Flew into LAX very late Thursday night from Hawaii(no way was I gonna do 13 plus hours in one hit!!). Since I was staying longer than the con I was just a *little* further from the convention than most(as I’m sure some merpups will agree!!)

On Friday, walked down to the Pac Shore to leave a message for one of the merpups(you know who you are!!) that one particularily crazy aussie was loose in Santa Monica… however it didn’t quite work out that way as I met her as she was checking in!!! We then proceded to roam Santa Monica in search of somewhere to send emails!!! Three hours, misdirections and many blocks later we finally found one… just so I could send a few emails home to say I was still alive!!

That night, a group of pups went down to the 3^rd Street Promenade and had tea at a place called ‘Teasers’. We then headed back to the auditorium for pre-registration and to return to Pac Shore to pick up the rest of the pups.

From there we headed to ‘The Palms’ where we stayed for a while before we split up into two groups… one to go clubbing elsewhere and the rest of us went to visit a little place called The Pleaseure Chest. After a while there we headed back to our respective hotels

After waking up WAY too early this morning, I walked down to the Pac Shore to meet the pups before heading off the the auditorium. When I got there I decidded to do something really foolish and line up to get some photos… lined up about 12.20 and didn’t get to the end until about 1.15. but did get some good piccys(cant remember all that I got but there was one of Aphrodite, Cupid(NOT Ceaser… bleehhh), Strife and the goodlooking god, Ares, a couple of Xena outtake shoot, a photo of Dar J and a couple of others)

Heading into the con, I made it in time to see Gina Torres come out, she was really good and willing to answer heaps of questions, cant wait to see the new eps she was talking about…

Missed the blooper reels(I think… short term memory here), but the music videos that they did for Ares and Aphrodite were great.. in fact alll the music videos that they showed at the con were wonderful… I just gotta work out how to get them all now!!

When Alexandra Tydings came out, you keep expecting all this hair… now I know she has short hair and I’ve seen photos of her before at cons, but you still don’t expect it. She was really friendly and upbeat. Alexandra keep throwing in phrases and actions that were pure Aphrodite so it was really good and left you wondering who is the real person… Aphrodite or Alexandra. J

Joel Tobeck was great(really appreciated the accent too!!) Love the way he desccribed Strife though, weasel… no, rat…. No, I think weasel!!

The young herc guys were also good though they could have down with some better direction… its hard to believe how young, young herc(?) is. One of them… I don’t know which had brought a camcorder with him to show his mum.

Kevin was really good, answered questions and talked to the audience. At one point he asked if there were any aussies of kiwis in the audience… I think I saw three of four more hands go up, but as I was probably the closest aussie, we spoke breifly about the differences between aussie and american footy… he thinks our guys are nuts to play without any protective padding!!!

After the con, all the merpups headed off to some hotel where we had Thai and met our fanfic goddess herself!! Lots of photos were taken and the Q&A session we had after was really good. I had brought with me some goodies from Oz with me so that the poor Americans who had no idea what a Violet Crumble or Tim Tam was, could try them… Everybody I got to loved them… if I missed anybody, I’m really, really sorry, but I did try to cover everybody!!

I didn’t hang around long for the vidoe night, though I did stay to watch the HK connection video, which was really interesting.

Now this is the day that we were all waiting for!!!.

Alti….. if you squint, you can see her in Claire Stansfield, however, you wouldn’t believe it if you saw here walking down the street!! As others have mentioned she talked about when she first got eh script she did not know who she was playing and when she read the stuff about Alti(old hag, old bag of bones) she figured she wasn’t in the running for this part…

Steven Sears and Robert Field were great… very dangerous together but really great. Robs presentation was really good, her had bloopers and contiunity tapes to show and he talked a bit about each scene!!

The auction was incredible(31,000 for the sword!!!), I though when they said that a chakram went for 8,5000 at the last convention it was a lot!!

Karl Urban was absolutely incredible, bounced from one side of the stage to the other, very animated.

A lot of people have talked about how they brought out Lucy…. I think that probably they had the best idea with the ‘canned’ questions, but maybe they could have told us they were doing this beforehand… and the interviewer…. I don’t know who she was and I don’t want to know, she more than made up for the imbecile questions that were avoided!!

The most embarassing part of this that I can remember is when she said that Lucy had recently played a highschool dropout… the look on lucy’s face when she turned to look at us was priceless!!! I think we all answered for her.

I’m sure that I havent covered nearly everything in this, but it’s a bit hard to do when youre still trying to see the rest of the LA, so when I get back home again (Feb 12) I’ll expand on this and post it along with whatever piccys I got that come out good.

We wont mention the ton of xen gear I’ve bought to try to take home with me… Lets say the suitcase is gonna be rather FULL to say the least…. But I do wanna know something… who hid all the Gabrielle dolls!!!!!