blahNow all that's left is to try and see if I can even recall what happened the last day of origins. After the sleep deprived chaos of dexcon, origins seems like it took place a half year ago.
The problem with Sundays at cons is I always end up taking a disproportionate number of pictures. It's the time to snap shots of everything I didn't get a chance to earlier and so this portion of the recap will likely be image intensive.
Here's a perfect example for instance of things I end up taking pictures of on the last day. These are the generic tokens that origins used this year. Sweet, eh? It certainly kicks the living crap out of those avaliable at gencon or other cons I've seen. For one, this actually has some collectable value and it's obvious that GAMA has put some thought into their production. In the picture, I've managed to collect 'em all, so to speak. It wasn't spiffy enough for me to eat $9 and keep a set, but it was still sorta nice. At the gift shop they were selling complete sets of poker chips with the origins logo, so in effect the tokens were like mini advertisements. Last year GAMA had little lead/pewter coins in two different sizes for generics that were in the same vein of being collectable.
It was hard prying myself out of bed sunday morning, and that's no real surprise. I had tried to do the majority of my packing up the night before and so all that was left was checking to see if I had forgotten anything behind. I'm happy to report that as far as I can tell these couple of weeks latter, that I don't appear to have lost anything on the trip. That's pretty remarkable really.
Anyway, I packed everything up and
sherilyn70 and I made it down to check out. Before I get to that though.....I'm sorta curious. Does anyone else tip the maid when they check out of a hotel room? I'm not even sure where I read that you're supposed to, but I've been doing it for years now. I never leave all that much and frankly the amount often depends heavily on how much cash I have left on me and how much I think I can spare from the trip home. For the average con-length stay, I usually leave $5 to $10 dollars on the low end, and I was curious if this is a common practice.
After the hotel situation had been taken care of and my luggage had been checked into their bag-holding whozit, it was off to the convention center one last time. Here's a shot of me with Randy (Keeper) who was still hard at work manning the gencon booth. I think other than a half day off at some point, he was pretty much at that booth from morning to evening every single day. I'm sure he got benefits and was able to attend the con when he might not otherwise have been able to, but it's still quite a sacrifice.
Right after having a shot taken with Randy, it occurred to me that I don't think I had a picture of myself with
sherilyn70. That's the problem of course when you're usually snapping pictures with your camera. You have a lot of pictures of other people but few of yourself with others and even fewer of you by yourself. You always have to remember to flag someone down for those. Anyway, you can see that we snapped up a couple of gencon bumper stickers for props. After that it was time for another pass through the exhibit hall and then the Killer Bunnies National Championship. Six people qualified for the event but in the end, only 4 showed up including myself. As far as I was concerned, it was a positive that the guy who won the first qualifier I was in was not one of them. Of course, without his mom to help him out it might have been quite a different game anyway. Chelle was there of course and so was Bud, who I had been in the masters game with.
Here is a picture of the four of us with Jeff. As you can see from the location of the plaque, I did not win. Despite that fact, it was a really good game. I ended up with the most carrots, a whopping 9 of them, and as I've always said, that's the best you can really do at Killer Bunnies. The rub in this case is I ended up trading the winner the winning carrot, Normon. That's something that always sticks in your craw.
Here's a picture of Jeff with the winner. I console myself with the lack of a win with the argument that I didn't need or want a plaque anyway. It would just be a dust collector, right? More clutter that I don't need. I was doing a fairly good job of convincing myself of that fact when someone brought out a large poster case and produced uncut sheets of killer bunnies cards. I'll admit I began chewing on my own liver at that point since I _really_ wanted an uncut sheet.
Wait! What's that?!? All 4 of the finalists get an uncut sheet? WEEEEEE!!!! *cheer* *cheer*
I choose the pink set since it's my favorite since red. I love those pink bunnies damnit.
Jeff even signed all the sheets which was just spiffy as all heck. I'm thinking about taking mine to a print store and having the thing professionally framed. It'd go great with my other prize that I picked up from dexcon. You'll get to see pictures of that in the next set of recaps.
And then it was time for the carrot draw. For every single killer bunnies event that took place during the con, the winner received an oversized lamenated carrot card. There would then be a drawing of the carrots and the winner would receive some spiffy prize. Last year I think the person got a set of the first four promo cards for the game, which would sell on ebay right now for around 300 dollars. I have no clue what the prize was this year since I didn't have a horse in the race this time around.
Here's Jeff of course, in the middle of all the action.
Peeling another carrot off the top of the deck. You can see Marcelo on the right there in the green bunny shirt.
Uh oh. Whose carrot just got whacked?
And then there were 4. Hmmm, two of them are ginger too. I wonder what the odds of that are. I was personally rooting for Presto and against Harry. I'm sure those potter fanatics would just be insufferable if the latter had won. In the end, neither of those two carrots prevailed.
Ta da! The winner. Sorry about the blurryness, but it was apparently the only picture I snapped of Jeff and the winner together. The funny thing is, I was looking at me origins '05 pictures and this kid was also in that carrot draw. He didn't win that time around but he certainly nailed it this time.
Here's last year's picture with the winner in the red box. You can see the kid in the left side of the picture. He certainly dosen't seem to have changed much. It's hard to even tell that the two pictures were taken a year apart.
So anyway, the nations were over, the carrot draw was over, and I was basically at loose ends. There was nothing left to do. I bumped back into
sherilyn70 and spent some time wandering around with her. Before we set off though, she asked me if I would go and take a picture of her sluggy guy. Basically someone at the slugfest booth she had sort of hit it off with. After a series of missteps playing the con version of Guess Who? (That guy over there? No! Umm, that one? Not him either! etc) I finally id'ed the target and waltzed up there to snap a picture.
This is what I ended up with and was the third picture I took I think. In the first he just looked weird. I think I must've caught him in the middle of some sort of facial contortion. I'll admit right off the bat that I was not very subtle about obtaining this picture. Walking up to someone and saying the equivalent of 'Hey, it's picture time! Smile!' might score high on getting to the point, but it's not subtle. In fact, the pooch has already been screwed anyway. He had apparently glanced over while
sherilyn70 had been gesticulating wildly in his direction trying to help me figure out who the target was to begin with.
After that was done, we spent some time wandering around. I took her over to the Tokens booth where she rolled well enough to pick up a ring of protection +1. We also got another picture taken, this time with a pokeball the people at the pokemon booth had given me. When we went back to fetch one for
sherilyn70 they were all gone. 
Still, waste not, want not. No reason not to get a few more pictures with Blastoise, right?
The minute I saw the pokeball, I knew this was something I need to get a picture of. How could I not get a shot of me tossing the pokeball in the air above blaistoise? I really need to find someone who can do photo editing to make the little magical color swirels on the picture to make it look like I was summoning him. 'Blastoise! I choose you!!'
Overall, just cool beans. Still not as cool as it would be if it were bulbasaur, but you can't have everything I guess.
Then it was off to the nightmare before christmas booth for one last spin. Here's a picture of
sherilyn70 with Andrew Parks. The designer of the NBC CCG as well as Parthenon, a BG that won the origins award.
Here's a picture of Anni. I thought her Wallace and Grommit shirt was spiffy so I wanted to get a shot.
One last shot of me and Jeff.
I ended the con sitting with him and another person just chatting as the day wound down. A couple hours before the end, someone had come up to me and asked if he could hitch a ride with me back to jersey. I recognized him from somewhere but it took a long time for me to figure out it was from the double exposure cons. It turns out that his ride had ditched him and had not attended the con at all so he needed someone who was willing to drive him back to jersey. I figured I could use the company since on my own it was very unlikely I could make it back the whole way with my level of sleep deprivation. In the end, it was one of the best decisions I made since the ability to swap off on the driving was a god send. We managed to make it back around 2am and I even had someone to split the gas and tolls with. I really need to make sure that before next year I find a couple of people to carpool with. No more doing it solo.
So I didn't collect much swag during this con and made almost no effort to do so. Despite that, it was still a lot of fun and I didn't feel like I missed out on anything major. It might have been nice to pick up some more CCG packs or some of those horrorclix, but it would have just gone into the junk drawer anyway.
All in all, it was the best origins so far and I can only hope that next year is even better.
