...Hey, I'm not trying to be nobody. I just want a chance to be myself...

[hazelchaz]

Oh, by the way, photos now online:
Buddy Todd Park, Oceanside (Feb/Mar-2009)
ConDor: Friday Evening (27-Feb-2009) et seq.
Photo of caprine is from Condor, natch.

ConDor Report part 2: Party time and scouting a park. (See also: part 1.)

Why go to a convention and throw a party? One could ask the opposite question, sort of: why would I go to a convention and not do something?

Some people near and dear to me go to conventions and dress up in costumes, or go to all the program items, or spend a great deal of time shopping. Me, my focus is generally either hosting a party or sitting at a table (or both).

I wanted to host a "Confirmation" party. ala_mokita was on board with the idea. (For those who just got here: The Westercon in 2010 will be in Pasadena, and has a name of "Confirmation." Christian's the chair.) I think the theme idea has possibilities - "Come to a Confirmation Party. Shirt and tie, poofy dresses, school uniforms, or come as you are" - but we need to have at least two or three people, preferably more, following the "dress code" for the party, or it's just a goofy guy inexplicably wearing a tie. But there definitely should be flyers for the party with some kind of art explaining the joke. While the chair's named Christian, and the convention's called Confirmation, it's not actually a Christian fandom convention...

And Christian was going to be at Potlatch. selinawoman wasn't coming, library_lynn was working, nitroace had rehearsals. Melissa and summoner_lenne9 couldn't get away -- it was only going to be me. My folks weren't even going to be there. And I didn't have any art for a party sign.

So, I decided I'd host a party, just to have one. A "Chaz party." Last year I celebrated Hazel's Picture Gallery's 10th (11th) birthday party at ConDor, and my room was already booked for the party block. I'd expected to have some kind of party in my room regardless.

What to serve? Well, a certain portion of my menu tends to be the same every time. (I know, I'm in a rut...) Something salty, some fresh fruit and veg, something chocolate, something sweet but not chocolate. Something special you won't find at the other parties. Real food of some sort (although the fresh fruit and veg sometimes qualify for that) and usually I have some kind of protein... Soft drinks with caffeine and without, with sugar and without, that sort of thing.

I usually can handle most of that by packing the right party bins in the car and making one or two shopping trips. I decided I wanted to make Meyer Lemon Cake cupcakes -- we had one of the Fresh & Easy cake mixes -- and I could do that in our new toaster oven. Cargo space is precious. While Saltine is quite capacious, I wanted to make sure I kept the passenger seat open in case I drove someone around. I didn't want to try to pack a crockpot as well as the toaster oven, so I decided not to have something hot during the party.

A tough decision to make. So many hot dishes are dead-easy to shop and heat, like macaroni & cheese or chili or teriyaki meatballs... but this time I knew that there would be a loscon party at the con, and surely they'd have something hot and tasty.

And theming/decorations wouldn't apply this time -- I was "phoning it in" and just shaking the party box -- so I didn't worry about having food to match my theme. Making it a bit easier.

I brought most of the ingredients that went with the cake mix. Two eggs, butter and powdered sugar for the frosting, oil in an empty water bottle. Would need to buy milk, but then, I always like to buy a carton of milk for my parties.

I made it to the Smart and Final on Midway by 7:00 pm. I noticed that "Go Girl" energy drinks were available by the case. (left)

You may recall that at yaoicon, we'd found "Go Girl" at the store. Christian got what turned out to be a lifetime supply. (right)

I was surprised to find the Midway S&F store didn't have the Mexican Coca-Cola! So, a detour downtown. Exit on 10th, right, left on G, to 15th and G, found everything I needed there.

I made it to the hotel about 8 o'clock, as I mentioned in the last part, and ran into ericeps which is when I realized I'd forgotten the Cactus Cooler. I picked some up Saturday morning after breakfast, at this Ralphs store with a huge display of Coca-Cola products. Interestingly enough, the display has no Cactus Cooler, but it does have "Squirt" which isn't a Coke product. (left)

I like to have Cactus Cooler at my parties. I know Eric likes it, and I've seen it be the third-most popular flavor in other situations. (First is water, second is Coca-Cola.)

Here are the beverages I ended up serving:

1. Bottled water
2. Tejava unsweetened Ice Tea
3. Milk, 2%
4. Coca-Cola
5. Cactus Cooler
6. Diet Dr Pepper
7. Frappuccino, Vanilla/Caramel/Coffee flavors
8. Mike's Hard Lemonade/Lime/Cranberry-Lemonade/Pomegranate-Lemonade
9. Newcastle Brown Ale
10. Negra Modelo (I had a handful of bottles on hand)
11. Stockyard Oatmeal Stout (one bottle, in case I ran into jbriggs)

Saturday afternoon I went back to my room and started on the cupcakes. You can see the Brave Little Toaster Oven on the desk, before I decided it made more sense to have it outside. I figured this out about three minutes into pre-heating the oven. (left)

I made four dozen cupcakes. Actually 49 -- the final one was a matter of scraping the last bits of batter out, and as it turns out used up the last bit of frosting as well. There was about an hour of actual baking -- the cupcakes only take 10 minutes to bake, but I had to do them in five batches because of the size of the Brave Little Toaster Oven.

I have these blue square plates that are part of my party kit. They're a little beat up, but they're colorful and they're square so I have less dead table space on the buffet. I put each batch (a dozen) on a plate to cool. When I had baked all of them, I mixed up some butter cream frosting. Powdered sugar, a little milk, a little butter, and flavoring -- in this instance, I zested an entire lemon to make a good tart frosting. I'd brought all the kitchen utensils I might need, except I forgot the electric mixer. It's hard work, whipping frosting with a crooked wooden spoon!

Here you can a blue plate with one little cupcake on it. (And the poor naked lemon on the fruit tray.) When I frosted them I realized I needed a gap between cupcakes, so I put nine cupcakes on each square plate. I put all but one of the platefulls in the dresser. During the party, as each plate was emptied I pulled out another and just stacked it on top of the others. (right)

I mentioned I made 49 cupcakes, and the plates were stacked nine each. I ate one of the extras (to make sure I didn't need to throw out the whole batch as a bad job) and gave the other three to Bearwoman and to the bardsworth folks. I learned that from 3:00-4:00 pm, the smell of the baking lemon cupcakes was all over the pool deck area, and wafted into Registration every time the door was opened.

Snacks I served at the party:

1. Little lemon cupcakes
2. Gummy Bears, and Sour gummy worms*
3. Reese's Peanut Butter Bats
4. Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Cups
5. Trader Joe's Chocolate Orange Sticks
6. Peanut M&Ms*
7. Moon Pies
8. Go Panda, Pocky and Fran
9. Mini Oreo cookies*
10. Ruffles Potato Chips
11. Veg/dip tray
12. Multi-color Goldfish
13. Apples, oranges

* I had a small amount on hand from a previous event.

I brought one set of cubbies along. I set them up next to the cooler, for a restock/buffet space. And a place for empties to go. The cups on the top were meant to be used (ignore my Sombrero cup); a few of the disposable cups were used, but not my thrift-store assortment. (left)

I opened the party at 8:00 pm, as soon as the Masquerade was over and I'd snapped a few shots. From time to time I took pictures of the people in the room, such as this shot at half past eight. (right)

The three people on the right-hand corner of the bed -- whose names I unfortunately didn't catch -- were kind enough to donate some Japanese snacks. Apparently my party sign promising Pocky caught their attention, and they brought more Pocky and Hello Panda (chocolate and strawberry flavors), Yam-Yam (aka do-it-yourself Pocky) and shrimp crackers to share.

Other donations included small bottles of Jim Beam and Johnny Walker.

Also in that photo, in the background you can see one of my blue plates on with Moon Pies. When I had told menolly I was serving Moon Pies and beer, she asked me why I was throwing a redneck party! They were on the nightstand on the window side of the room, with another plate of them in the restock cubbies.

The intention was to do a plate swap to get more Moon Pies to the nightstand, but the people sitting on the cubby-side were eating them, along with some of the chocolate orange sticks there. No big deal, the cubbies were actually more convenient than the other nightstand, and if they treated the cubbies as buffet space (rather than off-limits prep space) that was fine with me. When the orange stick container was almost empty, I refilled it from the supply over at the desk buffet.

I have a large variety of small stickers in my party kit, and thought the "junk food" ones would be appropriate. By the end of the night I'd used 79 stickers, putting one on each person's badge as they came to the door. Interestingly enough, the convention had about 372 members over the course of the weekend, which meant that 21% of the membership visited my party. A bit low, at a small convention I would have expected between a quarter and a third of the membership to have been party-hopping based on my prior experience.

Does the poor economy mean more people are commuting and day-tripping, and not staying over? Certainly there weren't any local people renting a room to throw an open party, as my party and Loscon's were the only ones that weekend... At 10 o'clock I took another photo. (left).

There was interesting conversation all night. For example, Richard James, who has an orange tabby cat, talked about his doctor finding orange fur in his colonoscopy. At quarter 'till eleven, I snapped a shot. (right)

People came and went, investigated the dance or the all-night gaming and returned. Shannah Linker came with a friend to get an armload of sodas for the young fans who were hanging out somewhere else. I took that as a sign that things were winding down party-wise, and starting packing up. The room was empty of guests by 12:51 am. (left)

The Loscon party was still going on, though, and when they closed down an hour later as I was putting things away and getting ready to load the car their stragglers came back in! I appreciate the company, and kept cleaning up -- when I had it all packed up, I thanked them all for coming and told them they were welcome to stay but I was turning out the lights and going to sleep. So the party ended for the second time around 2:30 am.

The Loscon party was right next door. I checked out what they had, and I wasn't impressed. They had a cheese slice tray, and some crackers. (left) Also plain meatballs (not shown) and a pitcher of some kind of punch. Plain? It's not hard to grab a bottle of teriyaki or barbecue sauce, folks.

What really surprised me about the Loscon room, though, was the near-total absence of decorations. "Bucky the Robot" in the corner counts, I guess, if there had been a sign explaining that it was the invention of the artist guest of honor. (right)

The Loscon 36 table promotion theme involves a dozen or more colorful posters. Why weren't they hung on the wall? (left) At the table there are too many to display, so they're put out overlapping each other. Not terribly effective to get across the message.

lyzard13 is generally credited with starting the Loscon promotional tour, traveling to other regional conventions in 1999. I have occasionally been accused of being passive-agressive in this LJ, even ambiguously snarky. Let me state this plainly: The Loscon party at ConDor was the weakest party I've seen Loscon put on in ten years. Liz gets the ball rolling, ten years of Loscon chairs keep it going, and it's down to this? Hope things improve at baycon, which for California conventions is the big league as far as open parties are concerned.

Sunday I decided it would make more sense to hit the road before I was too tired, rather than wait a few hours and be absolutely exhausted. As it was, I needed a short nap by Carlsbad.

Then I pushed on to check out Buddy Todd Park in Oceanside.

Buddy Todd Park is 35 miles from Mission Valley, and 61 miles from my house. (40 miles from the 5/133 junction, if you want a good Orange County landmark to measure from.)

animelosangeles is sponsoring a potluck cosplay park there next month, Saturday 2009-04-25, noon to five. I'm hoping to have a bunch of department and division heads there, to do a little outreach to anyone who wants to know more about the convention. And anyone who just wants to show up and have a burger is certainly welcome.

I learned that the closest hotels are the Quality Inn & Suites and the Ramada. You can take Greyhound, Amtrak, Metrolink, the Coaster or the Sprinter to Oceanside Station and take the local bus 303 up to Mission and Mesa. The park is a mile up Mesa Avenue, but the bus on that road (313) doesn't run on weekends... call one of us for a pickup if you want a ride.

It's a pretty park, a good-sized one. Grass, fields, a basketball court, playground equipment, benches, lots of picnic tables with barbecue grills. Scattered pairs of picnic table + barbecue grill are all over the property.

There's also this one spot, near the restrooms and the parking lot and the playground, where there are half a dozen picnic tables next to each other with one or two grills. The logical place for a large group like ours, so I intend to get there bright and early to snag that spot. I'll bring some kind of streamer or tape to mark off our space.

Next: A week in Indianapolis. Chaz sleeps in five different beds over a seven-day period...

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_darkvictory/]

I dearly love the idea of a Confirmation party. When I heard that Westercon in 2010 was going to be Confirmation, I considered working up a bishop costume, complete with ring to be kissed, but wasn't sure how it would go over.

[ala-mokita.livejournal.com]

I'll kiss your ring... Whatever you want to make of that.

The real reason its called Confirmation is because Elayne wanted to let everyone know that we'd be answering their emails.