Thursday before and it wasn't this dead.

My second clue that there was going to be a problem was that all the signs in the lobby were sloppily hand-lettered in Sharpie. Again, the hotel is under new management, but it's been under new management for a year. If nothing else, that's more than enough time to learn how to use GIMP or something.

Clue number three was the room I was assigned. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, there were cigarette burns in everything, and the bathroom light was approximately two candlepower. When I called the front desk about the bathroom light, I was told to come downstairs to be assigned a new room.

The new room was the middle of a set of three connecting rooms, and all of the rooms on that floor facing south had windows that opened onto the roof of the restaurant on the floor below (probably to allow access for maintenance). Not only did my window not lock, it wouldn't even close all the way, so anyone in that strip of rooms could climb in through my window at any time. I did not exactly feel safe. That's when I gave up and checked out.

I was a little freaked out about being temporarily "homeless" in Lansing, but the con had sent out an alert yesterday that the con hotel had reached the end of the waiting list and there were still rooms available, so I made that my first stop and lucked into a room.

So, I'm now staying at the Causeway Bay, which has been so thoroughly renovated that it's making me feel underdressed. I'm in room 472 if anyone wants to say hi.

I'm now on Day 9 of whatever galloping crud my coworker gifted me with. I have missed more days of work from this than from anything else ever, including the flu and surgery. But I dragged my hopefully-no-longer-contagious self out of bed and over to Schaumburg because today is the first day of winchestmidwest. I think this is the first time the con has met outside of a hiatus, so we all got to watch the show together.

We actually started with a video presentation that condensed each of the first five seasons down to about a minute and a half, then summarized the theme of each season and the recurring characters we met there. Then we were supposed to have another discussion with the show's art department via Skype (something we did at the last WinMid), but they were busy with an episode and had to cancel, so we watched "The French Mistake" instead, and then turned on tonight's new ep. I was taking notes in the dark the whole time, so we'll see if I can remember what these scribbles mean.

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The last event of the con tonight was a variation of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, which involved pinning a pie on a target of Dean.

I'll have more con reports throughout the weekend.

So, you know how I said I wasn't going to be able to attend the con because I was sick? Well, Creation never got back to me about what would happen to my unused ticket, and several people told me that in their experience Creation would not give me a refund or exchange my ticket, so I skipped the first half of the con to sleep and ply myself with cold meds, and then my germs and I attended the second half of the con. Deepest apologies to anyone I gave the plague to. I would've stayed home if I could've gotten reimbursed somehow.

For those of you who have read my con reports before, this will not be one of my obsessively detailed ones. For one thing, I'm still sick. For another thing, Supernatural fandom exhaustively documents fandom goings on like no other fandom I've ever been in. I have no doubt that the entire con will be up on YouTube by the time I finish typing this.

That said, there won't be a Friday report (well, there was, but it was just me whining about being sick and not attending the con). Fortunately, I didn't miss much. I love Richard Speight, but I've seen him before. I'm not interested in Jason Manns, and Matt Cohen was doing a second panel today.

The first two guests of the day were Fredric Lehne and Aldis Hodge. I've seen them both before, so I skipped them in favor of some extra sleep and another dose of cold meds. The first panel I attended was for Matt Cohen.

( Matt Cohen )

( Travis Wester and A.J. Buckley )

( Mark Sheppard )

( Clif Kosterman )

This year was kind of a weird one for questions. There were a lot of people asking the same questions over and over again, and quite a few facepalm-inducing ones. It got to the point that if someone asked an interesting and intelligent question, the whole room would make sounds of appreciation and awe.

And just when I thought Adam Malin Gary Berman couldn't possibly get more annoying, he found a bell from somewhere (it sounded like a bicycle bell) and used it repeatedly during the auctions.

Today was the day where I wound up doing virtually none of the things I had originally planned to do. The day started off well enough with a Pros hurt/comfort panel. I came out of it with a list of stories to try, and I also ran back upstairs to one of the rooms that was having a big zine sale because I remembered seeing one of the zines that had been recced at the panel on sale there. So I now have yet another zine.

After that, I had intended to go to the John Barrowman panel followed by the Stargate rare pairings panel, but I somehow wound up at the Donald Strachey room party instead, where we watched the first movie, Third Man Out. Donald and Timothy are just so darned cute together.

Then I hit the art room a second time to fill out a ballot and place 2 bids. The items I bid on didn't make it to the auction, but that doesn't mean I wasn't outbid on them because I was the first bidder on both. I won't find out if I got them until tomorrow, because the line at the art room after the auction let out was still enormous at 11:00 p.m. I didn't want to wait in a line that long without knowing if I even needed to or not.

After a quick supply run and lunch, the BF and I went to the gen vid show. It was an hour and fifteen minutes long this year, which isn't as long as it used to be but was much longer than last year. I had to leave before the end of it for a Pros panel on where to find fic, vids, fan art, and whatnot on the Internet. That's the first time I've ever not watched the entire competition vid show.

Then I experienced panel fail. I intended to go to an A-Team panel, but the moderator didn't show up. I headed over to the Sherlock Holmes panel instead, but there was no place to sit, and everyone was talking at once so I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. So I decided to hit up the panel on TV remakes, but that room was totally empty. I tried to go through the dealer room again, but most of the dealers had left early for dinner. At that point, I just gave up and started reading.

After dinner, I watched a compilation of przed's older vids, followed by the second showing of the competition slash vids (sue me, I liked them). Then I went upstairs to meet the BF at jennetj's John Barrowman room party. It was already well underway when I got there, but I got to see a good chunk of one of his concert videos. Then jennetj offered up copies of any of her files to anyone who wanted them (that's what our supply run had been for--the BF and I both needed bigger flash drives).

And that is just about it for the con. We'll be stopping by the art room in the morning to see if I won anything or if someone won one of the BF's pieces, then passing through the dealer room one last time so I can say goodbye to all the things I didn't buy before we head home.

I just hope tomorrow isn't as hot as it has been the last couple of days, because the AC in my car died.

This con seems to get smaller every year. There's a lot more room in the aisles of the dealer room than usual, both because fewer people are crowding in there and because there are fewer tables.

The hotel is mostly broiling hot everywhere except the atrium, but at least they've moved a number of comfy couches in there and they're sitting under the AC vents. I will probably get to make good use of one of those couches at some point. I've been sick since a week ago Thursday and between my cold and my cold medicine, I tend to do a face plant in the late afternoon.

Today seems to have been the day for things to go wrong. They couldn't find my badge this morning because it turned out they'd put me down as a supporting membership instead of attending. Then I tried to buy some Stargate T-shirts from one of the vendors, but the credit card machine couldn't get a signal (I was the only person all day this happened to for her). Then I picked up my zine pre-orders from one of the vendors, and they'd given me 2 copies of one of the zines and no copies of another. Fortunately, all of it was pretty easily fixable, even if the T-shirt vendor had to take her credit card machine out to the registration area to get a signal.

So far, I've mostly bought zines (what a shock) and attended panels. The count so far includes 4 Pros zines, 3 Supernatural zines, 2 Stargate SG-1 zines, 1 Mag 7 zine, and 1 Man from UNCLE zine. I also bought a button (FANOSAUR--been there, done that, bought the zine). And jennetj was kind enough to bring me 2 big binders of Pros circuit fic to borrow.

The first panel I attended was on House and whether or not the show had succeeded in ruining all the characters. I seemed to be the complete opposite of everyone else in regard to which characters I liked and didn't like. Sorry, House fans, but it wasn't the end of the world (or the show) for me when Cameron left.

After that was a grammar panel on words commonly used incorrectly. It was nice to let loose (with two 'o's, not 'lose' with one 'o') my inner grammar nazi for awhile.

Then I went to a panel on obscure, short-lived TV shows. Most of the ones mentioned were from before my time and that have not seen much (if any) syndication, but it was nice to know someone besides me remembers Adderly and Probe.

I finished up with my first ever Pros panel on the action aspects of the show.

The BF and I were going to do a hall crawl tonight, but there didn't seem to be very many people ready to open their doors yet and not very many of them were decorated, so we decided to call it an early night (we both had to get up before the crack of dawn to make it here by noon).

Hopefully, there will be more people here tomorrow.

Today was the last day of the con. Boo.

It started off with a spoiler panel, which I skipped because I didn't want to be spoiled for the end of the season. After that, prizes were handed out for the scavenger hunt and the annual raffle. The big raffle prizes were an autographed picture of Jared, and a book of Jerry Wanek's set designs that was given out as a cast/crew gift, neither of which I won. However, I did win a very nice Jensen & Jared mouse pad, which my John Sheppard mouse pad says I can't hang out with unless it's there too. That was followed by the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of Supernatural, consisting of one important scene from every aired episode to date edited together in order.

After lunch, we were supposed to get the world premiere of the newest Plastic!Winchester Theater episode, but ant3ka suffered technical difficulties with the file so we couldn't watch it. This actually worked out okay because we were running about an hour behind and that put us back on schedule. We ended with speculation about how we thought the season was going to end and what we thought was going to happen in season 6.

We also posed for the annual group photo. Usually we just take one or two with everyone smiling, but after we took the smiley photos, someone wanted a really serious 'we're about to go to our deaths' photo like the group shot Bobby took in "Abandon All Hope." That was going well until someone in the back said "platypus" and we all died laughing. It then took about 5 more attempts before we got a successful serious shot. People kept cracking up a nanosecond before the flash went off. I'm afraid we're not actually a very serious group. We also posed for a mock angsty 'weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth' photo, which turned out well if all the giggling from the people who saw it is anything to go by. The photos are supposed to be posted to winchestmidwest later, which I hope they are so I can snag them.

One thing to be said about a con this small is that you end up on a first name basis with everyone there. I'm going to miss seeing everybody when the show finally ends.