day the first - august 29, 2002

well it was a long day at school. it seemed even longer with the anticipation of the coming trip looming overhead. chemistry seemed to drag on forever. but finally, the 2:30 bell rang and instead of hurrying to the band hall like i usually do, i went to the breezeway to wait for my dad to pick me up. after turning down a request from a classmate to catch some food together, i hopped in the van and we headed to the bank. i withdrew almost the entire contents of my bank account and now had enough to pay for a hotel and $100 worth of souveniers. then it was off to barnes & noble to purchase smitha's birthday present. this took all of 2 minutes, and we headed to the airport. dad and i checked in and got our boarding passes, and then after i grabbed a salad, we went outside to wait for my mom, who was coming after class. well, class let out in the nick of time, and when she got there, we hurried ourselves through security and into the concourse (narrowly avoiding being randomly searched; the person behind us was). as soon as we got our tickets, it was time to board. the flight was uneventful; the pretzels were good. two hours later by flight, and three hours later by time zone, we arrived at hartsfield international airport in atlanta, georgia.

not knowing the airport, we decided to follow the signs to baggage claim, where smitha, emily, crysta, gill, and hamza were waiting for us. taking the train seemed a little excessive when we were just going to baggage claim. turns out we were in the farthest concourse from baggage claim, in the largest airport in the world. long story short: we walked half an hour, but finally made it to baggage claim, where the five of them were waiting for us. :o) the initial meeting went very well, and we launched right into conversation. we "buddied" up for car rides, to make sure we were safe. ;o) i was hamza's buddy. mom, crysta, and i went with emily in her car, and hamza and gill with smitha. we were off to romano's macaroni grill for smitha's birthday dinner.

we got to the restaurant safely, and had a good meal. the tables were covered in butcher paper, and crayons were provided for drawing. this was much fun. we had a drawing contest, which i lost, hands down. smitha drew yoda, gill and i both drew garfield characters, hers being the better of the two. we also all tried to write our names and screennames upside-down. i think i lost that one too. so much for being artistic. :op smitha's parents showed up for dessert, and we gave her her birthday presents, mine being the worst wrapped (shut up everyone! :op) and there now exist pictures that prove how badly i can tie bows. i don't think i'll ever live that one down. at least i can wrap square packages in wrapping paper like mad. mad like a fox. anyway, i gave her a $20 gift certificate to barnes & noble and a burned copy of the a beautiful mind soundtrack. crysta and gill gave her harry potter uno and some star wars stickers. my mom gave her a copy of pirates of dark water: the saga begins, which i actually found at a local used bookstore, and which i think she liked, by the way she jumped when she saw the podw logo when opening it. ;o) her parents gave her a new cell phone. after dinner was over and we were the last people there, we headed off to wal*mart for some much-needed supplies.

wal*mart was a blast. though i think taking the seven of us there was probably a bad idea. this group has enough insanity problems when we're not running around taking things off shelves and sticking them on our heads. it was kind of scary though, because for some reason, this particular store had boxes everywhere. you would just be going down an aisle, and when you turned a corner, your path was blocked by large stacked cardboard boxes. gill and i actually got lost trying to find our way out of what we now affectionately call "the path of doom". we checked out with everything we needed for the weekend, including bucket!trooper supplies (which you'll later learn were never used due to lack of time). we headed back to the hotel to get checked in and such. we got a room in ivy tower at the hyatt regency on the sixth floor. well, it turned out they gave us a single-bed room, when we'd reserved a two-bed. naturally, with it being a convention, there was no other room available, and they even actually told us that they can't guarantee us the room type, only the room. grar. well, we were told that we could be put on a waiting list for a better room for the other two days. we put ourselves down, and then went over to the marriott to put us on that list too. i took the comforter from the bed in our room and made a makeshift bed out of it on the floor. it was actually very comfortable. we crawled into bed around 3:30 am and slept well, because the convention would start the next day.

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woke up to find that mom had already gone down and checked us in and gotten our badges. how sweet. :o) anyway, we got our costumes on (me as an elf, mom as a jedi) and set out to find breakfast. we found a place in the neighboring mall (accessible by skywalk) that had muffins and things. so we got a muffin and a donut or two, and some milk and sat down. we realized we really didn't know where we were supposed to meet everyone that day, but we were sure we'd catch up with them eventually. item number one on our list was to see the screening of the x-files finale, which i had never been able to catch on tv before. it was... different, to say the least. confusing more than anything, but hey. it's the x-files. :op

afterwards we headed over to get my copy of i, jedi signed by michael stackpole, who was doing signings at that time. well, seeing as that was the only time he would be doing signings at the convention, we of course met smitha, emily, crysta, and gill there. we got each others' cell phone numbers and decided to meet up again at 4:00 for the michael stackpole reading of his new battletech novel. having plenty of time until 4, mom and i went back to the mall for some chik-fil-a; or "chickfilla", as crysta would say. ;o) i couldn't help but think that the people working at the mall must be a little worried by all the freaks going in and out of the convention next door. ;o) the reading was pretty cool - hearing an author read his own works really lets you hear the voice inflections and things that he meant when he wrote it. there were a few people in there who would have scared me had a been michael. you know, that "i've read everything you've ever done and let me ask you a question about this obscure subplot you wrote in this book" type of person. they were even scaring me. :op after the reading, we got to meet lori and her husband scott. lori is a big organizer of starwarschicks things. she gave us swc badges (hehe) though mine didn't have my name on it because they didn't have time to finish mine before the reading. a few of us decided to go the opening ceremonies and a production from the atlanta radio theatre company. both were sleep-o-rific. but that's okay, because smitha and i had fun giving each other the "this is making me sleepy" glance. meanwhile mom had draped her hood over her head and fallen asleep in her chair. :op it went on forever. but it finally ended. and it was off to propbuilding.

smitha and i arrived to find the others already working on a podracer. we decided to do our own thing and went to work on a millenium falcon. i'm actually kind of proud of how well me made a believable falcon from things like plastic tv dinner trays. but the people coordinating the event weren't very nice (::grumble::) and mumbled and ignored us when we asked where the paint was. we actually got locked out of the building looking for where they told us it was (::groan::), and to make a long story short, we never found it. so we had a translucent falcon. which looked retarded when it was unpainted. i swear, it would have been so cool if we could have made it silver. oh well. at least we know we did well. ;o) needless to say, we didn't win. but neither did the podracer, which looked really good.

food was in order. hamza and jenn couldn't make it to pizza that night so we decided to delay it until saturday. either crysta or gill, don't remember which, suggest ed we go to a restaurant in the marriott called champions. it was awesome, lol. being that the majority of us were music geeks, we would comment on and critique every person doing karaoke. the best part was this one guy was dressed as a klingon. his makeup was so good, he could have been in the tv show and no one would have noticed. huge guy. and he sings a love song. the best part - he was really, really good at it too. lol! we couldn't resist. we had to get him to do a sunny pose. he was very cooperative, and i'll have the picture uploaded very soon. ;o) oh, and crysta and gill's backpacks (yoda and r2, respectively) got in a fight, a la esb. it was great. the food was even really good, and i had a great time just sitting there and enjoying the company. this was probably my favorite part of the trip.

we made plans where to meet and what we would be doing the next day. we stayed out in the lobby and talked for a while. we were trying to come up with acronyms for all of our names in case we won the zahn contest to put your name in his next book... plates and staple were the two i came up with. but they were unanimously rejected. :op we broke up to go back to our hotel rooms, full and happy. but not before emily managed to almost fall over twice. ;o) that's a different story, though. all in all, a great day :o).

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