The Very Model of a Modern Major Slytherin

I'd intended to update a couple of times by now, but things have been even busier than usual here this year. Of course, that could be because we have more people than usual here this year. The house has been positively filled with fangirlish squee!

To do the obligatory name drop, at our peak we had venturous (our fabulous host), someoldcat, craveslash, ducky, elmyraemilie, kelly_chambliss, ragdoll, songquake, tjs_whatnot, thistlerose, twilightsorcery, and Ven's friend and honorary fangirl for the weekend, Carol (plus dogs Ari, Lily, Seneca, and Bailey and our lone kitty, Cyprus).

Now to back up with a slightly longer (although I'm shooting for tl:dr-free) report:

Like last year, ragdoll and I drove down with Ari the Italian Hound of Love. Ari was a very good passenger, for which I was particularly grateful when we got stuck (for two hours!) in horrible triffic that was backed up along I-95 due to a nasty-looking wreck. Needless to say (and why do people make that remark and then say things anyway?), we arrived at Ven's place later than we intended. But, hey, so did pretty much everyone else this time. (Holy Unpredictable Manor indeed!)

Our Friday people all gradually wandered in (except one who ended up not being able to make it, boo), and we kicked off the weekend with generalized squee, jokes and references that only geeks get and a fantastic dinner. I.e. the fundamentals of the annual DC Retreat.

Saturday! twilightsorcery and songquake got up early to take off for Occupy DC, and venturous, tjs_whatnot, someoldcat, kelly_chambliss, ducky, and I took the doggy troop to the river for a romp. It was lovely out there, and the dogs were Such!Happy!Dogs! Yay!

By the time we got back, the Saturday fen had arrived. The rest of the day/evening involved me failing at taking a nap thanks to a needy Ari, another awesome dinner, and a nice bonfire (although it was way too cold for winter-hating me!). After all that, I ended up staying awake until 3:00 am talking with someoldcat. (Snack fans go at it all night? ::snerk::)

At some point very early this morning, the first few lines of one of my holiday fest fics came to me, so huge yay for that. Whew.

Today has been lazy. I think most of us are still sitting around in our pajamas, actually. A few have already started to trickle away (whaa!). ragdoll and I will have to leave at some point this evening since I have to teach tomorrow.

Gah, I can't believe another Fall Retreat is already almost over! Every time I'm here, I never want to leave. But it's been amazing as usual -- perhaps even more so due to the especially large group (squee increases exponentially with each added fan, you know), I've had a great time hanging out with friends who I see far too seldom, and I've met a lot of awesome new folks. And Ari's had a blast. So all goals and expectations for the weekend achieved. :)

DC Retreat attendees (especially our warm and welcoming host venturous), you all are epic, epic WIN. See you all again next year (and many of you much sooner, I hope)?? ♥

Now that my brain and I are both back in the U.S., I'll see if I can write up more of my DiaCon report. I did manage to post about Thursday, the first day of the con. Now I'll try for Friday... which was a really awesome day, so this might get long, depending upon how much I can remember!

( Half cut to save you from excessive scrolling )

Well, I certainly didn't miss the last piece of programming of the day, "Sensual Stories for Deviant Adults", the daily_deviant fic reading! \o/ Holy bovine, y'all. The thing went better than I possibly could have hoped or imagined! Everyone did such a fantastic job, and just... ::flail::

I counted about 60 people in attendance -- roughly half the con. We had program sheets with author bios and links and such which I think turned out looking pretty nice. Also, thanks to its_art, we have Daily Deviant buttons for everyone. As a side note, I gotta say, I can't begin to describe how awesome it was seeing most of the con attendees walking around with d_d buttons. So awesome! :DDDDD

So the reading... was amazing! OMG, sabethea, kelly_chambliss, ragdoll, silvernatasha, gatewaygirl, and kabal42 (a last-minute addition, since we weren't sure whether he'd be able to get away from working the con long enough to participate) did an unbelievable job! I read also, by the way, but have no idea how I did. I mean, I was looking at my paper, so if people were checking their watches or yawning, I didn't see it. Heh. And if it was really terrible, someone should probably tell me so that I don't ever do it again...! Honestly, I can't even tell you how thrilled and impressed I am with how everyone did. I think sabethea, kelly_chambliss, silvernatasha, and gatewaygirl were the big stars in the end.

For anyone interested, here's a list of what was read by whom:

sabethea read Getting In On the Christmas Spirit (Severus/Remus with a side of implied Sirius/Buckbeak and a voyeuristic portrait!Walburga -- completely hilarious and wrong, and even more so when performed beautifully by the author)
kelly_chambliss read Reflections in a Golden Frame (The Mirror of Erised and various characters, pairings, and perversions -- even more brilliant read aloud by the author than written)
ragdoll read an excerpt from Different for Girls (Tonks/Fleur with corsetting, cunnilingus, and a last line that cracked everyone up)
r_grayjoy read Everything He Has to Give (Severus/Remus -- one I wrote for the "semen kink" of which I'm still rather fond)
silvernatasha read Count for Me (Percy/Lavender in which Percy gets Lavender's birthday spankings -- humorous and hot in turn, and had the audience alternating between giggling and panting)
gatewaygirl read an excerpt from A Confusion of Will and Desire (Harry/Draco with Draco teasing Harry terribly, which results in frantic bathroom smut -- classic H/D that steamed up the room)
kabal42 read The Red Queen (Ginny/Pansy -- leather, rubber, fetishized* clothing, spanking, and D/s hotness to end the reading with an appropriate helping of kink!)

After all that, I was pretty much done for the day, so I wrote up the Thursday report, stuffed some goody bags, and rested while most everyone else went to see DH2.

Hmm, I think that's quite enough for now. Saturday report in the next post!


*Ahahaha, spell check tried to change "fetishized" into "fertilized"! ::dies::

Just a very fast, sleep-deprived note to let everyone know I'm alive and well (I think! I'm a little too fried to know for sure) in Canterbury. ::tiny squee because that's all the energy I can muster; larger squee forthcoming::

Completely exhausted. Still, it was something of a miracle that I made it to Canterbury more or less at the intended time, so I'll take that. ragdoll, twilightsorcery, its_art, little_werewolf, and I all flew into Heathrow from different points of origin, but arranged to arrive at similar times, then meet at the airport bus station and travel by coach to Canterbury together. Well, 3/5 of us had flight delays. My flight arrived an hour late; twilightsorcery's landed even later. Then I discovered that getting from Terminal 5 over to the bus station (which is between Terminals 1 and 3) was far more difficult than it sounded (and than it should have been, honestly!).

Oh, and just to add insult to injury: Apparently I was wearing my Invisibility Cloak on the plane, because the flight attendants somehow missed me entirely when dinner came around and when tea and coffee came around a bit after that. Epic amounts of WTF there. I know I've lost some weight (unfortunately), but I'm pretty sure I don't actually disappear when I turn sideways...

Long, long trip, chaos, chaos, chaos, sleep-deprivation, more long trip, more chaos... But we did make our coach trip (both legs, even!) and arrived in Canterbury without major incident, so really, I have to count it as a success in the end.

The B&B is really cute too. I'm in a single room that's tiny but cozy. I like it. :)

Also, I've been in England for 24 hours and have already seen twilightsorcery, ragdoll, its_art, little_werewolf, gatewaygirl, ravenna_c_tan, leni_jess, kennahijja, lazy_neutrino, scarletladyy, and scarletladyy's fiance, K. Win! This con is going to be epic, I can tell already! \o/

HOMG exhausted.

Very, very confused about what day it is. Since I haven't been to bed yet, this has been the longest Tuesday ever. But when I wake up in the morning, it'll be Thursday. Exceedingly baffling.

Now, however, I'm full of nummy margaritas and about to faceplant on my keyboard. It looks like tomorrow is going to be petty busy. Hope to report in with something a bit more exciting and less delerious tomorrow, but we'll see...

::shuffles off to bed mumbling something about needing braaaaaiiiiiinnnzzzzz::

Whew! Have made it to the con hotel. Finally!

The Aeternitas folks had me scheduled for a shuttle from the airport to the con hotel (which is about an hour trip) at 3:30 pm. Well, my flight from Philly was delayed, so I called and told them I'd be late, and might need to be on a later shuttle. As it turns out, I was walking off the plane at 3:35 -- but the shuttle (for which I was scheduled) was full?? Er. Okay. Well, they put me on the next shuttle -- which was 5:40. Yikes.

Since I had plenty of time to kill, I went to the airport's food court and found something to eat. And fortunately, leela_cat's flight arrived then, so I had someone to help pass the time until the shuttle came. Which... was at 6:10 rather than 5:40. ::headdesk:: We finally made it to the con hotel a bit after 7:00, I think.

It was even later before ragdoll made it there, since she'd been delayed due to broken things and family insanity. Once she finally made it in, she, Leela, and I managed to run out in time to get takeout from the Chinese place across the street and drinks and other various things we'd deemed essential from the CVS down the block.

Shortly after we'd got settled back into my and Ragdoll's room, arcanetrivia texted to say that she was here -- with a bottle of wine. Well, come on over, then! LOL So she came by, and there was wine, and general exhausted jabbering (or at least I was exhausted and jabbering), and... yeah, random fannishness. (Can you tell I'm running out of steam here??)

Oh, and in the middle of all that, there was some brief chatting with leni_jess (I'm sure I'll see more of her before the weekend is over), and a hello or two to other folks I recognized.

In short... I'd say it ended up being a fairly successful evening, given the multitude of delays (for many people, apparently) and the fact that the con doesn't technically start until tomorrow afternoon!

...And now I believe I'll have a successful night by passing out and sleeping like the dead. (I hope!)

I finally made it home this evening, and by then I was rather soggy and tired. The foul weather had things all b0rked, so my bus left NY late and arrived in Philly even more late. When I got in, I said hello to Ari, got out of my wet clothes, unpacked my stuff, ate something hot, and promptly passed out for a couple of hours. Now I'm wide awake again and trying to catch up with the weekend report. Because there is far too much awesome to not report, even if no one cares but me. So there. ;P

So the aforementioned cold? Was so mild that I took one dose of cold medicine before going to sleep on Friday night and... that was it. There was only some lingering disconnected, floaty feeling on Saturday, and all evidence of illness was completely gone on Sunday. Wow. Apparently I developed an immune system sometime in the last couple of years!

In other words, I was feeling good -- though a bit spacey (sorry, all!) -- when I went to the Lunch of Epic Win at Rosa Mexicano. When twilightsorcery and I arrived, everyone else was already there (sorry about that also, all!). "Everyone else" being bethbethbeth, acatnamedeaster, and kelly_chambliss and family. As eeyore9990 put it, that's a whole lot of awesome at one table!!

I'd met bethbethbeth briefly before, but I'd never had an opportunity to really sit down and talk with her, so I was looking forward to that. And I was excited beyond all reason to meet acatnamedeaster and kelly_chambliss. And everyone was just fantastic and brilliant and fun, and the conversation went all over the place, and abjlfqhiofpaf!!! ::flail:: Also, such a gathering would not be complete if we (well, okay, mostly I) didn't scandalize the restaurant staff. But hey, they should mind their own business, right?! ::nod::

Saturday night was mellow. twilightsorcery had work to do, and I had a snupin_ldws drabble to write. That drabble, by the way, did not want to be written and fought me tooth and nail. I did finally get something written and turned in, though, and hopefully it's not pathetic enough to get me kicked off the island this week. :P

Today I got up after far too little sleep (the drabble's fault!), packed up, and headed out. I met up with one more not-fannish-but-geeky friend for lunch, then trudged through the rain to get to my bus pick-up point. Three hours later I walked into my apartment and was greeted by a very enthusiastic dog. Hee.

In conclusion, huge thanks to everyone who made my weekend amazing. ::hugs all around:: ♥ ♥ ♥


Unrelated, but needs to be mentioned -- thank you, sassy_cissa for the TWO wonderful v-gifts! And thank you for all your support and help. ::loves::