Another goddamned crazy weekend: toorcon, 111mph winds and a MASSIVE fire season, all in 3 days! (part 1)

I really didn't see this weekend coming. As of the Thursday before my plans were to spend Saturday night at Jeni's, get up early-ish, pick up a uhaul and move her shit from mcaurther and the 55 to 17th and the 55, maybe 10 miles. Cake right? Gooood lord, I can tell you this, I woke up Thursday morning and until Wednesday next, I think I logged about 20 hours of sleep, that may sound like a lot but it's an avg of 4 hours a night.

All of this started because I caved into pressure to go to toorcon based on this deal: I don't have to pay for gas, we leave Friday afternoon and come home first thing Saturday Morning. We DID leave Friday afternoon, thats about it. Lei wanted to leave around 10am, I had a house guest over and we spent all night talking and watching movies, I didn't even get to SLEEP until 9am (worth it). I even called Lei at around 8:30am and told him I wasn't going because I hadn't slept yet and he wanted to leave so early. I hadn't even gotten ready yet!! I told Lei that I was going to sleep, if I woke up at a reasonable hour and had time to get ready I'd still go.

Well, I woke up at around 1:30pm, Lei was till online so I knew I still had a ride, I figured fuck it, 3.5 hours of sleep, seems like enough to start a binging weekend! Off we went!

We met up with Freaky and Israel Torres and immediately started drinking.



We headed over to the convention center (across the street) and hobnobbed (I can't believe my spell checker has hobnobbed in it!!) for a bit, then I get a call from Freaky telling me that they were loading Israel into an ambulance down stairs!

The last happy picture of Israel for the weekend:


Turns out he took a header going down a VERY large escalator, about 3 stories worth! He fell head first and backwards from near the top. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital for some nasty looking stitches

Israels pictures here

If you look closely at this picture you can see the blood spot on the wall..


Poor guy, he tanked out Friday, early, and missed the whole con.

After spending some time talking to friends and pimping Icetre and Abby's party, we all headed off to Ocean Beach to get our party on. God did we ever.

Here's my image that best describes the party


I drank until around sun-up and passed out until about 9am, whoo, 3 more hours of sleep (remember I only got 3.5 the night before)!

Back to the Convention Center


I milled around talking to friends, checked out the vendor area where Freaky had a nice table going on


I got interviewed for this documentary about hackers


I decided to do the lying down with Siviak, kind of a tribute to John and Yoko's Love In interviews. Ours had a lot more drinking, none of that made it into the trailer, hopefully theres more of it in the final cut.

Saturday night, about 50 of us went into the gas lamp district to eat, this was a pretty impressive sight seeing 50 people together walking as a group. We ignored stoplights and other people and just MOBBED our way downtown. All in all it was a pretty tame outing, but having such a large group was impressive.

We ended up at a party in, ummm, some hotel, hosted by, ummm, ghetto hackers I think. I remember bark0de letting me sleep there so I think it must have been them. It's all pretty hazy, all I know is that somehow I was drunk when we got to the party, there was an open bar I abused and we partied until about 3am when somebody narked off the party to hotel security, I actually caught the guy doing it!

After the party broke up, we all hung out in front of the hotel lobby, this was particularly amusing because several of the geeks decided to WRESTLE, funny because I don't think any of them broke 180lbs :) It was cute.

I had to be on a train at 7:15am. Wait, I forgot to mention something. Jeni picked this weekend to move, I really didn't think I was going to toorcon so I agreed to help her move. One of the conditions of getting a ride from lei was that we would be back on Saturday so that I could help Jeni on Sunday morning. Saturday night I called Jeni and told her I was going to spend the night there and get on a train first thing in the morning, she would have to pick me up from the train station. So yeah, I had to be on a train at 7:15am.

Bark0de offered to let me crash on a couch in their suite which was cool because it was closer to the trolly station. I set an alarm on my phone and on the alarm clock in the room, some sweet soul was nice enough to turn the alarm off! No matter, I woke up at at 6:40 thinking that was more than enough time to make it down to the trolly which was only a 5 minute ride to the train station. Got me another 2 hours sleep here btw, if you're counting, this is Sunday morning and I've had 8.5 hours of sleep since Thursday morning!

So I roll out of the hotel at 6:55, just in time to watch the trolly roll past me. CRAP! Turns out the trolly only runs every 20 minutes, this means if I wait, I get on a trolly at 7:15, the same time the train leaves! So, with two days of binge drinking and sleep deprivation behind me, I start the mile long walk to the station. Gah, that was not fun.

I made it, passed out for most of the trip and ended up in Santa Ana at about 9:45. As I stepped off the train I was immediately BLASTED by wind. Holy crap, the Santa Anas (irony) were blowing and hard. That weekend they registered 111mph winds in Laguna Beach.

Ok, thats it for part 1, part 2 has the joy of moving, a tree being blown down a MASSIVE fire season! Also coming up in this week is a trip to knotts scary farm and HALLOWEEN!