Anachrocon always starts late in the afternoon, so James worked until one o'clock today. I spent the morning making sandwiches, as the hotel food is extraordinarily expensive. It's a nice hotel, and I'm sure the rooms are terrific, but the restaurants are suited for businesspeople on expense accounts. If we thought the $20 breakfast buffet was too much at the Marriott at Century Center, this one is even worse: $24. We had dinner at the sports bar last year at WHOlanta and the portions were tiny and the charge large. They have an Italian place as well, with a $28 steak and even more for seafood; I don't even want to know what the ritzy "Magnolia Dining Room" costs! Anyway, I'd planned to buy chicken and make it as cacciatore, but we have a fridge stuffed with pork roast we bought on BOGO, so I made pork cacciatore in the crock pot and made sandwiches from that on cibatta bread. It sure smelled great while it was cooking.

James probably could have worked later, but we had to drive down to the airport where the hotel was, and that meant we had to leave before rush hour traffic started. Well, we left at 2:30 and still got caught in it. We had rain predicted today, but we managed to beat it down there, then registered for the convention and got our parking ticket vouchered so we don't have to pay $22 to park.

We wandered about locating each of the rooms for the panels we wanted to see, wandered through the dealer's room (already open with most of the vendors there; I bought three small things as gifts), and then went to see a guy called Matthew Atchley. He is an artist and an actor, and he was talking about being on the convention circuit most of the year and how sometimes he forgets where is is and what con it's supposed to be. He was talking about the celebrities he's met in his career and he said the nicest one was Burt Reynolds and the worst was Tom Wopat. We've never seen him perform, but his panel was fun.

I went on to the "Primordial Witches" panel. I'm not particularly interested in witchcraft, but this panel was done by Dr. Dea Mozingo-Gorman, who did the killer Neanderthal panel last year. She is a forensic anthropologist who also works with great apes, and this panel was about her discovery of shaman graves in the different digs she has been on. Apparently shamans were buried differently than other people in the tribe because they wanted no danger of the shaman rising from the dead. Their wrists and ankles were always tied so they could not stand up in the grave, and a stone was often laid upon the throat, sometimes a stone was also placed in the mouth. They were always buried with their shamanistic accessories and had symbolic items also included, like leopard claws and eagles' wings. Some were buried in stone jars. It was fascinating.

Dr. Mozingo-Gorman & Jeremiah Mitchell

She also followed in a panel with Jeremiah Mitchell (filmmaker and amateur historian) called Skeptics vs. Believers, in which she represented the skeptic side. She said that with as many graves as she has excavated, if anyone should be haunted if ghosts exist, it would be her. (On one gravesite she accidentally fractured the skull of a buried shaman who was buried upright instead of lying down.) She said even when other people said they got "a funny feeling" from a gravesite, she never has. Mitchell, on the other hand, recounted some spooky incidents he's come across, including odd prophetic dreams within his family.

Following these panels, we had nothing else we wanted to see, so decided to head home. We initially came out the back, where we were parked in the handicapped section, but it was pouring rain, so I took the chair back upstairs to the front doors, where there were overhangs, and James drove the truck around so we could load under cover. It was a nightmarish ride home on I-285 in the pouring rain surrounded by looming eighteen-wheelers going at speed. Plus one of James' windshield wipers was clearly flapping. Will have to take care of that next weekend.

So, the convention bits we already saw were great, even with the hairy ride home. The big disappointment was the sandwiches. However good pork cacciatore tastes hot, it doesn't taste that good cold. It's back to chicken, which tastes delicious hot, warm, or cold.

Labels: conventions, food, work

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