Friday,
March 21, 2003
AGGIECON - DAY ONE
Southbound and down, loaded up and truckin'. . .
Yes, it's that time of year again -- time to throw stuff into the car and head south to Texas A&M University and Aggiecon.
The trip down to College Station this morning was absolutely perfect -- straight down Central until it turned into I-45, light traffic, clouds giving way to blue skies by the time I got onto 190, and the beautiful smell of wildflowers and growing green things streaming through the car window. Ahhhh. . .
Much to my astonishment, I remembered the route from Highway 6, and got to College Station and the campus without a bobble. After parking, I trotted across the street to the Memorial Student Center, located Con Ops and was introduced to the lovely Alexis who badged me and handed me such special items as a parking pass (yay!). After a brief stop to dab some makeup on my self-destructing face (damn infection -- did something dreadful to my skin), I headed off to my reading which was attended by Scott and Kim Zrubek and two congoers. Everyone laughed in the right places for my FBOTA entry "A Rose By Any Other Name," so I'm hoping Selina will get a kick out of it, too.
That
was my last thing for a while, so I checked in and found out I was rooming in
the MSC hotel with Pat Elrod (double yay!), then met up with Julia and Ellan.
Julia took me over to Rumors for a very necessary sandwich, and we gabbed and
caught up on everything (although I'm kicking myself that I forgot AGAIN to
bring her Lawrence Watt-Evans books and my spare epee for point practice). There
was a brief spin through the dealer's room, where the lovely and talented Lisa
Blaschke introduced me to something I've been wanting for months -- a cloth
baby sling (because it's the only way Jordan will let me write). I'm going to
send her some fabric I want it made in, and with any luck the Gateway Cat will
have his own cat sling within a few weeks. And since Julia was nowhere in sight,
it fell to Scott to be my enabler and convince me to buy a beautiful set of
gold and crystal dreamcatcher earrings. God, I'm such an easy sell.
Oh,
and I had a rather amusing moment -- I wanted to take a general picture of the
dealer's room layout for here (because I'm all about bringing my life to you
people) and got ready to shoot the autograph area. A rather handsome man looked
up, grinned and made the peace sign, so I clicked and wandered off, pleased
with myself.
It wasn't until later that I realized he was Lani Tupu, one of the media guests from FARSCAPE. Um. . .oops?
After that, I knew my blood sugar was in need of serious boosting, so I grabbed Julia, Scott and Kim for a mad dash out to Chili's. After a nice meal discussing the war and learning more about Corps history from Scott, we got back to campus just in time for my last two panels of the evening.
"Pimp yo'self in ink" was fun -- it turned out that both Danny Gillies and I are from Chicago, and we spent the bulk of the panel trading Chi-town stories and making plans to meet up at Scarborough this summer. Afterwards was the obligatory "Sex and Sci-Fi" panel headed by Julia, Jeff Turner and myself. I always have fun with this panel when he's on it (especially when we can get him started on how much he hates slash :-)). Jeff and another FutureClassics member, Robert Pickering, were staying at the Kiva Inn, and invited me to come over with some other folks, but by that point all I really wanted to do was crawl into bed (well, the last few days had been something of a whirlwind trying to get the house ready for my arriving sister-in-law, AND I was getting over a sinus infection).
I chatted with
Pat for a bit before we both crashed -- if there are still a few people out
there who've never spoken with Pat Elrod, do so, because she's an absolute hoot.