kevin_standlee | Prime Time at MARCON Saturday

Lisa and I donned our WSFS uniforms this afternoon and went down to mingle and look around. We poked our heads into Ops where Kim Williams (and others) were not busy (this is good) and said hello, then went over to the Dealers Room. Just outside the hall, Rebecca Forstadt was signing autographs and selling various things, including the ROBOTECH soundtrack CD. We certainly had to get one of those if only to get "Lynn Minmei" to autograph a CD to Lisa Hayes.

We ended up spending a lot more money than I usual spend in a dealers room these days. I reckon this may be because we've seen most of the stuff that dealers on the West Coast circuit have, whereas many of these folks are new (to us). We were in the Dealers Room much longer than I expected, browsing various dealers' wares, socializing with people, having our picture taken, and handing out my business card with the link to the long version of the WSFS Armadillo story.

We got as far as the entrance to the Art Show, but they require all bags to be checked, and Kuma Bear rides in Lisa's bag and certainly wasn't going to ride to the bag check, so we'll have to skip the Art Show. We tried to make ourselves visible and accessible around the con as much as I could, walking the hallways, going through the Gaming area, and so forth. After a while, Lisa said she was getting tired and a little hungry.

There's no way we were going to eat in those all-white outfits. While they can be cleaned, they're natural attractants to dark staining things. So we went back to the room and changed into "civvies" and went out looking for dinner. The North Market is only open until 5 or 6 O'clock, and after walking that far, Lisa decided we didn't need a fancy sit-down meal, so we headed back to the food court at the convention center, where we got a burger and fries.

Lisa is a bit more tired than I am -- probably the cumulative fatigue of the 2500-mile drive from Oregon catching up with her -- and is not generally interested in convention masquerades anyway, so we decided the better part of valor was to get back upstairs while the masquerade was running. We could move between floors by stairs once we were up there.

Again, I don't want to be a hide-in-his-room guest, but we did need some unwind time. We'll make the rounds of the parties a little later. For now, I'm taking the chance to work off some of the backlog of unread e-mail.