Running Away to Memphis!

I’m going to be in Memphis, TN all weekend, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me.

Anyone going to Mephit Fur Meet, look for me at The Raccoon’s Bookshelf.

See you guys all on Wed.

Kyrin

Let’s see, thanks to Delta, we didn’t get there in time and missed most of the convention.

Story: Left work early so I could make the 5:30pm flight, giving up my vacation pay for Monday to do this I might add. Got there, checked in, 10 minutes to boarding they cancel the flight. We’re in Boise, not a major hub, next flight to SLC is in an hour, we get stand by, but it is overbooked, so next available flight? Saturday at 8am, arrival in Memphis? 6pm.

Convention runs 4 days, Thursday to Sunday, so we spent $1200 in plane tickets, $180 in Sponsor membership and $300 in hotel so we could attend the convention for ONE day. On top of that sleep for the weekend was nonexistant, and no I wasn’t having fun and eschewing sleep on purpose.

So Saturday: Arrive, get on plane arrive in SLC on time. Get on next plane from SLC to Cincinnati(sp) taxi to runway. Elderly lady in the row across from me goes into cardiac arrest, we race back to the gates and waiting paramedics, her husband is a doctor and he is doing his best to treat her with the plane stores of oxygen and the meds they have with them. She is going in and out of consciousness. Get to gate, paramedics assess her quickly, get her standing to put her in the plane’s wheel chair and she crumples to the floor with the paramedic and I diving for her! We manage to catch her and wrestle her now completely limp form onto the chair and they don’t even strap her on it and take off at warp 9.

The stewardesses told us later that the paramedics raced her up the ramps and were working on her at the top, we have no idea if she made it or not.

This whole episode put the plane’s schedule off by an hour, most passengers including us had only and hour for our connecting flights once we arrived in Cincinati, ack! They made it up in the air and we were only 15 minutes late once on the ground, of course our connecting gate was literally a mile away. Took a subway to get to it, but we made it.

On arrival we managed to get on the wrong hotel shuttle, but the fella who took us took pity on us and dropped us off at the correct hotel. Upon checking into the hotel we located 5 of our friends arranged to go to dinner and promptly lost the one with the car. The other 4 had eaten. We ended up at the hotel restaurant as we hadn’t eaten since 6am, and were starving. This was a mistake, for $71 we got a dismal almost nonexistant buffet dinner and an appetizer for 3 people. The buffet had a total of 6 items only 4 of which were things we considered food.

Managed to get our con badges and go to a really hilarious “How to draw Adult Art” panel presented by BushyCat. The comments and drawings were very entertaining, and when we were done we auctioned off the scribbles and earned $40 for the Tiger Haven Charity.

Next day I spent most of it hanging out with my friend Mike at his table, managed to sell a few prints, an original, and work on two sketch books, one of which was for Xian Jaguar, so cool to draw for her, though she insisted on paying me even though I wanted to gift it to her.

I may also be hearing from someone about doing some commission work, one for fun and another for a book cover. That will make 4 book cover art projects for me in total if I get it.

Sunday night was entertaining, we went to dinner with a bunch of dear friends, fought over who paid the bill goodnaturedly and then went back to the hotel and watched 70+ fursuiters play Musical Chairs. Oh man is that hilarious! You have to realize how hard it is for them to see, so this game was pretty tough for them, and the wrestling matches for chairs were really gut-busting.

Overall despite all the frustration and not being able to be there for everything as planned, we had a pretty good time. But for what we spent to do it, it was rather disappointing. Stupid airline.

Kyrin