Headed out to the convention center in the morning and found most of the Central caravan folks hard at work stuffing our goodie bags. Marcy, Terri, Mark and Linda Gilson, David Toney and Julie, Rick and Randy Carlson, Howie, Mrs. Howie, and Howie Junior, and of course the head alien, David Allen, were all there, and many others I didn't know. Tina was there too, shooting video of the proceedings. Looks like there's going to be LOTS of video from this year.

David and Julie had a close call on the trip in. A woman in the car next to them (not a caravan member) reached back to pet her cat, swerved, clipped them, causing them to spin twice. Other caravan members and a semi had to work hard to avoid running in to all of this. Fortunately, no one was injured and although Figment suffered a trashed rear fender, he is still driveable and basically ok.

David and i sussed out my connectivity for the web cams and I'm pretty pleased with the solution we came up with for this year. Hopefully it'll work well. I am also going to have my cam that's inside the convention center in a different position, one that will hopefully have a much better view of what's going on-- including the awards ceremony.

Time got away from me and before I knew it, it was 12:30. I called Steph to see how close they were to town, and she said they had just arrived! They weren't expected until about 3pm. So I missed my chance to photograph the eastern caravan while they were all still together. Oh well.

At registration we saw Glenn and Pugsley, I photographed Marcy's manicure, I ran into Val and Val's Husband (sometimes known as Mike), Karen Talley, Russ and his co-pilot BJ, a tall woman in a green wig (whose name I was afraid to ask), and many, many others.

And bugs. So many! I was pretty excited and couldn't put down the old camera.

We then set out to find Dan and my equipment. The place we thought he was staying had no record of him. We trooped back to our hotel, somewhat worn, wondering how to find him. I really wanted my stuff so I could run live cams during the bug glow.

He magically appeared in the hotel parking lot before I'd gotten up to the room. He seemed pretty stressed. He had actually uploaded a lot of web cam photos but I hadn't found them on the server. He did run the cams the whole time and I hope that sometime tomorrow I can get all of the files sorted out and uploaded for everyone to see from the slideshow.

After an all to brief period of reorganizing and rest in the hotel room, we headed out for the skywatch party and bug glow. you know, i have never really thought much about the "skywatch" part of the party-- they actually do have folks from the planetarium out there with telescopes. At least, so I hear. I still haven't availed myself of this opportunity to explore the night sky over Roswell.

It was a little on the cloudy side anyway.

And then it got a little worse.

As I was outside buying a bug glow t-shirt from Jana, the wind kicked up, the lightning got a little closer, and some rain started spitting down.

And then people started to just... leave. The parking lot cleared out fairly abruptly while I was trying to help Jana keep the t-shirts from flying away in the wind. Russ sailed by and said he was going to go back and open up the hospitality suite. I looked over the parking lot to find Steph and Phoebe was sitting there practically alone.

I found Stephanie inside and we kind of wound up hanging out there for a while with the folks who had not run in fear of the storm. It was nice. I noticed that she seemed to be fading a bit though, so we left and headed on back home.

Since it was raining there was no late night car washing session. We'll figure something out in the morning.

Time for sleepin'.

Posted by lisa @ 11:58 PM EST