Soooo tired...

Nearly midnight Saturday, and it's been another 16-hour-day at the fest. Been hanging with Omi, Makaru, Roa McToa, and of course KIE, and Shadrahk showed up today with his dad (sorry, don't know your screen handle). It's been busy, but pretty fun, although it's a lot of work to get these things going and keep 'em going. So far nothing major has disrupted the flow.

Thursday night we did initial setup, and got things well under way. We had a pizza party (Pizza Schmizza) for about 30 of us, and KIE had had a Manny Randazzo King Cake shipped from New Orleans for the party - which was very good. He even made the home page of Lugnet.

Friday morning, several video crews set up and did some shots of the event. The Bionicle table was on camera, mostly for interstitials, but we got some good coverage of BZP mocs. This picture at 6 a.m. includes (from left) our very own Kopaka's Ice Engineering, Omicron, and Roa McToa. Don't know the guy on the right.

Later that day, we did an auction. My friend Larry P. was the auctioneer, and he is a good one... the man loves to talk. Here's a blurry photo of Larry standing and me on his right, staring intently at a sheet of paper with numbers on it. A large part of the auction involved items donated for BZPower, and we managed to raise nearly $500 for BZP's server fund! I hope to earn more tomorrow with tee shirt sales.

Last night was a special event at the local LEGO store. Nearly 200 people crammed into a tiny little store and pounced on several pallets of scratch-n-dent, as well as large tubs of really good pick-a-brick elements. I missed some of the PaB stuff, but got four nice half-price sets - a LEGO Factory set, the Boeing Dreamliner, the Tie Interceptor pack, and [my favorite] the big AT-ST. I also managed to pick up 4 PaB cups of good stuff. The wait in line to pay was about an hour. The store had this event just for us, starting at 10 p.m. and was supposed to close at 1 a.m., but they got the last person out at 3 a.m. Oof. No wonder the store people were bleary-eyed today, even more than me.

For my part, I chauffeured my BZPeeps from the event to the LEGO store, with a quick stop off to drop the kids off at home, since I live a mile away from the store. We left at about midnight, and I managed to get almost 7 hours of sleep. Not bad.

The Bionicle table has received a lot of very positive notice, the display is pretty amazing. Roa McToa's MOCs are wicked cool, and I'm betting that table will be the most mobbed one tomorrow during the public expo.

Today we put up the Mosaic, a 20-baseplate 18-color image of a van Gogh painting. There's a picture of me on Lugnet putting my panel in place. Wait, that can't be me, I'm younger and sexier than that...

We did the Dirty Brickster tonight, one of my favorite events. It went very well, even with nearly 50 people in the group. I got a 2-pack of 1970s windows, highly coveted. I had a cool Classic Space tee shirt stolen from me, as well as 2 cans of cookies and a promotional set that I'd stolen from Roa McToa. She ended up giddiliy stealing a 4-pack of McTorans still in plastic, and a coveted Bionicle pen.

Lessee, what else... I did a roundtable discussion on LEGOFan, which I'll write up shortly (if I can remember it). That went well. And for the second night, I didn't win anything during the prize giveaway, but my son won a great Star Wars set, and Roa McToa won a "Building With LEGO" book (as if she needs it).

And a final word - the Karzani pictures Omi put up are not fake, they're real. Not an April Fool's joke. Trust me.

One more day. Then I can sleep.