Alright then...we are back from our trip to Chicago. I must say that we had the most wonderful time ever!! This might possibly have rivaled the trip that my wife and I took to New England on our 15th anniversary. Nah. But it was really great in some different ways. First off, let me get the one or two negative things off my chest. Chicago people are the rudest people I have ever met. If you are from there and are a nice person, go fix it. What can I say? They were just severely rude. The other thing is the traffic. Yeeesh! Ok, on to the good stuff.

I'm not going to try to give you a run down on everything we did in this one entry. For one thing, I don't have time. And ghostiness will certainly give you her own version as well. (And real soon, I'm going to learn how to make that a link to her diary.) We arrived Friday, shortly before noon, and discovered that we could not check into our hotel until 4:00. So we decided to head on down to Navy Pier downtown. We kind of figured that that would be the only opportunity that we had to visit the pier. (This was where we encountered some really bad traffic. Bad is too good a word for it.) Navy Pier is a nice place, but it was very crowded, especially for a Friday afternoon (how would I know, I've never been there before). It's also expensive to do anything there. But we found some food (hot dogs and hamburgers at the food court) and had some wonderful desserts at the Hagen Daz place. We looked at the lake a bit (Lake Michigan is really quite pretty and very, very big (looks like an ocean to me), bought some of those cinnamon-roasted nuts (yuuummmmm) and headed on back to the hotel. By this time it was pretty close to 4:00. We checked in at the hotel, then went downstairs and checked in at the convention window. They already had our stuff ready for us, so that didn't take long. We each got a large manila envelope which contained our copy of GotR's Mad Brilliant, the autographed photo of Ghost of the Robot (on which Charlie had colored his hair), our convention badges which had our assigned seats at the Pickwick theater (we kept these seats for all activities at the theater), a ticket to the GotR concert on Saturday night, autograph vouchers for James Marsters, Mark Metcalf, Danny Strong, and Tom Lenk. Oh, yeah...and a Buffy card. And one of those light stick thingies (which we never used...I think we were supposed to take it to the concert). And a convention booklet which had brief bios of each person attending. At this point, there was nothing really to do until the "Cocktail reception" at 7:30, so Christi and I walked across to the convenient Target store (yay!! Wherever there is a Target, I feel at home) while Her Ghostiness mingled with some other convention goers. She made a friend or two, I think. We brought back cokes and other snacks and hung in the room for a few minutes. Oh, yeah...almost forgot. Christi got this bright idea to go up to the 12th floor to see if we could find where James and the group were staying. Well, we got off the elevator, and saw down at the end of the hallway a door with a bronze plate on it that had two room numbers, 1230 and 1231. We approached the door quietly (well, they did, I kind of hung back a little in case a quick getaway was needed). Voices were heard, and one began getting closer. Just as Christi and Ghosti were walking away from the door, it opened! Charlie from GotR peeked out and went back in. Then, as we were about halfway down the hall, he came out and went to another room. He left the door partly open, and we are heard James and others talking and playing guitars. Sadly, we didn't get up the nerve to go down there and just try to meet them. We went on down to our room (we were still carrying a box of Coke and bags of goodies at this time), dumped our stuff, and headed downstairs to the reception.

I have to go to kickball practice, so this will be continued at a later date.

Missed anything?
The Beatles--Abbey Road/Alice Cooper--Killer - July 04, 2012
The Beatles Eponymous Album - June 26, 2012
Autism's False Prophets - February 12, 2011
Santana--Guitar God? - November 11, 2010
Tribute To the Red Sox - September 29, 2010