LeakyCon 2012

Well, I did my LeakyCon last week.  It was fantastic....but sooooo tiring.  Let me say, if I did it again?  If it was ever local again, I would just suck it up and stay on location.  There's no way I'd commute again.  I missed the night stuff so I could see my girl at home and so I could make trains.  I also had such pain in my knees and feet from all the walking and standing, and the train-to-hotel walks did not help matters.  What can you do?
Plus, if I were to go to the ball, I would have had to carry those clothes with me back and forth and lug even more stuff.  Not worth the killing of my shoulders.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience.  I hugged Evanna Lynch **SQUEE** she's beautiful in person, even more so than on screen.  If you don't know who she is?  She's Luna Lovegood in the HP movies.  If you still don't know?  IMDB.

I got to be 6 feet away from Darren Criss and smile and wave cause he was saying hi to all the volunteers after the really LONG but also AWESOME "A Very Potter Musical: A Very Senior Year 3D"

There were some perks, though it sucked that I had to make a train and had to miss the Lit signing that I wanted to go to with all the authors on Saturday evening....which I was late to getting into line for because of the volunteering at the AVPM show.  I don't regret volunteering or watching it, but I really wanted signatures of some of the authors that I didn't have a chance to get earlier.  Oh well, life goes on, I guess.  Maybe another time.

The HP Actors panel was fantastic!  They are awesome people, talk so genuinely and just hang out with us all.  It was fabulous.  Got a picture in a group with the 4 of them after, but as of last time I checked it was not posted yet to the LeakyCon Flickr page.  But that puppy is getting saved to the computer and printed out.  How can I not??

Unfortunately, I highly doubt I can go to the LeakyCon 2013 in London, amazing as that would be.  I also doubt I'll go to the Portland one next year either, unless we decide to make a vacation out of it and I don't volunteer, just do programming, so I could spend time with my family.

I enjoyed the programming.  I enjoyed all but 1 member of the staff.  I don't know her name, I know what she looks like, but we're busting our asses, and if your badge is flipped and I don't know you?  Don't yell at me for not knowing you're staff and can skip the lines and go in early.  They should just throw the volunteers a little bit of slack for doing their jobs, which most of them did.  But 1 bad apple makes a sour taste in your mouth for the whole thing.

I did make friends with so many wonderful people.  They're amazing people, a great fandom, a great expansion into things encompassing all books and genres, it's fantastic.  I loved it.  And it was great how many regular attendees kept telling us we were doing so great and thanks for doing it, they couldn't imagine what we were dealing with (like getting  yelled at by hotel management...yep, I sure did.  For what?  Um, a gigantic line of 4,000 people that were lined up through their whole hallway that had to cross the main thoroughfare of the hotel the same night that people were shuttling out for a Bears game.  Right...I could realllllly control that.  But hey, you can't win 'em all).  And I got so many thank yous, hugs, high-fives, it was a great experience.  And even with the extra crabby stuff thrown in, I would volunteer again, but like I said, only if I'm not commuting.