Finally it's FRIDAY!!!

Ahem.... Friday. So. I had left my brother-in-law "M" a phone message asking him to call me and we could make arrangements to go to eat or meet up somewhere or something. I wasn't too sure about our schedule, but I really like hanging out with M, so it was okay. The annoying thing was that I was gonna have to get up way early to get it all packed into one day, so I woke at 7.30, took my shower and I got ready for M to call for our breakfast "date". But he didn't call. I wasn't sure if it was my phone reception (which was bad) or what, so I held out for a while and left a few more messages on his cel. Then I called my sister, who was back in Cville, and left HER a message that I'd tried to contact M and had no luck. So while I had been waiting for M to call, Sarabi and Milamber had gotten up and taken their showers. (The ACEN theme is actually "got soap?" Seriously. Dude, showers are that important.) By then it was 10.30 and time to head down for the Con's Opening Ceremonies. Sorry, M! ::The coffee, by the way? Was all beans. And no way to grind them and actually MAKE the coffee. SAD! Tricky bad evil ACEN sponsor! Waah!:: We headed down and waiting for over an HOUR in line to get into the ROOM for Opening Ceremonies. Luckily there were others in line with us... and we had cameras: I really need to get that posed picture of the "Lickable" boy from Sarabi again... So anyway - Opening ceremonies were a blast as always. We split up after, telling Milamber that we were basically glued to our chairs in that room for the next few hours, and we would meet up with him again for lunch. So he left, and Sarabi and I stayed seated for the premier showing of "Full Metal Fantasy" by Vic Mignogna. Vic was one of the voice actors to work on the english version of the Full Metal Alchemist anime. He's also a fanboy. He got a bunch of the other english voice actors together and got with his props buddies to do a fan live-action parody of FMA. It was way cool! I hadn't watched all of the series at that point and Sarabi hadn't watched ANY FMA yet, but we were simply SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE! over it. Unfortunately, he's not allowing it to be sold or otherwise distributed because he wants it to make the con circuit. *am sad*. Then things got a bit tangled. Milamber didn't show back up for Iron Guest. We thought he wanted to watch it, so we held on to our seats and saved him one. But there was about a 20 minute break between the Full Metal Fantasy showing and Iron Guest, while they set up the room and still No Milamber. We shrugged it off though, and watched some great art come alive for us by the Iron Guests (theme was WORKPLACE). Plus fanboy comments about Voltron being god, Zima not being beer, and "sniffing markers is good... if they are blueberry" After the Iron Guest was over, we found Milamber again. He had apparently been waiting in the room for us to come get him. He'd thought we were going to eat lunch BEFORE Irong Guest and we'd thought it was AFTER. There was yelling. sad sad sad. Sarabi took a nap as she was starting to feel really sick. Milamber and I talked a bit, then tried to figure out what we wanted to do - we decided against watching a DVD in the hallway and instead settled in for a couple of games of cards. Milamber won. Grr. Finally Sarabi felt better enough that we hooked up the laptop to the TV and attempted to watch Abenoboshi - but the laptop fails and won't play the DVD. We tried another program, but again - fails to play. I thought this was EXTREMELY funny, since the DVD we were attempting to watch was a LICENSED one :) The laptop finally accepts the third program as usable for the DVD and we enjoy a few hours of anime. While we were trying to decide on what to do next, Sarabi suddenly point to a floating speck in front of her. It was a feather. The bed was full of down. Sarabi is allergic to down. THIS explains why Sarabi always felt bad when she returned to the room. So off we went for an adventure! "Hello!!!! Welcome to Housekeeping!!! Can I be of service?!?" We found the housekeeping room in the lower levels of the hotel. It was past the gaming rooms and off in one of the corners. We were met by a cute maid who was *actually* a maid, not a cosplayer. She gave us new blankets and pillows and towels and just kept asking us if we needed anything else? She was so nice, it made us feel bad. :) So we took our new linens and stuff and... went to the game room. We watched people play Katamari Damacy, DDR, card games and such. My brother B and brother-in-law T had just taught me how to play Magic: TG, so I stood for a moment and watched the gamers playing it, but was too chicken to sit and really observe. We went back to our room after about an hour and watched some more anime. We then left and ended the day with a few minutes of a panel called "Totally Lame Anime" where they tore apart some of our favourite anime and showed the stupid stuff that we pretty much ignore in favour of a good story. But when you take it OUT of the story - yeah, totally lame. Then we sat through the also lame Shonen Ai panel. It wasn't *intentionally* lame, it was just... bleah. Didn't help that no one seemed to understand that they had a DIFFERENT Yaoi panel that was being held AFTER the Shonen Ai one, which was ADVERTISED as being PG rated. People kept trying to get into the hard stuff and it was really rather annoying. Almost as annoying as the actual panel contents -yeah, it wasn't very fun. Possibly because it was so basic? Dunno - but they did have pretty slides! and action figures!! But we were so disappointed in the quality that we did not stay for their Yaoi panel this year.

		Part 1: Enima Convention Part 2: Defragging Chicago Part 3: Before the Con Opens		Part 4: TGIF! Part 5: Pancakes!yay and Shopping		Pictures: Iron Guest Random Cosplayers
Maeyan's ACEN 2k5 Trip ::: page updated 2005 June ::: maeyan[at]Lycos[dot]com