"I'm touching myself but I'm not waking up!"
So I said I wasn't going to do a Breakout report, and there was serious public outrage. It was a little scary. So, especially for alovysa and kathygascoigne (because it was their first con, and I'd hate for them to not get the full con experience by me not doing a report...) I'm doing what I can.
But I'd like to say outright that this will probably be SHORT. I hope. I'm going to try, at least.
Also, because it makes it nice and easy for me when it comes to the reporting and making it shorter, there will probably be times when I mention things that Michael Muhney said, and I might not elaborate. This is mostly because there were times when he asked that we didn't put what he said online, and though some people probably already have, I'm not going to be one of those people. So if there's a story I don't tell, and you weren't there to know what I'm talking about - please don't ask me to go into further details!
So Thursday morning, I finished work at 7am and headed out for the bus into York. My train was nice and on time, so I caught that, and then passed out until London. We arrived 8 minutes early, and just before I got there, I had a text from onmycrew saying that they'd landed at Gatwick. So I meandered across to Victoria, got a copy of Love It and a hot chocolate in Cafe Ritazza, gave some French people a nice impression of English “youfs”, and then waited for them to arrive. They managed to get on the wrong train (the train train instead of the Gatwick Express), but at least they made it okay! We were trying to kill time so that we could go check in at the hostel, but even after getting a hot chocolate and standing in a ridiculous constantly changing queue for getting Shirley and alovysa a couple of Oyster cards, it was only noonish when we got to Piccadilly. So we stayed on the tube til Leicester Square, and went to Pizza Hut, where we proceeded to order far too much food (see, the three of us didn't need jainaj to order pizza! It's only when we're all together!) and while I sent texts to everybody telling them that the Americans had landed.
We managed to kill enough time that it was after 2pm when we left, so we could go check in and get some serious sleep. While we all napped, the Random French Guy who was going to be sharing our room for the night came in, left some stuff, and left. He was gone when we woke up, which made things easier for us. We got up at like 6.30 and then went out for a walk to try and find somewhere to eat - we were going to do Chinese buffet but we were all still too full from our Pizza Hut experience so we walked around for almost an hour just looking for somewhere that wasn't packed. We eventually decided to go back to the first pub we'd walked into and just get drinks at the bar until some seats were available, and what do you know, by the time we got back there was a nice spare table!
So we ordered fish and chips and some wedges, I made them smell brown sauce, and we ate as much as we could fit inside us, before heading back to the hostel to DS a bit. I took fruit to both Shirley and Verdie's towns, phoned Mam, and then we all went to sleep. Well. We talked and talked and talked about TV, and then went deadly silent as soon as Random French Guy put his key in the lock. We think he thought we'd all been asleep straight through from the afternoon, lmao. He probably expected us to get up and leave at silly hour of the morning, but nope, we left at 9.30 while he was still in bed. But he was watching us, and it was a little creepy. He did ask us a question when we came to bed - he came in and said “Can I open the window?” which none of us answered, all pretending to be fast asleep. And he did not say “Can I ask a question?” which is what Shirley thought he said, lmao. I can't even remember what Verdie thought.
We were up bright and early (ish) to go meet fallen-wiccan and scourgeoe at King's Cross on Friday. Well. Their train was due in at 11.15, and we had to be out of the hostel by 10. So we went to Costa and got drinks, and Shirley and Verdie got a fruit salad cup. It wasn't until they were done eating it and I was playing with the label that we discovered it was out of date the day before (the 17th - the date did not say “use by: yesterday” on it, which we established after much laughter). Shirley and Verdie weren't going to say anything, but I was outraged, so I went to the counter and managed to get their £2.50 back. Score! The woman was like “Do you want another one or do you want a refund?” I was like “... well, they've already eaten the one that's POISON, so the money back please...”
Then the guy spent like half an hour checking the dates on EVERYTHING in the fridge unit. Go us! So once we were done causing a fuss about that, it was 11ish, and we left to go get Karen and Max. Once we got to King's Cross, I left Shirley and Verdie downstairs in the tube with my suitcase so that they didn't have to pay to come out through the barriers, and I went upstairs to get some cash, just exactly at the same time Karen and Max were coming up the platform and rang me. And then I managed to get them down to the platform without too much fuss, and Max even managed to get his ticket through the machine without breaking anything! :P
Then we headed for Heathrow. We probably annoyed everybody on the tube because we - shock horror - kept talking! Max and I sat at the end on the cases, and Shirley, Verdie and Karen snagged seats. Which meant we were having two seperate conversations, and kept yelling things out to each other to include them in the other conversation. It was quite a quick hour, actually!
Then we went up and there was a Hoppa pretty quickly after we arrived, so we got on that, and arrived at the Rad! I could see Sean Harry through the door before we even got off the bus - lovely image to greet us!
Max and I guarded the bags while Karen and Shirley went to check in, then we registered and got the schedules (pretty good for missing the Prison Break talks with minimum fuss!) and then I went to hang out in Karen and Max's room til fray101 arrived to check us into ours. When she did, I went downstairs to meet her, and then we headed over to Karen and Max's room to get my case. Which is where we were when people started texting to ask where we were, so Karen and Max's room became our own personal Meet & Greet room. There was a big flurry of arrivals after that, so I can't be sure exactly of the order that people arrived, but in the meantime, almarsare and marge_wings showed up, as did mrbuttmonkey and kathygascoigne, and we had a text from xfunkydoryx first asking for directions, and then saying she'd forgotten her ticket and was going home for it. We also used Karen's laptop for a bit of board postage, freaking a couple of people out in the HIMYM thread because the idea of a group of people reading a thread individually is one thing, but me reading the thread out to a room full of people is apparently weird!
Then we dispersed a bit, people went to register who hadn't already and I took my case across to our room. We did some 10x8 buying, and some photo session ticket buying (which was made totally complicated by the fact that you had to by a bizarre combination of pictures to get the free cast shot due to the small number of guests, but we got there in the end!) and I ended up buying an extra Jason Dohring picture and was talked into buying a Mark Sheppard picture that I wasn't going to get because I already had all the good ones, and then she produced a new one!
We decided to go to the garage and I managed to score a 2 litre bottle of Irn Bru for only 99p, and then we dumped all that stuff off and headed down the other direction to look for somewhere that sold alcohol and to check out the bowling alley for Ryan. Our hunt for alcohol was fruitless (and as it happens, we discovered on Sunday there was a shop called Sovereign Food & Wine just round the corner from the original garage, doh!) but it was okay, as when Kat arrived she had Whiskey, and Almar had various other alcohol with her, too. And in the end we didn't even really drink any of it. We just wanted the comfort of knowing it was there!
There was some more hanging out in our room, Kat phoned to say that she was in the lobby and came up, and that angelite and generalzog had arrived too. I decided to shower before the steward's meeting, and then we watched Neighbours and headed down for that. It was the shortest one ever, because it was in the main hall and they were testing the sound system. I also remember that at some point Ryan phoned from his room and Hilary totally freaked him out by answering the phone with “Hello Ryan!” when he didn't realise that his name flashed up on our phone when he did that.
When we headed downstairs for the opening ceremony/meet and greet, people were hanging out in the lobby. We decided to nip in to talk to Almar and Marguerite, who were still on photo sales, and that happened to be in the little corridor thing where you get into the main hall.
This led to people going “Oh, they went in, so can we!” so our talking to Almar resulted in us starting a queue. Heh. Awesome. We spent the time peeking into the main hall and trying to figure out how 13 people could fit onto a table with 8 seats for the M&G, and failed. Once we got inside, Ryan and I went to save four seats on another table for Max and Karen and Almar and Marguerite.
I spent a while talking to Pauline before things kicked off, there were a few public service announcements for the con newbies, and we were told that the M&G would be in another room and we'd all be led there afterwards. Which meant that our carefully planned seating was all ruined. D'oh! Never mind, we asked Ian if this “new room” would be seating or standing, and managed we happy enough to be told it was going to be seated. Phew. Because there were more people than there were in the M&G at Squared, and that was standing, and it was manic. The guests were mobbed!
The opening ceremony was nice, Mark was chatty as always, and it was great that Jason managed to make it along for Friday night after all. Instead of them all going off and then coming back on all together, they all stayed on stage. But it was nice, though we realised that we absolutely didn't care about the Prison Break dudes. We'd expected that anyway, but then there's the Gigi Edgely effect, so it was always possible we would like them. But they didn't have that effect. M'eh.
So we moved off to the M&G room, and still managed to share the same tables, got out Mel's big plate for the Jaffa Cakes, and were next to Karen and Max and Almar and Marguerite's table anyway. Mark Sheppard came over first and naturally helped himself to the Jaffa Cakes, only he broke into the mini pod we gave him instead of eating off the plate and taking those away with him. Never mind though! We had a big discussion about BSG (okay, everybody else did) which then turned into a discussion about him and accents, and then I turned that onto CSI (since he's been in Vegas and NY and was English in one and Irish in the other). Mark is always fun to talk to, so that was good!
Then Stacy Keach came over, and Mel's Mark became a legend by managing to hold up the conversation so that we don't think either of the Prison Break guests knew we hadn't seen the show. After having expected that Stacy would be the skeezy one, it turned out that Robert Knepper was - he freaked Verdie out by touching her neck and asking if he could sit there in a bit of a freaky voice, and then kept touching Verdie and Kathy on the leg while he was talking. Verdie was so freaked out that she lied to him and told him that she's a fan of both PB and VM.
When Jason sat down, he was very quiet. We literally FORCED him into eating a Jaffa Cake, which we probably shouldn't have done, but we were showing him that they only have 1g of fat while he was saying he was watching his weight, and he eventually ate one, reluctantly, though he didn't take his mini pod with him. He seemed to want us to start the conversation, and we didn't have anything to say, really. Probably because of the staring. Hee! We did manage to get him talking about how he felt about the cancellation, and the fact he was there for Friday when we weren't expecting it, which was nice, and then he started talking about this Spielberg thing he might be doing. Again, Mel's Mark was our saviour, I seem to remember!
Finally, Michael came over and launched into a conversation about his wife being pregnant and some other stuff. Michaelangelo was sitting on the table and he said “And her teenage...” and was staring at Michaelangelo while he was talking about his wife, and trailed off, and then said “... mutant ninja turtle...” and thought he'd gone insane. He said “I was like, is that really there or have I gone fucking insane?”
We offered him a Jaffa Cake but he declined to eat one then in case he got chocolate on his teeth, but said “Hey, I was told about these! Who told me about these?” and I said it was me, and he asked my online name rather than my name name and I was thinking “But I sent an email, so it WAS my real name...” So I said that, and he was sort of like “Oh...” Hee. Anyway, he took his pod away but we didn't find out what he thought of them, or if he'd even tried them by the end of the weekend. He literally talked pretty much non-stop, which was awesome - and it was so funny, Verdie was sitting next to him and it wasn't until he was told it was time to move on that he looked at her and said "I'm so sorry! I didn't even make eye contact with you!"
Hilary gave him his JD and coke, which he loved, since she'd put the JD in a little bottle with a vote Lamb label - he left with the drink but without the bottle, so Hilary passed it to his PA & wife to keep. She also managed to ask him her question about why he calls us all hobbits at RoL, when if he's the Wizard, surely we should be Munchkins.
While Jason was at our table, Sean Harry reached over and took one. It actually took him a lot longer than I'd expected. He came back later and took another, and I tried to bat his hand away and tell him he couldn't have one unless he told us when LA tickets were going on sale. He took one anyway and told us Tuesday, and elaborated a bit and then told us about this other thing which we still haven't discovered if it's going to happen or not. We've been reliably informed we were being mocked by Ryan for sucking up to him, but we weren't even BEING suckupy. We were just finding out vital information which he didn't release to the world at large until at least four hours after us!
Eventually we got thrown out of the M&G room because even though we were too lazy to move, they said they just wanted people in there who were still waiting for a guest to come over. It was suggested we move to the main hall, but this is US. So we didn't. Before we left, though, Hilary and I took Jason's pod of Jaffa Cakes up to Mark and said he hadn't wanted them, and Mark eagerly took them! We didn't even notice he'd been sitting next to Robert Knepper at the time, lmao.
Then we we went and hung out in our room, watching Jonathan Ross but not actually listening to it, surfing around a bit (snigger...) and then having a freakout about Neighbours moving to five (okay, that was just me).
Eventually people dispersed and we sorted Kat's floor-bed out (ie, she unrolled her sleeping bag and gave her a pillow) and crashed out for the night.
And that's Friday!
3035 words. Considering some of that is Thursday too, that's not bad for me! I think it could probably even be considered short!
And the thing is, now I've done Friday, I'm obligated to do the rest, too. I just can't not.
But I'd like to say outright that this will probably be SHORT. I hope. I'm going to try, at least.
Also, because it makes it nice and easy for me when it comes to the reporting and making it shorter, there will probably be times when I mention things that Michael Muhney said, and I might not elaborate. This is mostly because there were times when he asked that we didn't put what he said online, and though some people probably already have, I'm not going to be one of those people. So if there's a story I don't tell, and you weren't there to know what I'm talking about - please don't ask me to go into further details!
So Thursday morning, I finished work at 7am and headed out for the bus into York. My train was nice and on time, so I caught that, and then passed out until London. We arrived 8 minutes early, and just before I got there, I had a text from onmycrew saying that they'd landed at Gatwick. So I meandered across to Victoria, got a copy of Love It and a hot chocolate in Cafe Ritazza, gave some French people a nice impression of English “youfs”, and then waited for them to arrive. They managed to get on the wrong train (the train train instead of the Gatwick Express), but at least they made it okay! We were trying to kill time so that we could go check in at the hostel, but even after getting a hot chocolate and standing in a ridiculous constantly changing queue for getting Shirley and alovysa a couple of Oyster cards, it was only noonish when we got to Piccadilly. So we stayed on the tube til Leicester Square, and went to Pizza Hut, where we proceeded to order far too much food (see, the three of us didn't need jainaj to order pizza! It's only when we're all together!) and while I sent texts to everybody telling them that the Americans had landed.
We managed to kill enough time that it was after 2pm when we left, so we could go check in and get some serious sleep. While we all napped, the Random French Guy who was going to be sharing our room for the night came in, left some stuff, and left. He was gone when we woke up, which made things easier for us. We got up at like 6.30 and then went out for a walk to try and find somewhere to eat - we were going to do Chinese buffet but we were all still too full from our Pizza Hut experience so we walked around for almost an hour just looking for somewhere that wasn't packed. We eventually decided to go back to the first pub we'd walked into and just get drinks at the bar until some seats were available, and what do you know, by the time we got back there was a nice spare table!
So we ordered fish and chips and some wedges, I made them smell brown sauce, and we ate as much as we could fit inside us, before heading back to the hostel to DS a bit. I took fruit to both Shirley and Verdie's towns, phoned Mam, and then we all went to sleep. Well. We talked and talked and talked about TV, and then went deadly silent as soon as Random French Guy put his key in the lock. We think he thought we'd all been asleep straight through from the afternoon, lmao. He probably expected us to get up and leave at silly hour of the morning, but nope, we left at 9.30 while he was still in bed. But he was watching us, and it was a little creepy. He did ask us a question when we came to bed - he came in and said “Can I open the window?” which none of us answered, all pretending to be fast asleep. And he did not say “Can I ask a question?” which is what Shirley thought he said, lmao. I can't even remember what Verdie thought.
We were up bright and early (ish) to go meet fallen-wiccan and scourgeoe at King's Cross on Friday. Well. Their train was due in at 11.15, and we had to be out of the hostel by 10. So we went to Costa and got drinks, and Shirley and Verdie got a fruit salad cup. It wasn't until they were done eating it and I was playing with the label that we discovered it was out of date the day before (the 17th - the date did not say “use by: yesterday” on it, which we established after much laughter). Shirley and Verdie weren't going to say anything, but I was outraged, so I went to the counter and managed to get their £2.50 back. Score! The woman was like “Do you want another one or do you want a refund?” I was like “... well, they've already eaten the one that's POISON, so the money back please...”
Then the guy spent like half an hour checking the dates on EVERYTHING in the fridge unit. Go us! So once we were done causing a fuss about that, it was 11ish, and we left to go get Karen and Max. Once we got to King's Cross, I left Shirley and Verdie downstairs in the tube with my suitcase so that they didn't have to pay to come out through the barriers, and I went upstairs to get some cash, just exactly at the same time Karen and Max were coming up the platform and rang me. And then I managed to get them down to the platform without too much fuss, and Max even managed to get his ticket through the machine without breaking anything! :P
Then we headed for Heathrow. We probably annoyed everybody on the tube because we - shock horror - kept talking! Max and I sat at the end on the cases, and Shirley, Verdie and Karen snagged seats. Which meant we were having two seperate conversations, and kept yelling things out to each other to include them in the other conversation. It was quite a quick hour, actually!
Then we went up and there was a Hoppa pretty quickly after we arrived, so we got on that, and arrived at the Rad! I could see Sean Harry through the door before we even got off the bus - lovely image to greet us!
Max and I guarded the bags while Karen and Shirley went to check in, then we registered and got the schedules (pretty good for missing the Prison Break talks with minimum fuss!) and then I went to hang out in Karen and Max's room til fray101 arrived to check us into ours. When she did, I went downstairs to meet her, and then we headed over to Karen and Max's room to get my case. Which is where we were when people started texting to ask where we were, so Karen and Max's room became our own personal Meet & Greet room. There was a big flurry of arrivals after that, so I can't be sure exactly of the order that people arrived, but in the meantime, almarsare and marge_wings showed up, as did mrbuttmonkey and kathygascoigne, and we had a text from xfunkydoryx first asking for directions, and then saying she'd forgotten her ticket and was going home for it. We also used Karen's laptop for a bit of board postage, freaking a couple of people out in the HIMYM thread because the idea of a group of people reading a thread individually is one thing, but me reading the thread out to a room full of people is apparently weird!
Then we dispersed a bit, people went to register who hadn't already and I took my case across to our room. We did some 10x8 buying, and some photo session ticket buying (which was made totally complicated by the fact that you had to by a bizarre combination of pictures to get the free cast shot due to the small number of guests, but we got there in the end!) and I ended up buying an extra Jason Dohring picture and was talked into buying a Mark Sheppard picture that I wasn't going to get because I already had all the good ones, and then she produced a new one!
We decided to go to the garage and I managed to score a 2 litre bottle of Irn Bru for only 99p, and then we dumped all that stuff off and headed down the other direction to look for somewhere that sold alcohol and to check out the bowling alley for Ryan. Our hunt for alcohol was fruitless (and as it happens, we discovered on Sunday there was a shop called Sovereign Food & Wine just round the corner from the original garage, doh!) but it was okay, as when Kat arrived she had Whiskey, and Almar had various other alcohol with her, too. And in the end we didn't even really drink any of it. We just wanted the comfort of knowing it was there!
There was some more hanging out in our room, Kat phoned to say that she was in the lobby and came up, and that angelite and generalzog had arrived too. I decided to shower before the steward's meeting, and then we watched Neighbours and headed down for that. It was the shortest one ever, because it was in the main hall and they were testing the sound system. I also remember that at some point Ryan phoned from his room and Hilary totally freaked him out by answering the phone with “Hello Ryan!” when he didn't realise that his name flashed up on our phone when he did that.
When we headed downstairs for the opening ceremony/meet and greet, people were hanging out in the lobby. We decided to nip in to talk to Almar and Marguerite, who were still on photo sales, and that happened to be in the little corridor thing where you get into the main hall.
This led to people going “Oh, they went in, so can we!” so our talking to Almar resulted in us starting a queue. Heh. Awesome. We spent the time peeking into the main hall and trying to figure out how 13 people could fit onto a table with 8 seats for the M&G, and failed. Once we got inside, Ryan and I went to save four seats on another table for Max and Karen and Almar and Marguerite.
I spent a while talking to Pauline before things kicked off, there were a few public service announcements for the con newbies, and we were told that the M&G would be in another room and we'd all be led there afterwards. Which meant that our carefully planned seating was all ruined. D'oh! Never mind, we asked Ian if this “new room” would be seating or standing, and managed we happy enough to be told it was going to be seated. Phew. Because there were more people than there were in the M&G at Squared, and that was standing, and it was manic. The guests were mobbed!
The opening ceremony was nice, Mark was chatty as always, and it was great that Jason managed to make it along for Friday night after all. Instead of them all going off and then coming back on all together, they all stayed on stage. But it was nice, though we realised that we absolutely didn't care about the Prison Break dudes. We'd expected that anyway, but then there's the Gigi Edgely effect, so it was always possible we would like them. But they didn't have that effect. M'eh.
So we moved off to the M&G room, and still managed to share the same tables, got out Mel's big plate for the Jaffa Cakes, and were next to Karen and Max and Almar and Marguerite's table anyway. Mark Sheppard came over first and naturally helped himself to the Jaffa Cakes, only he broke into the mini pod we gave him instead of eating off the plate and taking those away with him. Never mind though! We had a big discussion about BSG (okay, everybody else did) which then turned into a discussion about him and accents, and then I turned that onto CSI (since he's been in Vegas and NY and was English in one and Irish in the other). Mark is always fun to talk to, so that was good!
Then Stacy Keach came over, and Mel's Mark became a legend by managing to hold up the conversation so that we don't think either of the Prison Break guests knew we hadn't seen the show. After having expected that Stacy would be the skeezy one, it turned out that Robert Knepper was - he freaked Verdie out by touching her neck and asking if he could sit there in a bit of a freaky voice, and then kept touching Verdie and Kathy on the leg while he was talking. Verdie was so freaked out that she lied to him and told him that she's a fan of both PB and VM.
When Jason sat down, he was very quiet. We literally FORCED him into eating a Jaffa Cake, which we probably shouldn't have done, but we were showing him that they only have 1g of fat while he was saying he was watching his weight, and he eventually ate one, reluctantly, though he didn't take his mini pod with him. He seemed to want us to start the conversation, and we didn't have anything to say, really. Probably because of the staring. Hee! We did manage to get him talking about how he felt about the cancellation, and the fact he was there for Friday when we weren't expecting it, which was nice, and then he started talking about this Spielberg thing he might be doing. Again, Mel's Mark was our saviour, I seem to remember!
Finally, Michael came over and launched into a conversation about his wife being pregnant and some other stuff. Michaelangelo was sitting on the table and he said “And her teenage...” and was staring at Michaelangelo while he was talking about his wife, and trailed off, and then said “... mutant ninja turtle...” and thought he'd gone insane. He said “I was like, is that really there or have I gone fucking insane?”
We offered him a Jaffa Cake but he declined to eat one then in case he got chocolate on his teeth, but said “Hey, I was told about these! Who told me about these?” and I said it was me, and he asked my online name rather than my name name and I was thinking “But I sent an email, so it WAS my real name...” So I said that, and he was sort of like “Oh...” Hee. Anyway, he took his pod away but we didn't find out what he thought of them, or if he'd even tried them by the end of the weekend. He literally talked pretty much non-stop, which was awesome - and it was so funny, Verdie was sitting next to him and it wasn't until he was told it was time to move on that he looked at her and said "I'm so sorry! I didn't even make eye contact with you!"
Hilary gave him his JD and coke, which he loved, since she'd put the JD in a little bottle with a vote Lamb label - he left with the drink but without the bottle, so Hilary passed it to his PA & wife to keep. She also managed to ask him her question about why he calls us all hobbits at RoL, when if he's the Wizard, surely we should be Munchkins.
While Jason was at our table, Sean Harry reached over and took one. It actually took him a lot longer than I'd expected. He came back later and took another, and I tried to bat his hand away and tell him he couldn't have one unless he told us when LA tickets were going on sale. He took one anyway and told us Tuesday, and elaborated a bit and then told us about this other thing which we still haven't discovered if it's going to happen or not. We've been reliably informed we were being mocked by Ryan for sucking up to him, but we weren't even BEING suckupy. We were just finding out vital information which he didn't release to the world at large until at least four hours after us!
Eventually we got thrown out of the M&G room because even though we were too lazy to move, they said they just wanted people in there who were still waiting for a guest to come over. It was suggested we move to the main hall, but this is US. So we didn't. Before we left, though, Hilary and I took Jason's pod of Jaffa Cakes up to Mark and said he hadn't wanted them, and Mark eagerly took them! We didn't even notice he'd been sitting next to Robert Knepper at the time, lmao.
Then we we went and hung out in our room, watching Jonathan Ross but not actually listening to it, surfing around a bit (snigger...) and then having a freakout about Neighbours moving to five (okay, that was just me).
Eventually people dispersed and we sorted Kat's floor-bed out (ie, she unrolled her sleeping bag and gave her a pillow) and crashed out for the night.
And that's Friday!
3035 words. Considering some of that is Thursday too, that's not bad for me! I think it could probably even be considered short!
And the thing is, now I've done Friday, I'm obligated to do the rest, too. I just can't not.