BrumCon 5 Report

[slycat]

This weekend, I attended the utterly awesome "BrumCon 5" which was generously hosted by colifox and Rallicat(badgerguy) over the weekend in their house. The event officially started on the Friday evening but due to me being on lates, I wasn't able to get a train up that evening. To make sure I could get to the con in time, I had to wake up at 5am on the Saturday to get myself prepared and out the house for the early train to arrive at the BrumCon venue at around 10am. This was not helped by the fact that I had the really smart idea of packing everything I needed into one bag. This included the 3 large bottles of Mountain Dew and 4 cans of baked beans which made my bag impossibly heavy to carry. By the time I got to the train station, I was dripping with sweat and totally exhausted...

Anyhoo, the journey was pretty uneventful, long and boring, and thanks to Google Maps, I had no problems finding the place. First on the agenda was a fursuit walk. I had expected that people were going to be ready to leave immediately after I got there but of course we were now on furry time where normal rules of scheduling do not apply. I think at least another hour passed before everyone was ready to go and those who were fursuiting had suited up. Then we bundled into various cars and drove off towards a park in central Birmingham.

I hadn't brought my suit, one because it would add more bulk to my already overweight baggage and secondly, I don't have the balls to throw myself into a public place like that in fursuit, it's a little too far outside my comfort zone. That, and the bodysuit really could do with replacing and I need to be a bit more fit. The walk round the park itself was pretty fun, with the fursuiters getting all the attention. The walk took about 2 hours to get round the 2km circuit with a short intermission half way through. Plenty of great photo opportunities. I took a lot of photos and video during the walk, the photos of which are online here.

After the walk, we drove back to the house and Colifox and some others got the BBQ going. There was an absolute tonne of meat, but then there was about 20 of us there. Rallicat had managed to get a link to the BBF Confuzzled 2009 video a day before it got released, and so enjoyed the UK premiere of that while eating lots and lots of BBQ'd meat. It was great watching the con video with a bunch of people who went to the con :)

As the evening went on, the living room became a dance floor, and we had DJ swolf providing us with a live mix and Rallicat provided glowsticks aplenty. Things wound down sometime after midnight and then began the task of finding a space to sleep. I ended up sleeping on the floor of the living room using only my sleeping bag and a flat padded thing which kyyanno generously donated. Needless to say, it wasn't very comfortable but I wasn't complaining.

What I did complain about was waking up at around 6 to the sight of ember_komodog's foot in my face. I woke up a few times, but go up properly at 9am and decided to take advantage of being one of the first awake and have a shower. However, that house is impossible to move around quietly in and despite my best efforts to be quiet, I had ended up waking most of the people by just collecting my stuff. Still, I was very glad to have got showered when I did as quite a substantial queue developed.

Colifox did his chef thing again but cooking breakfast in bulk for the mob. There was bacon, eggs, sausages, toast and beans for everyone. As soon as it was ready, an orderly queue formed and it all started to feel somewhat reminiscent of Confuzzled. Only, the food was much better :P Once breakfast was done, people started disappearing off home, myself included. I left shortly after 2 to get my train home and finally arrived home around 6pm.

In summary, it was a fantastic weekend. Well worth the hassle I had to go through to make sure I could be there (I had been due to be on call that weekend). Much better than any furmeet as it was more a bunch of people the hosts knew getting together for a weekend and socialising. I met a lot of great people, some who I knew before and some who I met for the first time.

I did take a lot of video too but I forsee it taking quite a while to make something half-decent from it all. For those who just want to see the photos I took, they're currently all online at: http://gallery.slycat.co.uk/main.php?g2_itemId=5964

Comments

[colifox.livejournal.com]

Those photos are outstanding! Some really REALLY good photos there. I really appreciate you sharing them.

Thanks for coming, you were a great guest, made me laugh a lot and will be welcome back to the next one without a doubt :)

[slycat.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you like the snaps. It's amazing what a bit of clever cropping can do, can make even crappy images look better :)

And thanks again for such a fantastic weekend, I look forward to attending another in the future :)