Finally got my Oklacon report up
Oklacon Day 1 (Thursday)
After two days of driving, we finally rolled in about 6pm today. I left Green Bay yesterday with Allie, our daughter Kira, and a very, very….VERY packed car. Yesterday’s drive was a long 14 hour day with severe head winds from that wind storm that was blowing through the Upper Midwest, but it settled down about half way through until we stopped at my ex-wife’s place for the night. Had a good visit with her before we crashed, and thankfully Kira went to bed easy despite sleeping most of the day in the car seat. Got up this morning and met a few other people that stopped by before we left out for the final 8 hour stint into Watonga, OK. Again the drive was uneventful but the 70-75 mph speed limits were nice and made great time. Also didn’t have to worry about the wind, so fuel mileage was back up where we expected. We were supposed to stay in the lodge at the campgrounds but due to renovations that were delayed, we were moved to a local motel.
We got checked in pretty easily and cleared out some of the car to give us breathing room and headed to a local store to pick up steaks and hot dogs to go with some corn we already had for the grill at the con site. Things at the con were pretty laid back, and we got checked in easily enough and met several people I hadn’t seen since we’d been there 2 years ago. After check in and gave out some long over due hugs, we grilled up the foods during the BYOBBQ and headed to the camp fire after eating. We didn’t stay down there too long, sprinkling coffee creamer into the fire (fun for any pyro!) and listened to a couple of people telling stories until Kira started getting fussy. At that point we decided to call it quits and headed back to the motel. Today was mostly a meet and greet day and tomorrow starts the con’s first main day and events.
Day2 (Friday)
We started off going to a Subway across the street from the motel at a Loves. Loves is nation wide but come to find out Watonga is home to store #001. That was something neat, but not too special I guess. Especially since it was a rather small store. Normally this would be the official first day of a convention, but despite its small size, so many people come early and leave late that this is technically the second day of the convention and it spans 5 days total. Friday was still kinda slow in terms of events so a lot of it was spent sitting around the camp fire and me helping set up A/V for the nightly dances. The dealers den and such was up and running and one dealer reported making more sales in one day here than she did the entire weekend for Anthrocon (the world’s largest furry convention for those that don’t know).
There were the usual snags and last minute changes that had me standing around and not doing much while waiting for something else to be moved for the lights and sound system to be set in place. But I love working with this stuff, so it wasn‘t all bad I guess. It can be stressful sometimes because a lot of stuff is set up on the fly, since don’t have the time or space to plan out permanent setup locations. Heros is the A/V head but he had to run to another town to grab a computer monitor so I worked with Psyfur, Ratchet, and another attendee to do what we could, getting most everything mounted to trusses and ready to plug in once the trusses were moved into place for the dances, as well as getting most of the sound board set up.
Allie stayed down by the fire most of this time until dinner, which was a pretty yummy spaghetti. One thing that stands out at this convention is they provide you with at least one actual meal a day. Again, unlike other cons, there’s not a ton of places to go eat and all are a 10 minute drive into town. A lot of trail mix is consumed here. I took a break from my work while we chowed down and then went to a cookie exchange. Allie baked up some great M&M cookies, and a small group shared the batches of home made cookies as well as putting together a large batch of them all for the charity auction. Allie also made up a large batch of puppy chow for the auction, which is basically Chex cereal, chocolate chips, powdered sugar, and peanut butter melted and mixed together. It’s pretty simple and that sold for $28. We would have been pleased with $5, but one thing about Oklacon is the attendees are pretty devoted to the convention’s charity.
Once registration was shut down, I went back to work rapidly moving the lighting in place for the dances. Thankfully that went fairly smooth for the DJ’s to get going and I finished setting up my visuals stuff to project onto a screen. For such a small event, we have a surprisingly large A/V system. At least 2 decks with a main mixer that also have one or two other laptops plugged in for the different DJ’s, a full sized rack of audio mixers, eq’s, and other enhancements. Lighting was on 3 trusses, using 3 boards to control them and 2 laptops for my various visualization programs to switch between. I still wonder sometimes how we don’t blow breakers right and left. We ran until 1am and then packed up the expensive stuff and headed back to the motel to crash again from a long day.
Day 3 (Saturday)
We got up kinda early because Pardus from Safari’s Sanctuary, the con’s charity, was doing a little presentation with a bobcat they brought. Ricco was so cute and we were able to get a few good shots with the cameras. They had him around a few times during the con on a leash. Yes, he was on a leash. Rather well trained bobcat for the most part. After that, we had lunch before the start of one of the con’s biggest events. They hold a game called Predator Vs. Prey, which lasts about 2 hours. It’s a pretty detailed and active game, but basically some players are “prey” species, others are “predators”, and some are special characters such as flood, fire, a hunter, a Mack truck and others. Prey have to survive with food and water, while predators hunt them as well as water, and they all have to avoid the bad things like fires and floods. Think of it kinda like a massive game of hide and seek meant to mimic life in the wild.
I had our camcorder and filmed a lot of this because the chases can make for some pretty interesting footage. Since it lasts so long, we also sat around the campfire again, which was also a popular spot to see someone being chased through despite the size of the campground. Didn’t have a lot of stories ourselves to share, so we mostly just listened in until dinner time. About that time we ordered a custom little hat for Kira, but the lady’s needle broke and she’ll be shipping it to us later. They also had the variety show this evening, which went with the con’s theme of the Great Depression. It involved near vaudeville type acts and references to the era of the depression. Including a rather interesting skit about the Coyote 10 commandments and an Irish drinking song aimed at “The Death of Old Mouse Corsi”. If you don’t know Corsi, I can’t really explain him, other than he’s pretty popular at the con and is known for his rendition of 69’ing Gay Raccoons.
After that, it was about time to set back up for the night’s dance again, only this time I couldn’t set my projector up until it was about over. Tonight they had a fursuit auction. You could bid on a fursuiter to have the first or sometimes second dance with that night, with all money again going to the charity. Like last night, they kept concessions open most of the night, but this time the table top refrigerator was in the way since I was running a rear projection setup and it blocked the image. Thankfully it was moved when concessions shut down so I could fire it up for about the last hour. Also had a couple of hiccups that got laughs from the people when the DJ’s hard drive started acting up with a full volume USB disconnect sound. I think that sound helped ease a tense moment pretty well actually.
Day 4 (Sunday)
Today we slept in since there wasn’t much going on and took it easy until time to go see the charity auction run. As usual it lasted a rather long time because there was a lot of items up for bid. We had won a door mat a couple years ago that said “Wipe Your paws” and they had another up for bid this year. That was about the only thing we wanted because ours was worn out and could use a replacement. That we won, and had fun watching the bids for all the other items. Everything from a pair of Sponge Bob boxers to hand made wine box with openers was on the auction block. I was tempted to buy the 2 cans of Bawls energy drink. I don’t really go for energy drinks, but with the cans being blue and a name like Bawls, you sometimes just have to empty them. XD
After the auction, they had closing ceremonies, and was when we learned the final membership counts and amount raised for Safari’s. There was something like 368 attendees there this year, making it the largest in the 8 years the convention has been going on. Through all the charity events like the various auctions, poker tourney, straight up donations, etc, we raised $4871 for Safari’s. That was the second largest single event donation made in Oklacon history. And for years we have been Safari’s single biggest donator, even when you include corporate donations. While Blue Otter was giving some final words, I pulled Horses Ghost aside and suggested we ask for another push of donations to put us over the $5000 mark since we were so close and he thought it a great idea.
Once Blue was done, HG took back the mic and asked for that final push and he wasn’t even done with his little speech when people were basically throwing money at him! It took them a few minutes to count it all so Pardus made another little speech to make sure we all knew that Oklacon attendee’s are always more than welcomed at the sanctuary to see the animals free of charge for all our contributions. When he finished that, HG took back the mic and gave the final final numbers for donations. It ended up being Oklacon’s largest ever donation of $5365 to Safari’s. In just those few moments they pulled in over $400 extra and $5 Canadian. Hehe. I heard someone did a bit of quick math and said it came out to about $60 in donations in some form or another per person this year, meaning we’re still the highest per capita in donations of any fur con they know of.
After that I had to go give Pardus a big hug and made plans to go see them next Thursday during our trip back up to Green Bay after going to visit my parents down in Texas. Then it was off to Watonga, which is actually a few miles from the campgrounds to join in with some fursuiters that wanted to go on a walk through town. We caravanned in and grouped up and had a nice long walk. Watonga is a very small town, but everyone driving by had to look and wonder what was going on. Maybe they thought it was some Halloween event or something, but most smiled and waved. While in one parking lot, a couple of women with their kids walked up and a couple of the suiters hung back to interact with them and get some photos taken. One kid didn’t take it so well, but I’m thinking by his age he maybe thought his plushies had come to life and were now after him. There was also a huge American flag painted on the side of a building that made for a great photo-op with all the suiters lined up.
We then went back to the hotel to start getting things together to pack up and went to a Chinese place for supper. It was the 3rd choice of places to go. When I said this town was small, it’s “everything closes at 2 on Sunday because who in their right mind would want to go out after that” kind of small. The 2 other places we tried were closed already and everything else open we had already been to. It was a decent place though and had some stuff that even a non-Chinese eater like me could enjoy. Then we headed back up to the campgrounds one last time to watch a bad movie, a-la MST3K. It was a truly epically awful movie called Alien Apocalypse, about an insectoid alien race that invaded Earth to harvest all its timber. A delicacy for their kind, and they were stripping the planet of wood without replanting. Kira went to sleep during it as we expected so we didn‘t have to worry about leaving early. We said some final goodbyes then and headed back to the hotel to crash and get ready for the journey on south to the Dallas area to visit my parents.
All in all, good times with some “interesting” times thrown in to keep us on our toes. On the way back we stopped at Safari’s as we planned and took about an hour long tour there. Pardus had hoped to do it but he had other commitments and another volunteer took us around. We got to check out all the lions, tigers, and ligers, as well as smaller wild cats and wolves and such. Our highlight was the fennec fox that Kay let us hold for part of the tour. She was so cute and loved to ride up on our shoulders as we walked around. I had been wanting to visit them since the first time I went to Oklacon but never had the chance because of my job. This year we had some extra time and Kira was with us and we thought she’d love to see the animals too. She wasn’t quite as in to it as we hoped, but maybe next time when she’s a bit older to know more about what’s going on.
You can find all the videos at www.youtube.com/user/Nareimooncatt
My pictures can be found at http://www.thefoxydj.com/cons/oklacon_8/album/index.html