A round-up of the other Chicago Con guests

So there were a few folks I didn't get photo ops with, but did snap a few pics of during their panels.

First up is Julie McNiven. Can you say beautiful?





I saw her for the first time in Vancouver in 2011 and she's still just as sweet. She mentioned in her Q&A panel that she just filmed an episode of Motive, a Canadian show filmed in Vancouver. During the autograph session I told her that I loved Motive and I couldn't wait to see her. Her eyes got really big when I said I watched it and we had quite the animated discussion about it. But I couldn't get her to reveal if she was the Killer or the Victim. Darn! :-)


Then of course there's the Dynamic Duo of Matt Cohen and Richard Speight Jr. :-)





For two guys who never worked together on the show they've become such amazing friends. I always look forward to their panel because where Sebastian's is off the hook with the raunchiness, theirs is off the hook with the funny. Just ask my buddy Charity who pretty much lost her voice from laughing so hard! And surprisingly enough, for the first time in ages, they stayed on the stage 90% of the time. In fact, I think only Matt jumped down and wandered around. Some of the highlights: Matt pretending to be Chris the photographer and Richard pretending to be Matt - and then Richard telling the story about how a fan was falling all over Matt and only said "Hi, Rich" before ignoring him. He told that story three times and it kept getting more outlandish each time - and then Matt's unfortunate "nipple tweaking" encounter with a female fan inside a gorilla costume at karaoke. He called the poor woman up on stage to apologize to her and I think she was more embarrassed then than when it actually happened! LOL!





And here we have the aptly dubbed Super Fan of the Weekend - Osric Chau. This kid was amazing! First, he's just a really nice guy and quite funny. Second, he's a huge fanboy of his own show! LOL! Seriously! He was having a blast getting to meet people like Sebastian, etc. for the first time. He attended all the Q&A panels and even got in Mark Sheppard's line for an autograph! It was freaking hysterical! He was seen all weekend just walking the halls with the rest of us fans, chatting, taking photos, etc. If you didn't know who he was you'd think he was just a regular attendee. I have to admit that Kevin has grown really tiresome for me, having never thought the character would be sticking around for years, but Osric himself I was very impressed with.

All in all it was a good line up of guests this year!

Conventions - getting together with friends is what it's all about

One of the things I like most about going to conventions is meeting friends (both old and new). Sometimes you don't get to see them but once a year at these events, which makes the con even more special.

I was kinda bummed that this year four friends ended up canceling. I was really looking forward to seeing them and hanging out and fangirling with them for three days. But in the end charityflint, lausbub0402 and I had a blast with just the three of us:

Then a great thing happened….we made two new friends! Claudia and I were in line for registration on Thursday night. It was about a half hour before it was going to start, so everyone was just sitting on the floor. There were two young gals in front of us. I saw one of them take a deck of cards out of her bag and she turned to Claudia and I and asked if we wanted to play cards to pass the time.

Well it turned out to be the start of a beautiful friendship, all because of a couple games of Go Fish with a deck of Harry Potter cards. :-)

Turns out that Correen and Hillary were best friends from Ohio, attending their first ever convention. When they found out I'd been attending the SPN cons since 2007 I became their convention expert. *g* Which was totally okay by me! I loved imparting my knowledge of how things are run, answering their questions, etc. We ended up hanging out off and on all weekend. I loved their enthusiasm about everything since it was all new to them. They very much reminded me of myself and Charity back when we started going to cons in the 90's.

Charity snapped a group photo of us on the last day:

Really can't say enough nice things about them. Such fun gals! I truly hope that we get to hang out together at another con.