C2E2 Day 3 - The End Has Come (and a really long drive!)

Sunday, bloody Sunday...See? Inner dj is still on! There was no blood, I swear! Ok, there might have been but it wasn't real blood! It was makeup blood and it wasn't on me! There were tons of cosplayers with tons of fake blood on them. I don't have any pictures, so you'll just have to trust me that it happened.

I woke up waaaay too early this morning. It was probably close to 2am before I went to sleep and I woke up probably six times overnight and finally gave up and got up at 8:30. This meant that I was packed up and checked out of the hotel by 9am. After a quick stop at the gift shop for a couple of shirts for the boys, I dragged a luggage cart upstairs to the room, packed everything on it and then dragged it alllll the way out to the van and loaded it up. I caught the 9:20am shuttle and was at the convention center by around 10:30. Then, the great hunt for an atm machine began! I couldn't believe it, but a Sheraton hotel didn't have an atm on sight and I didn't want to walk 2 blocks down to a gas station so I figured there'd be one at the convention center. There was! Except the first one I tried was plum out of cash! Luckily, someone told me where there was another one, so I stood in line at that one and pulled my spending money for the day.

Then, it was back up to the floor to make my first purchase of the day. It's pretty rare that I purchase review items, but something about this had caught my attention and I decided to take a risk on it. What did I buy (once I tracked the guy down...) ? I bought this:

Image snagged from www.turbopizza.com

It was about 11:20am by that time (yeah, it took me a while to find that atm and then this guy!), so I decided to go sit in line for the one and only panel that I attended this weekend. Of course, I got up there and realized that it was only 11:25 and the room had another panel in it for another 20 minutes! So, I sat down on the floor and got comfy up against a wall with another girl. While sitting there, I snagged these pictures with my phone:

As you can tell, there were a lot of kids waiting in line to attend the Imperial Academy. I don't know who the folks in costume were, but they were great with the kids who were waiting.

Now, I know you want to know about that bag. Isn't it fabulous? It has My Little Pony on one side and Hello Kitty on the other and it is HUGE! I actually snagged one later in the day. One of the shops was giving them away free with purchase. It turns out I didn't want to purchase and another couple didn't want the bag which worked out really, really well for all of us.

Once the previous panel was released, my new "friend" and I headed in to listen to Dirk Manning. I guess I hadn't read the description very well in my exhausted state the night before but it was still a really good talk on working with artists as a writer. I wish Michael of Dead Factions had been there. I think he could have gotten a heck of a lot from it. I'm not going to give away any spoilers but I might write up a post where I cover some of the highlights.

I really need to start taking better photos.

After the talk, I headed back to the floor. I stopped and talked with some of the great people that I had met the day before. I even had one really cute guy tell me that he wished he'd known I'd been on my own for dinner because they would have asked me along. That made me feel pretty good. I made my way back to Artist Alley because I'd missed it the day before.

I had a lot of fun talking to people and then I came across Virgil, of prior WWE fame. He kept me there talking to him, mostly because I had a press badge, I suspect. I'm not going into a lot of what he went on about, but let me tell you folks, if you have small children, keep them away from this guy. I don't care if he does teach at a private school one day a week, his language is not anything your kids need to hear. Honestly, his ego is something the rest of us could do without too. That's all I'll say about that. The guy was arrogant beyond belief and I was sooo happy when I managed to move on.

The rest of my day was taken up with moving from table to table, talking to people. I love meeting new people and had so much fun talking with different people. I'm only disappointed by two things. The first is that I didn't get to cover all of artist alley. That means that I missed getting to see Art Baltazar again. The second is that I didn't get to meet Jesse James of Jesse James Comics. I did, however, blatantly steal his picture from Facebook. Wanna see? I stole it just so I could say booo, I didn't get to see this man!

Oh my gosh! I almost forgot to tell you who I did get to meet! I got to meet Mr McFeely from Mister Roger's neighborhood! He was so nice and we stood there talking for a few minutes. Then, he gave me this:

Isn't that fantastic? Yeah, it's the only celebrity autograph I brought home for the weekend, but I think it's the best! I'm not much of a squealing fan girl but yeah, this makes me go wooo! hehe...

Sadly, before I knew it, the time had come from me to leave the land of omg awesome comics and entertainment folks and head back home.

Another shuttle, train, shuttle ride and I was back at the hotel and started the long drive home.

The GPS helped me to tour Michigan and I finally rolled in around 1am early Monday morning. Would I do it again? Hell yes. If I'm not on the press list for next year, you will find one majorly sulking blogger here. I might be getting hooked on cons because I'm already mega excited for Phoenix in May. I'll be there Thursday-Sunday so expect another series of con posts after that trip. Between now and then, keep your eyes open for review posts and the standard life of me posts. Life keeps rolling along, even when I get to go pretend I'm real press for a weekend.

Thank you to C2E2 for believing in me, Big Dog Ink for hanging out with me, to the many vendors/exhibitors/artists who are taking a chance on me and lastly to Justin and Eric for not only believing in me and pushing me, but for keeping me company on those long train rides. I wish you could have been there with me, but we'll all be together in Phoenix next month and I can't wait for all the hugs and loves from you and from other friends who will be there, as well.