AnthroCon Con Report... FINALY!!!
Tuesday:
Well... got up at midnight and spent most of Tuesday on the road. I met up with “AnthroWolf” at his home in New York at about 9am. We waited for his mother to get home for about fifteen minutes and then tossed his things in the back of my truck. It was a rather tight fit but we managed to get it in with all my stuff. We continued on toward the con and only ended up getting “mapquested” once when the road we were supposed to merge onto turned out to be in a different lane. After a few moments in a city I decided to backtrack and found my way back to the highway. We eventually got to the hotel but at that point I had been on the road for about 14hours and was fairly tired. We met up with Pollen_W and went to the local TGI Fridays for food. It was ok and hey... at the very least wasn’t Denny’s (which was right next door).
Wednesday:
I slept in late and wondered down to the lounge at about 10:30. We waited for a while and played “fur/not-a-fur” while waiting for the next roomie to arrive. He was on time for the most part but slightly annoyed he had to use public transportation. I was really in no condition to drive that morning (especially city driving) so I refuse to feel bad about not giving him ride. If I had gone to get him there is a good chance I would have become lost or involved in an accident and I really didn’t need that stress at that point.
We ended up going to OliveGarden with a bunch of other furs we met hanging out in the lobby and all had something to eat. I actually had my food to go and ran (literally) back to the hotel. At that point I was concerned that petercat (AnthroCon art show director) was waiting for me in the lobby for a ride to get the rental truck for the art show supplies. I had agreed to give him a ride through e-mail prior to the con and technically I think I was late getting back to the hotel. Well... I couldn’t find him and ended up going downstairs to con ops to see if he had arrived yet. When I got to con-op’s I found Giza hanging out there waiting for folks to arrive and after he told me peter hadn’t arrived yet I ended up hanging out with him for a while.
For those of you that don’t know, besides being an AC staff member, Giza is a very cool guy and I would definitely not hesitate to hang out with him again. My only regret was that I didn’t know more about computers. That way I could actually have something resembling an intelligent conversation with him rather than getting this stupid ass blank look every time he asked me a question.
Well.. It turned out peter had been delayed by a few things and when he showed up at about 3:30pm we hurried off to get the rental truck.
The drive over was fine, peter gave me directions where to turn and other than getting a bit nervous in traffic I think I did ok.
We got the truck and immediately zipped over to the store where the new pipe was located.
You see... it was the decision of the con that they need to have new art show panels both to create more show space and also so they could display the mature art in an entirely different room than the general art. This gave a large number of extra panels for artists to purchase and then display their art on.
We loaded the truck with the pipe and drove back to the hotel to drop off my truck and pick up some “volunteer muscle”.
When we reached the hotel peter and I wondered back to the con ops room. Upon leaving the U-haul area I had noticed that there were no working signal lights on the back of the truck. I mentioned it to peter when we got back to the hotel but later discovered there were other problems with the truck... but I’ll get back to that in a minute.
We organized a crew to go get the remainder of the art show supplies from the “storage facility” where it was being held. We exchanged phone numbers so if anyone had any questions they could call my cell phone in the lead truck and headed on our way.
During the drive to The “storage facility” we learned a few interesting things about the truck we had rented. The windshield wipers didn’t work very well, the roof/windows/windshield all leaked, the right side break light didn’t work, the signal lights didn’t work, the driver side mirror kept moving, and there was a nice list of other little things that also did not function properly. When we returned the truck peter gave the list to the staff at the rental place and reassured me he would be getting a different truck on Sunday. Technically, sense the truck did not have working signal lights or break lights, it was therefore actually illegal for use on the road.
During the drive we had to make sure our two chase cars (with the other volunteer muscle) didn’t get lost on traffic.
Well... considering the tuck didn’t get above second gear the whole time, they were quite capable of keeping up with us.
It turned out the “storage facility” is actually the garage of a very nice lady whom helped us load the truck and made sure we got everything we needed. She even offered us drinks but peter had thought of that beforehand and had a cooler with water bottles (I filled the thing with ice before we left the hotel so they were even cold).
From the “storage facility” we went to a Chinese restaurant and all had the buffet. I found out several things there. I don’t really like sushi and crayfish are rather spicy little critters (even though they look just like little Maine lobsters). I guess the season them a LOT.
We continued back to the hotel and unloaded the equipment into the art show rooms before calling it a night at about 12:45am.
Thursday:
I met up with peter at about 8:30am and after some confusion we found out that we could only cut the new pipe on the loading dock where we had just brought the stuff in the night before. That wasn’t such a big deal because there was a power outlet right there and we were under an overhead so at least we were in the shade.
After setting everything up on the loading bay and beginning cutting, a lady came out and told us that we had to move down to the parking lot near the dumpsters because we were blocking delivery trucks. We reluctantly did so and continued cutting pipe (in direct sunlight) with the electric drill plugged in back at the loading dock.
After cutting the pipe the person cleaning them would come over to where we were, retrieve the pipes, walk back over to the loading dock, drill out the inside to remove the sharp edges, and then walk the pipe back over to us to go in the big line for painting.
Well... turned out you can only cut so much pipe before the blades get very dull and let out one last death cry before breaking into a million little pieces. We lost three good pipe cutter blades that day, and have permanently damaged at least two others. The worst part was noone could find the right size replacement blades at the local hardware store so they ended up buying a whole new pipe cutter.
Fortunately we did manage to cut all the necessary pipe with that one last cutter without losing any more blades. I’m quite sure the next time someone tries to use it, the thing will break in mere moments. At least we got enough use out of it to justify the damage done to the tools.
After a number of hours we managed to get all the pieces cut and continued trying to figure out which pipes went together.
Fortunately petercat had come up with a checklist so after a bit of modification to some pipes we had everything we needed and shipped everything indoors.
Indoors the other crews had been setting up the frames and by the time we shipped the last of our pipes indoors they were almost done.
I was sporting a good sunburn at that point and decided to call it a night. It was only about 8:30pm but I think most everyone else was right behind me.
To Be Continued...