OK - today was the day before the convention actually starts. I flew into Dallas this morning. I remember part of the beverage service and the landing. I guess I needed sleep. I purposely took the seat next to the engine so that:
A) The white noise from the engine would be soothing.
B) The noise from the engine would prevent people from talking.
Both worked. At one point the noise got annoying so I put in my earbuds and listened to music. I made it half-way through the second song before I was asleep again. That helped me be slightly more alert.
The directions from Yahoo had me using the toll road when there was a perfectly good non-toll road alternative. Luckily I knew this from previous trips. So I made it to the hotel with very little fuss.
My buddy got here Tuesday so we met up at the hot tub for some catch-up and some relaxation. Make a note of this - pools in Texas generally aren't heated. This can be quite a surprise after sitting in a hot tub for a while. We found it easier to use the ladder into the deep end instead of the stairs at the shallow end. The stairs gave us too much of a chance to chicken out.
It started to rain a bit while we were in the pool but no storm so we just waited it out. It worked. A couple of rounds of hot tub - pool really relaxed the muscles kinked up from days of prep, hauling around heavy luggage and sleeping in an airplane.
Reaper is nice enough to do a "meet and greet" with food for all the early arrivals. They also gave us our convention packets so we don't have to clog up the official registration tomorrow. There were some really fun things in the packets this year. Two of the reformulated Pro Paints, some CAV cards, some other surprises. The new Casketworks is not in color which seems like a throwback to the early days but it makes sense. Only a few pages were in color. Most of the catalog was black and white anyway. Doesn't help the color swatches they used to have tho.
Most everyone had left by around 10:00 or so. Getting back to the hotel I changed into my comfy clothes, poured a margarita (darn these small hotel cups) and set about fixing the pieces that broke off the Hirst Arts piece I brought as a gift. ReaperClark kindly provided me a tube of two part epoxy so I didn't have to hunt around for a store this late at night. Unfortunately as I fixed it all back up I noticed a missing brick at the join of one of the sections. A completely missing brick. Argh. I'll have to give it to the person this way and send them the missing brick and that annoys me. But it should also teach me to leave things until last minute.
I stopped at the package store to get my contribution to ShinerCon later this weekend. For those not informed a 'package store' is a liquor store and ShinerCon is one night when we all meet in someone's hotel room and indulge in Shiner beer. Shiner is a local brand of beer. There's a secret handshake and some of us attach Shiner bottle caps to our badges the next day. It's all part of ReaperCon.
The convention officially opens at noon on Thursday. That lets me sleep in a little and hopefully hit that hot tub again. I won't have time after that because I'm going to be at Reaper from 9:00am until around 11:00pm if last year is any indication. And Sunday I'll be going directly from Reaper to visit my dad. And don't think I won't be hitting the hot tub once I get to that hotel. But I get ahead of myself.
Tomorrow I have one class on painting army highlights. The rest of the day is mine. There's games to play, people to chat with, painting to do, shopping to do, and otherwise just hang out.
I'll report back on Official Day One tomorrow. I would add pictures but I can't get them from the camera to the computer I'm using here. I could probably have used one of the adapters from home but the one that would have been easiest is USB 2.0 and this is an older computer that doesn't support it. Ditto on the media player - I can charge it using the computer but not transfer files.
Margarita number three is almost gone so it's time to toddle off to sleep.
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