Five-forty channel six news team, breaking story 'bout a get-rich-quick scheme. One anchor turns...

Photos online: LASFS/Aftermeetings part 296: Coral Cafe (23-Aug-2007); Remodeling Monster: Water Heater (25-Aug-2007); Chaz's Birthday Party: Saturday Evening (25-Aug-2007) and The Morning After (26-Aug-2007). The picture of xkokuux is from the tail end of the party.

Just got back last night from Anime Vegas 4. Sure glad library_lynn took half the driving, it's always a grueling drive home from Las Vegas. The convention got about 3500 people over the course of the three-day weekend (the convention ran Saturday to Monday). We'd been promised a table in the dealers room, at the end of artist's alley, and I learned late by checking the website that they were offering a dealers room "preview" Friday afternoon 4pm-7pm for pre-reg members, so Lynn and I left Friday morning instead of Friday evening.

( We brought the silly ribbons, because having something shiny for sale gets people to slow down and take a look at the table... )

We went through 525 bottles of water. When we'd given away the last bottle Monday, we packed up and left.

Some of the bottles we gave away at night. After dinner Saturday, I headed back over to the site to see if they were keeping the dance watered. They were -- the ballpark people were filling up a couple of barrel coolers and putting out cups just as I got there to take a look. So I went downstairs to the function rooms.

I ran into a couple of cosplayers having a few malt coolers outside, who I'll call Cat and Saskatoon. ( I encouraged them to drink some water, and they accepted the bottles... I saw them again Sunday night... )

Anyhow, taking Armando and James back to their house and fleabag motel, respectfully, late Sunday night, was the end of it, or so I thought. The next day, Monday, thank-yous and "see-you-at-animelosangeles, may I have another granola bar? thank you for looking out for us." Lynn and I planned to leave mid-afternoon. Cat and Saskatoon? Well, they were heading back to Sacramento. By way of Orange County, to drop off Saskatoon --- she was the only one in the carpool who lives in SoCal. Whisky tango foxtrot? Really? Okay, whatever floats your skis, but that's not even an L-shaped route -- it's more 7-shaped than anything. Long, long, looong drive.

Oh, you're not leaving right away? You're going to wait until it cools off. Did you notice that it's Vegas, and it only gets down to the 90s at night? (For the Celsius audience, that means it drops from 42 C down to 35 C.) You've got a 16-hour drive, minimum, and you're going to wait another six hours before you leave town... Saskatoon, we live in Orange County, want to ride with us?

So Saskatoon gets her stuff out of their car, and I consolidate our gear like mad to free up space for her in the back. Good thing she's young 'n skinny and travels light. We head out. We hit two cloudbursts before we get out of Nevada, and have a largely uneventful ride home. Oh, there was about an hour where traffic was moving so stop-and-go-slow that we saw bored passengers from other cars get out and walk along the freeway for a while just for the novelty of it. And when we got to Baker, it was 113 F (45 C).

We ate at the Bob's Big Boy. Saskatoon had been in constant contact with Cat and her gang, who were unhappily still in Vegas -- that slow leaky flat they had couldn't be repaired on Labor Day, they needed to go back to the motel for another night. Not as much of an inconvenience for them when you consider that none of them had to be at work Tuesday morning -- only Saskatoon, myself and Lynn.

About 10-something Monday night, we rolled into Orange, dropped her off at her sister's house where her mom would pick her up for the ride back to Laguna Niguel. Lynn and I went home, pulled the bed out of the spare room because Tuesday morning the handyman was coming to pull up the tile floor.

And Tuesday night, about 9:30 pm, almost four hours ago, Cat made it back to her home in Sacramento.