alisanne

First, let me apologize to my flist for my disappearing act. I really thought I would be able to post every day, but I underestimated the effect that interacting with real life fandom people would have on my posting habits. So, I did not drop off the face of the earth, nor did I forget my computer or even my computer charger (people who know me know that I HAVE actually done that) I just got distracted by teh shiny. :)
Because I didn’t post every day as things were happening, I am sure I will have forgotten a lot. I met a TON of awesome people, but those pesky badges kept flipping around thus I’m not sure I got everyone’s name, so if I miss listing you it’s my bad memory’s fault.
Okay, so on to the tl;dr

Thursday:
So, because of a scheduling snafu they thought I was working that day and had me as the only person scheduled in. I managed to obtain coverage for the afternoon but it meant that I had to find a way to cover things in the morning, so I went in at 5:30 am to get the work done. This was both good and bad, good since no one is around at 5:30 so it means no one asks questions, but bad because, dude, it’s five fucking thirty.
Anyway, I got done early and so ended up at the airport with several hours to kill. So I called

sassy_cissa to torture her. It’s not as if she had things to do, like, you know, pack.
So, after a relatively non-eventful flight into Chicago, she locates me in the airport (apparently my terminal moved or something, you can ask her about that) and we head for the hotel. We take a serendipitous wrong turn which results in us arriving at the hotel in like 35 mins (unprecedented!) and we attempt to check in (alongside the Gospel singers convention -- what is it about HP conventions that bring out the Christian groups?)
Our room is not ready (naturally), so we track down

r_grayjoy who says we can stow our stuff in their room (yay!)
We meet up with

ragdoll,

twilightsorcery,

its_art and

r_grayjoy, and we all go to the H/D meetup in Grant Park.
Dude, so many slashers in one place gave me goosebumps!
I finally got to meet so many people like

littleblackbow (AKA Rita Skeeter, AKA Gilderoy Lockhart),

romaine,

mizbean,

sesheta_66,

kabal42,

snottygrrl,

bewarethesmirk,

potteresque_ire, not to mention seeing old friends like

nqdonne,

lesyeuxverts,

themostpotente, and

jin_fenghuang. They had door prizes and I won this AWESOME H/D art. *g* This started a trend for the con, actually since I ended up with incredible art, yo! I’ll have to show you those in a separate picture post (once I scan them).
After the H/D meetup we managed to check in, and we had the welcome feast. But, before that I found

dementordelta and she began her quest to bring me to the dark side with her evil enabler-ness. We’ll come back to this bit, though.
We had a quick snack in the lobby hotel with

swtalmnd,

rubyrosered and Delta, then we went to dinner, lol.
Dinner was chicago deep dish pizza and cheesecake. What? Oh, yes there were other things but that’s all I saw. :)
During our second dinner

sassy_cissa gets a call and she whispers to me, “OMG,

sansa1970 and

empathic_siren are in the pub!” By whisper I mean she says it, which means everyone hears it, which means we all leave the dinner speeches and troop down to the pub where we ~~squee over~~ meet

sansa1970,

empathic_siren and Mr. Sansa. OMG, they are ALL so lovely (and CUTE! *pinches their cheeks*) so we take over the patio of the pub and proceed to scare off the other people with our evil slash talk. Heh.
Eventually they close the patio so we are forced to go to our room (with half the conference who also want to see

sansa1970 and

empathic_siren) and have a party. I should prolly mention at this point that our room was located at the furthest point that you can be from the lobby and still be in the city of Chicago. This is both good and bad, good because it means no one else is there to complain about noise, bad because it takes an hour to walk there.
Anyway, we arrive, we claim a spot (

sansa1970 and I pick a spot close to the wine and the cooler) and we chat. I swear that was the best party ever. I’m not sure who all was there (speak up!) but it at the very least included

nqdonne,

coffeejunkii,

snottygrrl,

bewardthesmirk,

alaana_fair, Jin, Lyv, and what felt like like thirty other people. LOL.
When

sansa1970 left she took everyone with her I think (I have no idea since I was like the walking dead by that point having been up for a LONG FUCKING time by then). I should tell you that the Hilton beds are AWESOME to sleep in, btw.

Friday:
After breakfast we wander down to the conference because, you know, academics, yo. Anyway, the panel is about the JK vs SVA thing (interesting). I cut out to go to the Caribou cafe ( a coffee shop around the corner (where there’s free internet) for the Snupin meetup. Yay, Snupin.
Again, I can’t remember names, but

r_grayjoy and

bronze_ribbons and

drusillas_rain were there, and we chatted for a couple of hours about, well, Snupin. We had set up by the toilets, and so the poor sods who had to use the bathroom had to run the gauntlet. *g* They were good sports, though.
I had to go back to the hotel eventually to drop off stuff and so

lesyeuxverts and

jin_fenghuang and I collected

sassy_cissa and went to lunch around another corner before coming back to go to more programming. I went to the Snape panel that was beig moderated by

bethbethbeth,

femmequixiotic,

djinnj and

go_seaward and had a GREAT time. :)
That was followed by the H/D panel, moderated by

furiosity,

titti and Saber ShadowKitten.
After all that serious slashing we needed to go slash some more, so we had a slashers meetup in the park across the street. What we discovered, however, was that the park is big and not entirely flat, so when we couldn’t find slashers (there were wizard rockers, though) we didn’t think to look behind the hill, that is until

dracofiend and Mr. Dracofiend came along to ~~rescue us~~ show us the way. *g*
At that picnic I met the absolutely ADORABLE

doctormav AKA Severus *loves being glomped by Snape*,

ravenna_c_tan,

gatewaygirl,

supes,

dacro and

stupid_drawings, as well as seeing everyone else I had already mentioned. It felt as if we were just collecting people as we went along...
So then it was time for the Snarry meetup at Edwardo’s.
OMG, SO MANY PEOPLE! I cannot possibly remember them all but I’ll try to get a few. In addition to all the people I already mentioned (and I do mean all) there was

the_con_cept,

hpstrangelove,

tracy_loo_who,

joanwilder,

armand_r,

tripperfunster,

djinn7,

reddwarfer,

aliciamasters,

amanuensis1,

nimori,

dbadssasin,

gossymer,

silver_ariel,

vals_wickedgrin,

accioslash,

jeni_less,

anathama91,

acromantular,

clauclauclaudia,

geoviki and about seventy other people. My other roomie,

venturous1 showed up during dinner, yay!
And the STUFF! Wow, we know how to party in Snarry. :)
After that we went home, moved Ven in, and, well, crashed. (What? I’m old, okay?)

Saturday:
This was the morning of my panel with

kabal42,

wook77,

ziasudra and

kethlenda. We talked about how fandom newsletters are used in HP fandom and had a really great discussion with our audience. Given that it was at 9am on a Saturday morning, I was shocked anyone came, lol.
After that we planned to go to a Snape panel, but it quickly went, well, het, so we ran away and grabbed some food before going to the Snaco meetup in the pub. This was a TON of fun.

ravenna_c_tan passed out a Snaco zine that was positively droolable. You all must read it here!
I sat in a corner with

tripperfunster,

the_con_cept,

dracofiend,

hpstrangelove and

r_grayjoy and we talked about, well, everything. *g*
I went to

amanuensis1’s Slytherin talk which was amazing (I knew I picked the right House), and then we decided it was time to eat again.
This was when

dementordelta continued her diabolical plan. We talked about how there are no Dunken Donuts in her part of the country and how this upset her. Since they all seem to close early we decided there would need to be an early morning run to get donuts, only we couldn’t figure out when it would be. We then mapped out all the Dunkin donuts nearby.
At dinner,

stupid_drawings asked for drabbles in exchange for art, so I wrote her this (as close as I can remember):

~

Pairing: Snarry
Prompt: Bench

“I thought there would at least be foreplay.”

Severus smirked, eying Harry’s arse as he moved rhythmically back and forth. “This is foreplay,” he murmured, “Very stimulating.”

“But why do I have to actually clean the bench?” Harry whinged. “It’s not dirty. Why can’t we just cut to the sex and forget the manual cleaning?”

“That was the agreement. You missed a spot by the way.”

Harry sighed and reached forward to scrub harder. “Why do your fantasies always involve me cleaning?”

He jumped as Severus moved in behind him.

“Enough,” Severus purred. “Now it’s time to mess it up.”

~

She drew me a pic for it that I’ll post as soon as I figure out how. ;)
We went back to the hotel and Sansa and Siren came over again, so we threw another impromptu party in which we managed to get Siren to agree to write in the

snarry_holidays with us. *glee* I even posted in proxy for her. ;)
I seriously think Sansa and Siren are my long lost sisters. ♥

Sunday:
Because there wasn’t that much slash programming,

bethbethbeth,

titti,

midnitemarauder and Saber ShadowKitten decided to put on an impromptu slash panel which turned into a lovely couple of hours of sheer slash yumminess. After a late breakfast, we all retired to the Room of Requirement, where we wrote drabbles, nagged the artists into making us drawbles, and where they sang me happy birthday. *glee* Very relaxing. Ven had to leave that afternoon, and she found that she had too much art (cannot fathom that) so she came and distributed it to us! Eeee! Happy birthday to ME.
After that

sassy_cissa,

dementordelta,

accioslash, Mr Accioslash,

rubyrosered and Gretchen (sorry, I can’t remember your fandom name!) went for sushi (mmmm) and then Sassy had to leave. *sadness*
I got dressed for ~~my birthday party~~ the Yule Ball, and met Delta there. The ballroom is gorgeous and the silent auction was fun. I lost my bid on Jin’s art but Delta and I won Alan’s photos which we divided up later. *happy sigh* I also managed to get another of my darling

littleblackbow’s pieces of Snape art.

Monday:
So sad! Breakfast was all about making sure I got people to sign my friendship book and hugging/clinging to everyone.
Apparently there was this conference going on though, and the House cup was up for grabs and guess what! Kohilo House (my house - go figure) won! So we got these Chinese good luck coins as our prize. Hee!
After that it was to the airport. I shared a cab with a couple of people and then it was goodbye Chicago. *sniff*
But here’s where Delta’s evil plan comes to fruition. As I was walking through the airport, I realized I was hungry. I passed Chinese food, salads, smoothies, sandwiches, McDonalds, and Starbucks. Nothing appealed to me. Until I walked by Dunkin donuts. Grrrr. What did I have for lunch? A Dunkin donuts apple fritter. *sigh*
Delta is an evil enabler. :P

If I forgot to put someone on this list (and I know I did) just poke me and remind me, and don’t forget the Terminus Friending Frenzy currently going on. *g*

*collapses*

Up next? Drabbles! :)