Planning started over a year ago. I hadn't been to D*C for a few years, and wanted to go. Sirvinya and I were chatting on Twitter, and somehow we came to the conclusion that she'd fly over. (I don't remember if I sent her the guest list, or exactly what was the trigger for her deciding to come over. All I know is, we immediately started planning on where to go shopping. This trip was never just about Dragon*Con. It was also about beauty shopping. Priorities, after all!) I got us a room at one of the host hotels, we bought our event passes and got our respective airplane tickets, and we were off. Sirvinya and I had apps on our respective web sites, counting down to Dragon*Con. (I also had one counting down to the Great Shopping Expedition, because I was looking forward to that as much as Dragon*Con.) Sirvinya wanted to hit Sephora, Ulta, and Wal-mart (that's the only place to get Hard Candy makeup), so I scouted the area and found most of those stores clustered in or near the Lenox Square Mall. We planned to arrive two days before registration opened for the convention, to get all our shopping done before the geekery started. There was also a vague faint idea that we'd spend some time playing with our new toys, especially since Numindan is new to makeup and wanted to learn some stuff while we were there, not just reading it on our blogs. (This never quite happened.)

My mother was going to cat-sit for me while I was gone, and would also be repainting about half of my house, so I spent the week before departure in a flurry of activity. I was boxing up my books and DVDs, moving furniture away from the walls, sweeping cobwebs, vacuuming, jobsearching, doing laundry, packing, and assembling everything I'd need: my Dragon*Con registration pass, my plane itinerary, the hotel reservations, the rental car confirmation, my receipt from Coffee Shop of Horrors (to pick up while at D*C, so we'd have good in-room coffee), and all that jazz. When I arrived in Atlanta, the temperature and the humidity were both in the high 80s. When I walked out of the airport it was like trying to walk through damp laundry that's hanging out to dry: it keeps dragging at you, you feel like you have to work just a little harder to breathe, and you get a bit damp yourself. I had about six more hours until Sirvinya arrived, so I picked up the car, headed to the hotel, checked in (room on the 41st floor, glass elevators, and two people who have issues with heights), and hit a nearby store for supplies: two case of bottled water, plastic picnicware, Aleve (for the sore feet we'd have from walking all around the convention) and EmergenC (for staving off Con Crud.) I then found out what I'd forgotten to print out and bring with me: arrival times for Numindan and Sirvinya. Numindan and Drew weren't arriving until the next day, so I could email them and get their info; but Sirvinya was already in the air...and Numindan didn't have her info. And I didn't have access to that email account. Yeah. Problem. Okay, I thought: I think she's arriving at 9:30pm or thereabouts, so I'll just go early and take a book. I arrived at the airport at 8:30pm and headed for the prearranged meeting spot...and poor Sirvinya had already been there for an hour. I'd utterly misremembered her arrival time. (Yay me.) We got into the car, headed back to the hotel, got room service, and just holed up in the room, adjusting to our respective cases of jet lag. The next day was beauty shopping, and I wanted my brain to actually be engaged for that!

Wednesday August 31: We woke up, grabbed the car, and headed out. (I am so glad we got the car. I'm also so glad we got the GPS. Yes, it was a bit unclear on some of its directions, and had a bad habit of telling me to turn left *just* as I'd pass the place where it wanted me to turn, but it made getting about a LOT easier!) First stop was Wal-Mart, to get a coffee maker and a proper kettle. And Butterfinger bars, for Sirvinya's dad. And Hard Candy makeup. And whatever other pretties grabbed our attention. The Hard Candy section was a bit small, and kind of picked over; but I got myself two waterproof colored mascaras: purple, and teal-green. (Why Hard Candy makes colored mascaras that are waterproof, but Urban Decay's colored mascaras are *not* waterproof...that's a question for the sages.) Sirvinya had spotted an Ulta in the same strip mall, so we headed there next. It was okay, but they didn't have Real Techniques brushes nor Wet n Wild. We each picked up a few items - I got a jumbo eye pencil from NYX, I think Sirvinya did too, I got a Stila smudge pot, I forget what else we got - and then headed to Lenox Square Mall...and Sephora! We spent a few hours in that mall, hitting the food court, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and Sephora - keeping an eye on the time, so we could unload our haul at the hotel and have plenty of room for Numindan's and Drew's luggage when we picked them up from the airport. As we were headed out to the car, one of us remembered that we had stuff in the trunk. As in, stuff that might be affected by the heat. The eye pencils and the smudge pot might have melted, oh crap!! And -=then=- we remembered Sirvinya's chocolate. (That's right, we first worried about the makeup, and didn't think of the chocolate. We have our priorities.) The makeup survived with no apparent problems, but the chocolate had achieved near-liquid consistency. We headed back to the hotel, put the chocolate in the refrigerator, left the makeup on the desk and bed and dresser-top to cool to room temperature, and headed to the airport for Numindan and SandMan. After retrieving them we headed to the Vortex Bar and Grill for burgers, fries, and buckets of beer (okay, that was mostly Numindan with a little help from SandMan. But two buckets of beer were brought to the table.) I think that some of us ordered dessert, but honestly, it's kind of fuzzy at this point. I really enjoyed meeting Numindan IRL after communicating with her online for about a decade, and it was nice to meet Drew instead of only hearing his name; but we were all coming down off the high of "OMG!!! We're in Atlanta after a year of planning!! Yay!!!" We checked and saw that registration was opening at 10am the next day, instead of 1pm. Okay, fine enough: perhaps we could get our DragonCon badges early, and head back out for more shopping. (Don't judge us.) Drew, Numindan and I headed downstairs to take photos while Sirvinya went to sleep, to get rid of her jet lag before the festivities started in earnest. People had started arriving that afternoon, and so there was a decent-sized crowd around Pulse.

Thursday September 1: Dragon*Con's previous registration system was all manual, and generally it would take 4-6 hours to get one's badge. The pre-registration line took a lot longer than just buying your badge on-site! This year, finally, D*C switched to a barcode system. I figured that there would still be some glitches, so it might take us 2 or 3 hours, even with the new whizbangs. We got to the Sheraton before registration was open. The line was down one side of the building and around the block behind the hotel, but wasn't yet to the third leg - so things were looking positive. After waiting in line for about 20 minutes, registration opened and the line started moving. And kept moving. Once inside the building, we spent about 30 minutes walking through the roped-off switchbacks to reach the actual registration desks. We handed in our barcoded post cards, they scanned them and printed our labels, slapped those labels on laminated badges, handed us our program books, and we were out the door...in barely over an hour. I'd been to Dragon*Con in previous years, and waited through registration. I'd had friends who started queueing at 5am on Friday, and didn't get their badges until 11am. This...was amazing! We had time for more shopping!!! (Remember: priorities. With three non-USians in the group, there were Places To Go and Things To Get.) We piled back in the car and headed back out, stopping first at IHOP for breakfast. We were able to get to almost every place we needed to go that day, but apparently my weeks of frenetic activity were catching up with me, and I headed back to the room to nap while Sirvinya, Numindan, and Drew headed out to dinner at Truva, a nearby Greek restaurant with a really great buffet. (I'll have to go there when I'm next in Atlanta.)

Friday September 2: The next morning both Numindan and Drew, who are heavily involved with the Edmonton Browncoats, were off to this and that panel while Sirvinya and I caught the first William Shatner panel on DCTV. Or...we tried to. The picture was jumpy, the sound was reedy, they obviously had a few technical issues to sort out. We finally headed down for breakfast. Since my previously-favorite breakfast spot Kafe Kobenhaven was now utterly changed, we tried Sear. They had a buffet, which was perhaps a little more choice than desired that morning. I really wanted Eggs Benedict, and Sirvinya had about an hour before she was off to her next panel. Buffets are nice, and the food at this one was good both in variety and in taste, but buffets are good when you've got time and inclination to go back for seconds. We didn't Sirvinya finished up and headed off, and I wandered through the dealers-rooms and the lower-level lobby. The Cruxshadows had their booth set up and the music blaring, and I bought an album, their latest single, and a tee shirt. (Their concert was scheduled to start at 1:30am on Sunday morning. That...was a wee bit too late for me. I'd been looking forward to attending, but 1:30 ack emma? I don't know that I can handle that when I'm -=not=- dragging!) I also headed over to get a Celtic-design DragonCon logo shirt. I had a DragonCon 2011 tee shirt with artwork by Boris Vallejo...but I get kind of tired of all the D*C artwork featuring cheesecake. Why can't Michael Whelan's artwork go on the teeshirt, hm?? Yes, it looks lovely and impressive on the glossy program book cover. But I want a D*C tee shirt that a straight woman can wear without feeling just a bit odd. (For that matter, I'd love a commemorative D*C tee shirt that could be worn in your average geeky workplace by a straight woman. The Celtic-design shirt is lovely, but there's no year on it. The one with the year on it has the soft-core chickie, and this happens just about every year. Kind of irritating. Okay, gripe over.) Then I spent time wandering through the Imperial and Marquis ballrooms, looking at the booths and dodging the crowds and seeing everyone's first-day costumes. I picked up my order from Coffee Shop of Horrors: 12 sample packs and three full-pound bags of ground coffee. Later that day, while waiting for an elevator, I spotted someone in a landstrider costume! People occasionally show up as Gelflings, but I hadn't ever seen someone in that costume before. They were having some trouble navigating, even with several friends around them; and I'm guessing that they pretty quickly headed back up to their room and got out of that costume before they broke their neck. But as someone who saw Dark Crystal at age 12, it was pretty cool to spot.

Saturday September 3: I started off the day with a double dose of the vitamin drink, headed back to the dealers' room to buy some stuff I'd seen the previous day but hadn't firmly decided upon, and wandered over to the Hyatt and the Art Show, meeting up with my friend Apryl and her family. Apryl does freehand body art and temporary tattoos, both with henna and jagua; as well as selling her CG and oil artwork, pottery, cold-kettle soaps, and incense. I got two tattoos: henna on my left arm, and jagua on my right. Part of the henna process is putting glue atop the henna, to help seal it. This year she started adding a layer of glitter on top of the glue-seal, just so that it would be a little more attractive while folks walked around. Apryl patted on the glue, added the blue glitter, gathered the overflow glitter onto a piece of plastic-sleeved paper, and poured most of the glitter back into its envelope. She then made the mistake of blowing on the sleeve, to disperse the rest of the glitter. Apryl ended up with a face full of blue sparkle, and I looked like I'd been strafed by Tinkerbelle. The tattoos are temporary, and the henna one is already fading after six days. The jagua one is lightening, but much less noticeably! On me, the jagua is a dark dark blue. Next, I headed over and checked out the Skeptic's track, which was packed - but not so packed that I couldn't get in. The Trek track, down the hall, already had folks queueing up for the next show. That evening I met up with Phyrra and her group for dinner (well, dessert for me, because I'd already had dinner) and saw Apryl and my friend Marc in passing. I was able to give Phyrra the Wet n Wild polishes that I bought for her a few months ago!! Phyrra's group headed off to an MMO track party while I headed back up to go sleep. Thrilling, I know, but my throat was still scratchy and I was feeling draggy.

Sunday September 4: After another double-dose of EmergenC, Sirvinya and I met up with Phyrra and Ray for breakfast, then each headed out to go wandering about and soaking in all that is DragonCon. I wore the green dress I'd bought the day before, and Sirvinya wore the fancy dress she'd bought to wear to D*C. We were perhaps a bit overdressed, but who cares, this is DragonCon! Sirvinya headed off to her first panel of the day while Phyrra and Ray and I headed to a booth in the dealers' room where sharp-eyed Ray had spotted makeup. They had some theatrical and costuming stuff out, Kryolan and Ben Nye. I didn't get anything, though it was nice to see it in person. Phyrra and Sirvinya and I had plans to meet up at the EFF Track's "down and dirty social media" panel later that afternoon, but I was in the room packing (and drinking more EmergenC) and got to the panel a bit late. Turns out I didn't miss anything - this was a very rudimentary panel, for folks who weren't really using Twitter at all. It seemed geared toward folks who wanted to get started in writing, and while it may have offered good insights to newbies, I already knew how to get off the drama llama (don't get on in the first place!). I left after about 10 minutes. Phyrra and Sirvinya had left perhaps 5 minutes before I arrived.

Monday September 5: The last full actual day of the convention. Today was Sirvinya's meet-up, and that was really the only thing we had firmly planned. Lots of people were checking out of the hotels and leaving on this day, to get back to work the next morning - so there was chaos at the elevators, the hotel registration desks were slammed, and the busboys were all busy loading up luggage carts. Sirvinya and I wandered through the third dealers' room, which was actually walkable now that about half the attendees were in the process of checking out. (This is the room that, in previous years, had served as the Comic Artists' Alley.) There were a few places we lingered, one place selling horror-soundtrack-like music, another place selling belly-dance and similar clothing, several tee-shirt places, some figurines, Squishables, posters, the whole range. We meandered down to the Sheraton for the 1pm meet-up, which went well. Then we headed back to the room to meet up with Numindan and Drew, and head out to Barnes and Noble to get Numindan's new Nook activated. (The in-room wifi wasn't cooperating in the slightest.) All four of us went to Hard Rock for dinner, because while we did honestly look around at every place we ate, Sirvinya hadn't gotten to have any really good mac and cheese yet. Just some kind of 'meh' stuff in the food court. Then we stopped at the diner next door and got pieces of cake for dessert. These pieces were ginormous - the size of a hardback book - and I figured, hey, breakfast too! Numindan and Drew were flying out at 8:30 the next morning, so had to leave the hotel by 6 to get to the airport.

Tuesday September 6: Drew and Numindan woke up at 4:30 or so to get ready and leave, and neither Becky nor I could get back to sleep. We headed down, got breakfast at the 24-hour diner on the corner, and came back intending to go shopping again. We spent some time walking through the Marquis level, which had been so full of activity all week. That morning there was just the lone Information Desk at the foot of the stairs...and the dealers' rooms, with crews of folks breaking down the tables. It was a little bit like suddenly being in a ghost town! We checked out, I dropped my package of makeup off at the post office to head home via USPS Priority Flat Rate, and we headed to one final Ulta, where we found the Real Techniques brushes and quite a few other bits. (For anyone going to Atlanta: the Ulta on Buckhead Loop is the one you want to go to. It's the largest and best-stocked of any that I've been in.) We then hit Sephora one more time, to see if maybe - just maybe - they'd gotten any Kat Von D palettes in. (Sadly, they had not. Sirvinya really wanted to get a few of those.) We hit the food court at the mall for lunch, then headed to the airport. We were both a little concerned how we were going to get from the car rental return depot to the airport terminal, when a man in a Hertz shirt approached us and said that he'd drive us and our luggage to the airport. I was so relieved!! We both had full suitcases and carry-ons, and we really didn't relish the thought of trying to wheel them onto the tram, across the terminal, to wherever we were going. Sirvinya's flight wasn't open for check-in, as it wasn't leaving until much later that evening; so I checked in my bags and we sat in the atrium for a bit, stupefied by Con-brain and general Impending Travel Malaise. I flew home at 4:42 pm, and while it took 5.5 hours, it was a fraction of the total time Sirvinya had!

Tomorrow: the arrival and the unpacking. And the haulage. (Or mine, at least.)

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