18 August 2008

Terminus, part six: Sunday 10 August 2008

Okay, so I actually got to sleep in on Sunday!!!  Leslie woke me up when she went to go running around 7:00, but I stayed in bed until around 9:00, half-asleep, until I finally decided to get up and take a shower. First real shower, too—one that wasn’t at 12:30 at night! I took forever to dry my hair, though! GAH!!!! Sometimes I really hate having thick hair—I dried it with the hair dryer for about 20 minutes and then let it air-dry for another 20 or so minutes, and then straightened it. Leslie and I headed down to the vender room around 10:40 to buy me a Ravenclaw tie that actually had the right colors! Squee!!!!

I was hoping to get into Cody’s roundtable about sorting, but it was full even though I arrived more than 10 minutes early, so I went to Julia’s roundtable about Wizard Rock. So, I obviously don’t know how Cody’s would have been, but I had a genuinely good time at Julia’s—all of us there, naturally, were huge wrock fans, and Matt even came in for the last half to talk to us. I was still really disappointed that I didn’t get to go to Wrock Chicago, but I’ve heard so much about it and been around all the wrock bands there that I feel pretty close to having been there!!! Sadly, I had to leave the roundtable about half an hour early because I was going out to lunch with Leslie’s sister, niece, and nephew. It wasn’t too bad—I had some pretty plain pasta and got a pretty long time to calm myself down for my presentation.

Presentation. Surprisingly, I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be. I mean, I’d seen how nice the audience was to other presenters, and I knew that Harry Potter fans in general are pretty nice. I was still a little nervous, of course, because I didn’t know the people I was presenting to and how they’d accept a paper written by a 15-year-old. A pretty small number of people showed up, which was disappointing at first, but it turned out to be really nice because I left about 10 minutes for “questions,” but that period turned into a semi-roundtable with really good discussion. And everyone there seemed to genuinely enjoy the paper, though I can’t be sure…Either way, I left the room very happy.

I got Leslie to take over my volunteer shift for an hour so that I could go to the Unplugged Common room session with my favorite bands….that I never ended up finding!!!! It was pretty annoying, because that was my main chance to talk to Lauren and Kristina and all and to buy merchandise from them. Instead, I walked around searching for quite a while, bought a DVD of the Wizard Rockumentary and then found Mike and one of his friends (who was playing the piano). I talked to Mike for….well, for a while, and then I had to go back upstairs to finish out the last hour of my volunteer session. Really boring, because I wasn’t particularly interested in the presentation and the presenter did the powerpoint herself. So I pretty much sat outside in the hallway reading through the ENTIRE Terminus program, and then waited what seemed like forever for the AV people to pick up the laptop and projector.

Well….I was kind of in a bad mood after that because I hadn’t had the most exciting day, hadn’t seen very many of my friends, and I really didn’t want it to be the last night. But my spirits were lifted when we found a really good Mexican restaurant to eat at for dinner—enchiladas!! Then, that night was the Bon Voyage Ball, which I’m going to attempt to write a separate entry about…so, stay tuned!

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