hellziggy

What can I say? I've been busy. I got about 100 (ok, maybe 10 or so) new LJ friends after the convention, I was a week behind on my classes, and I'm STILL working on trying to get all the pictures ready!

( Underneath this cut you will find a sort of longish account of Friday night at the James Marsters & Friends convention on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.  )

and if you are looking for a few hundred pictures of the handsome Mr. Marsters, they can be found HERE

I've put about 50 pics up. They are me in my fancy dress, the reception on Friday, my lovely dinner companions, and James both at dinner and in concert. (And there is a Moose in some of them too!) I have oodles more to do, but since I actually have to go to work tomorrow for the first time in a week & a half I should probably go to bed!

All the pictures of just James should have a copyright notice on them. Please don't repost these pics anywhere without asking me first, and if I say yes, do not post them with the copyright info removed. Giving people the link is ok, but it would be cool to let me know just so I know where folks are wandering in from!

This picture posted below shows just how BLUE James' eyes are! I didn't enhance the blue at all, I just desaturated the rest of it.





Click here to find the pretty, pretty man!

OK. Under the cut are pictures of James from this weekend. This is just a sampling. None of them are final versions, I just wanted to get something up. After I'm home and can offload them to my external drive I'll get them ready for posting. So please, don't repost these anywhere although you can feel free to send people here via links.

( Warning! Extreme hotness under here!! )

James was soooo happy & healthy looking and full of energy this weekend. It was a fabulous time!

I'm very tired. Less than 4 hours sleep last night.

Fabulous day though! But too tired to type!

Here it is, the dress for Friday night in LA and for Darek & Nissa's wedding when we get back.

Two more guests added for the James Marsters and Friends event:
Smallville creators Al Gough & Miles Millar!

At this rate, the Friday Night premium ticket event is going to have as many special guests as ticket holders! This is going to rock sooooo much! And I have ticket number 26!!! I can hardly wait!


The current guest list is:
James Marsters
Tony Todd
Kevin Sorbo
David Fury
Jane Espenson
Steve DeKnight
Michael Winnick
Dee Dee Bradley
Mercedes McNab
Al Gough & Miles Millar

They've added another guest to the James Marsters event in September: David Fury!

So the current list is:

James Marsters
Tony Todd
Kevin Sorbo
David Fury
Jane Espenson
Steve DeKnight
Michael Winnick
Dee Dee Bradley

It's official. hellbob and I are finally getting back to California to visit scubagrrl and Mr. Scubagrrl again!

Our last trip to LA was four years ago! And the trip to Washington State was two years ago. Now that we're at a point in our lives where vacations are not just pipe dreams I start to get antsy when it's been over a year since a trip.

We are going to fly out there on Thurs, September 7th and fly home on Thurs, September 14th. We don't have to pay for plane tickets because we are exchanging timeshare points for the tickets, and we don't have to pay for hotel because we are staying with scubagrrl.

hellbob may not believe it, but I was planning that we should go out there this fall anyway. So, when www.jamesmarsters.com announced that his only convention this year would be in LA in September I figured that was perfect timing.

Unfortunately they didn't announce any further info until the time the tickets went on sale. We didn't know date, place, price, anything until then. I was expecting about $150 for gold tickets and $500 for premium. That's about what the Toronto tickets were in US$.

So I logged on when the ticket info went up.

Sept. 8-10th? Perfect! I already had from the 7th through the 17th off work.

On the Queen Mary? Cool! What a neat venue.

One of the other guests? Jane Espenson. Cool! She's written for a ton of shows I love and I've heard she's a fabulous con speaker.

Ticket cost? $300 for gold. What? Wow. ok. I've decided I'm going. That's spendy but if it's like Toronto it'll be worth it. Besides, I haven't done any concerts lately besides INXS. So I peeked at the premium expecting to see $750 plus for the price. They were $500. And limited to only 100 tickets. They included a formal reception w/dinner, drinks, acoustic concert.

I waffled a bit, but I just couldn't pass it up. Not when the price between the two was so close. It seems silly because $500 is the same either way, but I wouldn't have been willing to upgrade to that if the regular tickets were in the $100-200 range. Apparently other people felt the same way because the premium tickets were sold out within an hour. If we had to pay for plane tickets to get there I would have considered not even doing the $300 ticket and skipping the convention altogether (but I would have been bummed.)

I was going to be a lazy bum on Friday and relax because it's a holiday here at work, but now I'm going to come in to work instead. I'll get my holiday pay, but I'll also get paid time and a half for any hours I work. So every hour I work will be like 2.5 on the paycheck. Depending on how my week goes I may come in Saturday morning too for a few hours. It sucks putting in extra hours, but I want to at least make up the difference in the two ticket prices as well as then cover as much of the rest of the ticket as I can.

So, in September, WE'RE GOING TO CALIFORNIA!!! YAY! I just loved it there last time we went, even though I don't think I could live there. And the weekend we're there, I GET TO SEE JAMES AGAIN! Two concerts, two dinners (one is formal) and lots of other stuff. Not gonna get too excited yet though because it's still five months away.

It was a nice lazy day today. lucky13charm came over this afternoon (bearing a Caribou frou-frou drink for me!) and we hooked the laptop up to the tv and watched the movie Chance. Even without the obvious reason for us wanting to watch it (see pic below) this is just a darn fun movie. It's too damn bad Amber couldn't get any kind of distribution for it because I'd really like to get a legal DVD copy of it.



While we were watching the movie I knitted. One Jayne hat for the Monkeys is done and the other is partially earflapped! The picture has kinda crappy color, but I didn't feel like messing with it.



Also, while taking the picture of the hat I took the picture of Francois that I had been meaning to take. He was made by the uber-talented Janeness aka bleaknimue. Again, the pic has kinda crappy color.




I also rectified lucky13charm's lack of knowledge about Rejected, and then we watched Pirates of the Carribean which I hadn't seen in too long.

I finally just saw Amber Benson's unreleased film Chance. I was interested in this movie even without James Marsters in it, and honestly, I thought his part was much smaller than it turned out to be. But the movie was good, and there were many many good shots of him to take screenshots of.



( Click for more pretties )