This is my week and a half away. Actually, I take that back. This isn’t just my week and a half away, since my trip started long before I ever got on an airplane. It started for me when you guys, the community, discovered I wasn’t going to be able to attend and put together the fund-raiser to get me there. At that point I went from helping around the edges to jumping in with both feet and getting stuff organized for the UI community at the ‘con. Let the fun and games begin!
Start with trying to organize stuff for groups ranging from 10 – 25 people at any given moment. Throw in coordinating flight times, cell phone numbers, hotels and a silly little thing that interferes with our time together called BlizzCon. Then try to get people to agree on what restaurant they want to eat at on the different nights. Meh, not too bad so far, except when everyone (myself included) appears to have suddenly been struck blind:
Yes, it’s a funny story now, but I was ready to absolutely cry at the time. I’ve got a bunch of authors looking at the Downtown Disney website with me, deciding which restaurants we want to go to on which nights. Call to make the reservations on Tuesday before I fly out on Wednesday. Absolutely can NOT get hold of one of the restaurants we wanted, but got through to the second and was able to make the reservation there no problem for the Friday night. Great. Mention the problem with the second restaurant in the IRC channel and Cogwheel very kindly offered to take care of getting hold of the other restaurant on Wednesday while I was on my flight down. Good, everything will be fine. I log on to IRC Wednesday morning long enough to let folks know that I’m getting ready to go catch my flight and that I’ll see everyone either later that day or on Thursday. Cogwheel pings me – “Umm, Cairenn? We seem to have a little problem here.” Oh no, what’s wrong now? “Well, you know that reservation we have for Friday night? ….. it’s in Florida” Yeah, you heard me – we’ve had like 15 of us all looking at the website off and on deciding on where we wanted to eat, and not one of us realized that the page we were looking at was for Florida’s Downtown Disney, not California’s. DOH! And I’m about to get on a plane and can do NOTHING about it! My only consolation in all this is the fact that it wasn’t just me that missed the fact we were looking at Disneyworld’s page, not Disneyland’s. Yup, some of the best and brightest mod authors you guys know and respect, and they all missed it too!
Thankfully, Cogwheel was able to get it all straightened out for us and secure reservations for our groups for both nights, in California. Unfortunately, our restaurant adventures didn’t end there. More later.
Wed, 1 Aug: The trip out to LA!
I flew out of Ottawa ON bright and early on Wed, 1 Aug. Short hop down to Newark NJ, then a quick stop and plane change in Newark NJ then a direct flight (yay!) to Orange County CA.
Warning, apparently little ol’ me can be pretty daunting when I’m flying with a migraine. (Any wonder I had a migraine? Read above!) The flight from Ottawa to Newark didn’t bother me too much because I knew it was only an hour flight so I just took some light-weight meds to get me through until I could get on the flight from Newark to LA when I could take something stronger and hopefully sleep away the worst of the migraine before I landed. Unfortunately, I get on the plane to discover I’m in a center seat. That’s not too bad, because I can just recline the seat and sleep, right? Wrong. I find that I’m in a row that the seats don’t recline. This just isn’t going to work. So I’m looking around the plane, trying to find any available seat that I can switch to, even if it’s a center seat, as long as it reclines. So I see a window seat that is empty a couple rows ahead of me. Keep an eye on it and wait until I think everyone is on the flight. It’s still empty. Yay! Get up, walk up the aisle and check with the folks sitting in the other two seats. Sure enough, no one has claimed it. Joy oh bliss, I’m going to be able to sleep! The two folks in the row start to get up to let me in, when I hear this voice behind me “That’s not your seat”. /sigh. “No, it isn’t, but it looked like everyone was on the flight and the seat was still empty so I was going to switch to it. Sorry.” Start to go back to my original seat, when I hear the Flight Attendant talking with the person: “Excuse me sir, what seems to be the delay with you getting seated? Oh, I see this isn’t your seat, your seat is back there *point*.” The guy says, “Well, I wanted a window seat and no one is sitting here so I thought I’d take this one.” Oh really, thinks me? I don’t THINK so! So I stand up and go “Excuse me? As you well know, I had already asked the other people in the row if that seat was taken, when you came up behind me and made it sound like this was your seat, and now I’m hearing that it isn’t, and you just wanted a window seat? Well, I’m very sorry, but that isn’t your seat and I laid claim to it already, so you can just go sit in your original seat because I am taking that one.” The flight attendant is all like, “I don’t care who sits there, you two sort it out.” I storm my way up the aisle and all but elbow him aside to get the seat. I really just don’t care at this point, my head hurts way too much. So, plunk myself down in this lovely window seat that also reclines, pop my heavy-duty migraine meds (which include a sedative) and settle in to doze my way to LA. Yeah, okay, so what’s the big deal about all this, you’re thinking. Well, you have to understand, I stand a whole 5’2” and weigh in about 110lbs soaking wet. I got a good look at the guy as we’re getting off the plane in LA and my migraine is mostly gone. He had to have stood 6’3” and been at least 220lbs of solid muscle and was just flat out scary looking! Not a chance I would have stood up to him under normal circumstances. Little tiny me made this guy back down! Eep!
Anyway, safely on the ground in LA, Slouken picked me up at the airport and whisked me off to the hotel where I get to meet Beladona face to face for the first time. Bella and I wander around Anaheim a bit while I show him where the ‘con is in relation to our hotel and try to find some food. Back to the hotel and try to get some sleep (yeah, right, like I could sleep? Too excited!)
Thurs, 2 Aug: I get to meet everyone!
Bela and I meet up and go meet Iriel and Esamynn. Iriel and I then ditch Es and Bela after we’and head over to Blizzard for lunch with Slouken and some members of the Blizz UI team (Eric Dodds, Michael Schweitzer, Irena Pereira, Tom Thompson and Pat Magruder). After lunch they asked Iriel and I to come back to the offices and be a “test audience” for them for the UI panel. Had a lot of fun laughing with them about problems that had already cropped up for the UI panel (including, but not limited to, Blizz’s web team mis-spelling Slouken’s name on the website) and about some of the things they are considering if things go wrong during the panel. You guys lost out, since everything went well. Rislyn (who is as hot as she is smart) considered doing some of the presentation in the sexy Russian female Draenei voice and/or perhaps doing the female human dance if the various technologies didn’t cooperate. Iriel and I got to point out a few minor things that they might want to tweak the wording of and threw a bunch of possible questions at them so they could consider how they might like to answer them if they came up. Then back to the convention center to meet up with others.
Mid-afternoon we get together with a bunch more of the UI community and hang out for the afternoon. At this point the crew includes Beladona, Iriel, Esamynn, Cladhaire, Jim, Qzot and his daughter, Cogwheel and his wife, AnduinLothar, MentalPower, Kaelten and his wife, and myself. I also found Sargeras (a friend of Kudane, Dolby and I) and his guildmate Dan during that time, both of whom spent a fair amount of the ‘con hanging out with us as well. Lots and lots of hugs all around! Spent a lot of time hanging out in front of the Anaheim Convention Center while everyone worked their way through the line-ups for their badges to get into the convention, then off for an impromptu supper at
Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney. Back to our respective hotels to get some sleep before the big day, the opening of BlizzCon 2007.