We had a busy day today. We started out at the Hallmark Christmas ornament premiere, where I accumulated some ornaments for the library tree I am planning. James got the new airplane ornament, a silver Cessna with blue trim.

There was another item we were planning to get as a gift, but which was not at the Hallmark store we went to. Apparently the Hallmark people only sent them four of this item, and they were all gone by the time we got there at 9:45 (they could be bought as a set or individually). They told us the store up at Town Center had received "extra," so we went there and did find it.

After a brief visit to the hobby shop, we went to Timegate, a small Doctor Who/Stargate oriented convention. We attended last year's and had a wonderful time; it was like the small fan-run cons I attended when I first moved to Georgia. This year was just as good: we went to three panels, all about Doctor Who, one about the third season, a "how-I-did-it" by an gentleman who built his own full-size Dalek with nothing but photo references from the series, and a wonderful panel featuring Louis Robinson, who worked for the BBC as a film editor on Doctor Who, The Onedin Line, and others and did other work for the BBC. He showed us slides of the different places and people he associated with during those years, along with some very funny stories about not only Doctor Who cast and crew, but about his film school days (one of his lecturers was Alfred Hitchcock and another was John Frankenheimer). He had worked at the old Ealing Studios as well as at the BCC Television Centre and had a variety of slides of places and the most wonderful old "Radio Times" covers.

The convention also serves supper, so we enjoyed that as well, sitting with our friends from ARTC, but unfortunately had to leave early since James has to be up at 7:30 tomorrow to go in to work. We would have liked to have stayed and played trivia.

I did meet my Waterloo in the very small dealer's room. One of the vendors had a beautiful thick, full-color volume called Doctor Who: The Legend Continues and also Andrew Cartmel's Through Time. (Is there anyone else out there who looks at books with greedy eyes the way the DeBeers people look at diamonds? <g>) James bought me a sonic screwdriver, too. I bought him a T-shirt, so we swapped. I couldn't resist: it was a helpdesk character rolled as if it were running in a roleplaying game—42 Armor, +20 Intellect, etc.

The sonic screwdriver is cool since it is also a pen and comes with two different pen points, one black and one "UV" that writes in "invisible ink" on the included ID folder with "psychic paper" (read, of course, with the blue light from the other end of the sonic screwdriver). I've always wanted a sonic screwdriver; pity it's not real—I would love to give my computer at work an adjustment!!

However, the thing that made me laugh the longest was a black T-shirt with the following on it (Rodney, you'll like this one):

<GEEK LOVE LETTER>
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
</GEEK LOVE LETTER>

Absolutely wicked funny.

Labels: Christmas, conventions, science fiction

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