All right, I’d better start writing this up or I’ll forget all the good stuff (well as good as the good stuff gets).

Thursday
takaza took off from work an hour early so we were able to leave at 4 PM – that hour made a real difference, I think. We drove as far as Edgewood, Maryland that night and stayed at the luxurious Best Western there, just off I-95. Actually, it was cheap, clean and comfortable, which is all we needed. It was wee bit more expensive than the Days Inn Aberdeen, a few miles up the road, but reading the description of that hotel over the net just gave me a bad feeling and made we suspect that the place was a dive (we’ve gotten stuck in some nasty Days Inns before, while Best Westerns are usually a pretty good value). Thus, we opted for the more expensive digs. A few minutes of skimming through the channels to see what was on and then we crashed out for the night.

Friday
We started off bright and early at 8 AM with breakfast at the restaurant adjoining the hotel. We were the only ones in the place, which is usually a bad sign, but the egg sandwiches were good and the waitress was quite nice, asking where we were from and where we were headed. (“So, are you two boys brothers?” “Uh, no…”) We were headed up to Philadelphia to visit, uh, friends. Yeah, that’s it. Saves on the explanations, anyway. We stopped by a local grocery store to pick up munchies (carrots, apples, oranges) and drinks for the room and then hit the road.

A quick drive up I-95, I-476, and I-76 (OK, actually a slow drive on I-76, the only traffic jam we hit on the way up) and we were at the Adams Mark Philadelphia, home of Anthrocon 2002. We parked in the parking garage (hard to find, but nice to have covered parking somewhat readily accessible from the hotel) and I tried to check in. No dice – too early, and they didn’t have any non-smoking, king bed rooms available yet. I remembered that the key to getting what you want in these situations is to be as nice as possible, so I really turned on the charm and I could tell the ladies behind the desk appreciated it. There were lots and lots of folks trying to check in and some being impatient about it. I told them to take their time, and thanked them even when nothing came up. They went out of their way to get us a room on a lower floor (5th floor, but what the hey), even though it took five or six visits to finally obtain the room.

We killed time by checking out the con suite on the 23rd floor, and got our first experience with the dreaded elevators. We were on our way up, stopped at the 22nd floor to let someone out, then the elevator started up and hiccupped a bit. Then the doors opened, showing us a blank wall (or the 22 1/2 floor, I suppose). The doors closed, and we sat there for a few minutes, motionless. We had a nice chat with the hotel operator over the emergency intercom (“Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? I can’t hear you…”) and finally the elevator started descending. And descending. We started hoping it would stop soon when we reached the lobby and the doors opened. We got out and immediately notified the front desk that the elevator was really not in usable condition. This is why I spent a lot of time going up and down the stairwell to our room, since that left only two other working elevators for a 23-floor hotel completely filled with people. Ugh.

Takaza and I put all of our stuff in the room (it took a few trips) and immediately set to making it inhabitable – moving furniture, blowing up the air mattresses, putting ice in the coolers, setting out the French press coffee maker – all the important stuff 🙂 Our roommates, mirkowuff and rustitobuck, had arrived while we were roomless so they were contacted by FRS radio. They arrived with their stuff and everything was tucked away neatly.

After some brief relaxing in the room, we headed downstairs to check out what else was going on at the con. We ran into aureth and JenWolf outside the Artists Alley and set up a Midwest Furfest staff meeting for later in the evening. A quick spin through the Dealers Room yielded a copy of Circles #3, which was really my only purchase of the convention. The art show had some very nice stuff in it (and some really crappy stuff, but oh well). T’ is always an amazing artist, and Heather Bruton’s work is just beautiful. I didn’t see anything that I absolutely had to have, though we did bid on a print by Dark Natasha for Linnaeus that eventually went out of our price range.

After this it was time for us to start our first shift in Artists Alley. Prior to the convention, Takaza had spoken with Kagemushi, volunteering our services. We were placed on Operations staff, specifically Artists Alley. Anthrocon’s Artists Alley is a bit unique, because the way it works is this: so that each artist doesn’t have to get a tax ID number and deal with tax paperwork, Anthrocon “sells” their work on consignment. The artist gives a customer a receipt for a goods, the customer pays at a central register where tax and a 3% handling fee is added, and then the customer shows the paid receipt to the artist and collects his goods. At the end of the day, all the artists must be paid (since seating is first come, first serve and there’s no guarantee that an artist will be in the alley for more than one day). Now, we’re talking about 30-40 artists, so payout and reconciliation at the end of the day can be quite tedious and time-consuming. Our job for the three days of the convention was to handle the payouts.

Now, before I go any further, since I know some of the staff might read this, I want to say that I have no problems with how Artists Alley and Operations were run this year. Giza, you especially did a fabulous job keeping it all together and deserve congratulations for pulling it off, if not flawlessly, at least in a way that there appeared to be no problems 🙂 That having been said, we have a few suggestions on improvements to Artists Alley and cash handling in general which we’ll forward to you and Kage in the next week or so. The Artists Alley payout procedure can definitely use some refinements, both for the sanity of the volunteer staff and to keep the artists happy. This will become especially important next year with Artists Alley expanding. Even if no changes were made, though, I’d do it all again – it was fun, and it was a good way to meet a lot of folks I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Wandering off on another tangent here – a lot of people have said that I’m a masochist for being on staff for Anthrocon as well as Midwest Furfest. I think I figured it out at Anthrocon – I’m not particularly interested in most of the con programming, I don’t buy much (if anything) in the dealers room, and the art show is good for a few visits, but that’s about it. If I’m not working for the con, I’m pretty much bored out of my mind. So when you see me working at a con, be assured that I’m probably having a lot of fun, and I enjoy being able to both keep myself occupied and make the con experiences of those around me better at the same time.

Anyway, back to the narrative: we stumbled through our first payout session Friday night with only a few problems, even though it took about an hour. Chris Johnson (jinxtigr), tailmaker extraordinaire, was nice enough to wait until after the long line cleared out before taking his sizable payout, and helped with the cleanup of the room as well. Thanks Chris, your help was very much appreciated! After everyone was paid it was back to Operations for counting and double-counting the cash drawers, and trying to reconcile everything up.

We met up with Mirko somewhere along the way and decided to walk over to Houlihan’s for dinner. I had a delicious tuna salad – that is, a salad with a wasabi dressing and chunk of rare seared tuna on it. Unfortunately, Dan’s burger was only so-so, so we didn’t return to that restaurant again. Probably for the better, since it’s a bit pricey.

Returning to the hotel, we hung out a bit and then it was back to our room for the Midwest Furfest gathering. Aureth, JenWolf, Robert King, Mirko, Rusty, werellama and Mistetoe all stuffed into our little room and we covered some outstanding Furfest business, drank excellent Scotch, and had a good time. (Quote of the evening from Aureth: “I’m sorry, but I like my balls!” {snicker}) Things wound down sometime after midnight and we headed to bed not long after.

Saturday
I woke up bright and early at about 7 AM on Saturday. Yeah, I’m weird that way. I made a nice pot of coffee (mmm, French press…) and walked around downstairs a bit, reading the paper and sipping coffee in the lobby. (glad I remembered to bring my commuter mug!), When I went up to refill my mug, Rusty was awake and about, so we headed down and got breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The breakfast burrito was quite tasty, in spite of it being very little like what was described on the menu. We wandered through the art show a bit more and Takaza joined us there. After some socializing, we headed upstairs for the Supersponsors lunch.

Now, one of the reasons we were at Anthrocon this year is because Kage surprised us at our commitment ceremony last year with two supersponsor memberships to Anthrocon, a gift that was very sweet and very much appreciated. I doubt that I would ever actually buy a supersponsorship, though – you get access to a special lounge and a special meal with the guests of honor and all, but this means leaving all of your friends who aren’t supersponsors behind while to do these things, and I go to cons mainly to spend time with friends. Nevertheless, the gift was much appreciated and the lunch was quite tasty (teriyaki chicken). We didn’t know anyone at our table besides HartreeFox and Blue_Heeler, but the company was good and we had an OK time.

After lunch, we went down to Operations and got ready for our Artists Alley shift. This time around we would be both running the registers and doing payout, as opposed to the payout-only shift we had on Friday. Unfortunately, it was exceptionally busy for the last two hours that the Alley was open, leaving us little time to prepare for payout. That, coupled with a few artists who had some problems reconciling their receipts with ours, made the payout an extended nightmare. Bless their hearts, Brophey, Rasslor, Mirko, and Rusty were waiting on us to go to dinner and we kept telling them that it would be just a little longer. We started payout at 5 PM and didn’t finish until about 6:45 PM. I’m sure that many of the artists were frustrated with the long wait but surprisingly no one really complained. It was another half-hour of counting up all the cash back in Operations, and finally, exhausted, we wrapped it all up. It was decided that we would go out for sushi, and Takaza decided to strike out on his own, not being a sushi fan.

Now, before everyone decides that we’re awful people for ditching my beloved, let me say that he insisted we go, and we had talked this over before the con: we’re two separate people, not joined at the hip. We have different likes and dislikes, and sometimes it’s good to separate and indulge in what we each enjoy.

Of course, I still felt like a shit, but that’s that ol’ recreational guilt for you. It’s a hobby of mine, you see.

The drive to find sushi was probably about the most entertaining thing at the con. We started out trying to find a place suggested by one of the bellmen and wound up getting horribly lost. The conversation in the car was hysterical (“There’s no restaurants here, but it certainly is a lovely neighborhood.” “Maybe we could stop at someone’s house and ask if they have any sushi? Or if they have any goldfish?”) We wound up making a big circle and as we were passing the hotel we decided to try another place that Brophey knew of. This was in downtown Philadelphia, and getting down there was quite exciting (“You know, people are going to know you’re a tourist.” “How will they know I’m a tourist?” “You’re using your turn signal.”) We discovered that you can’t just “go around the block” in downtown Philly, you have to go around several blocks, and get lost in the process. Add to the excitement that there was a national gathering of black fraternities at the convention center and there were approximately three thousand policemen everywhere and it was a very entertaining trip.

We finally reached the restaurant (Aoi Sushi Bar), a little hole in the wall on the outskirts of the Philly’s gay ghetto. We walked in and much to our amusement found Crim, Wyldekyttin, and Cuttercoon just finishing up dinner. We chatted with them briefly as they headed out, then got down to the business of ordering. I have to say, the $20 all you can eat sushi deal is quite amazing and worth going back for. Assuming I could ever find the place again, which I sure I couldn’t. After an excellent meal and good conversation, we headed back to the hotel.

We found Takaza in the lobby, chatting with friends, and we headed down to the dance. A band of some sort was playing, and I was able to hear the last song – interesting trance-y progressive stuff. Good to listen to if you’re in the mood and maybe even something I might listen to as background music, but not particularly appropriate for a furry con, I don’t think. They wrapped up and Rigelkitty kicked off the dance. I didn’t dance much but Takaza did, and we took a lot of fun pictures, playing with the light and movement of the dancers. We’ll post those sometime this week. Hartree came back from a MickeyD‘s run with dinner for Dan and we hung out at the Registration tables as they ate and generally socialized. After that we headed back to the room and crashed for the night.

Sunday
I slept late – 8 AM 🙂 Following another nice morning of coffee and the newspaper, Takaza, Rusty, and I went to breakfast at the hotel restaurant, taking advantage of their breakfast buffet. Not too bad, and almost worth the $12. After a bit more socializing, we started our final shift in Artists Alley. This was supposed to be 1-3 PM then 4-5 PM but there was some confusion with scheduling and we wound up working from 1-5 with help from Tango (vt_komainu). This time around we had the sense to lay everything out in order as we had time and payout went much, much more smoothly – we started at 4 PM and had it all wrapped up by 4:30 PM. We did some super-quick cash counting in Operations and then headed over to catch closing ceremonies.

Now, I have to agree with Aureth – the whole “Kage gets a mohawk for charity” got very tiresome after a while. It’s great that $13,000 was raised for the charity (a shame they didn’t have a representative there, by the way), but I’m not particularly enchanted with the whole humiliation for money thing. The suggestions from the audience dragged on far too long and could have used either some pre-screening or perhaps a little harsher enforcement by the board to keep things moving along.

After closing ceremonies we headed up for the staff dinner. This is an idea that I would love to see Furfest steal – at about 7 PM on Sunday, everyone puts down what they’re working on, lock it all up, and take a break. The staff, the guests of honor, and the volunteers all gathered and we had a tasty Philly cheese steak buffet. Unfortunately, there were lots of onions cooked in with the meat, so Takaza was out of luck, though he was lovely and kept me company while we ate. Kage showed off his Mohawk during the dinner (bare-chested and with a spiked collar, no less!) and everyone got a good laugh out of that. After dinner, everyone headed back to their assigned tasks to clean everything up for the end of con. I felt somewhat guilty about not helping but I figured I’ll be doing the same thing come November, plus we had to get Takaza some dinner.

We ended up walking over to TGI Friday’s with Rusty for a mediocre meal (though the brownie meltdown thingy was divine) and, after hanging out a bit more, headed up to bed.

Not much to say about Monday except that we got up and drove home, leaving at about 10 AM. It was a long drive, and tiring. Pictures from that drive are coming, too.

As always with Anthrocon, there were so many people I saw and just didn’t get to spend any time with. Daveqat, Chronocoon, Robfox, Robin and Kimba, Hartreefox, Zenwolph, Berin (no worries about being so formal – it was a pleasure just to be able to put a face to the name), Iciclechild (the piano playing sounded good!), Andreal, Tealfox, Herefox and so many more. There will be other cons, though, and I’m going to try to be a little more sociable next time around (those games that Xydexx and Rigel had sound like a lot of fun!). Next time, I promise!

So now we need to look at our finances and see where we stand for the rest of the summer. There’s MFM on the calendar, and of course Midwest Furfest. Time to start looking at airfares and hotel reservations…