Slept in a little this morning, today is a light day. I was out the door first and Dominica stayed to watch the girls. I had breakfast with Art and Danielle in the Hampton and then we went over to the convention center to get checked in to the conference. As always, my badge was missing. I cannot remember a year that I had a badge. And Dominica’s was there but had the wrong info, no avatar and her job was misspelled. I picked up all of her gear, though, and brought it back to the hotel with me. Every year the haul gets bigger. More and more swag.
Back at the hotel we opened up the backpacks, pretty nice ones this year, I can see us using these, and dumped out the swag on the bed to see what there was. Way better than in London, where Danielle and I literally put it all straight into the trash including the bags, and probably better than nearly any Austin year that I can remember. Nothing super outstanding but some nice flashlights (StorageCraft), USB adapters from Western Digital, etc.
Dominica could not stand the misspelling on her badge so I stayed with the kids for a bit and she went to the conference center to deal with that and took care of getting me a badge which they had not had one for me while I was there and had to print it later. So we are all set with registration stuff after that.
This afternoon we had the “Straggle In Brunch” at Max’s Wine Dive across the street from the Hampton and Hyatt hotels. This is year two of the brunch and it worked out really well again. The food there is excellent and everyone seems to like it. I got the fried egg sandwich thing that they do for the second year in a row.
That went all afternoon until people had to go to other events and do things. Then we went back to the hotel for a while until it was evening.
Dominica just got room service and stayed with the kids. Paul, Kim, John (that I had just met) and a new guy that Paul found on the street went to Uncle Julio’s for dinner. Paul and I were both looking forward to getting their salmon, but they were out of that. So I tried the fish tacos. They were out of that too. Argh. They ended up being out of every fish item on the menu. Kind of frustrating as that was a big part of their menu.
After dinner it was off to Touche to start the SpiceWorld parties! Tonight’s Doctor Pepper extravaganza was sixty eight! A new record to be sure. It was amazing as they had to send runners to several other bars around Sixth Street simply in order to have sufficient glassware to handle us! That many Flaming Doctor Peppers means that one hundred and thirty six glasses have to be set up on the bar all at once. They don’t have anywhere near that many glasses at the one tiny bar.
It was a good night. Rob and I had stalkers follow us around Austin, which was a problem, and had to duck into the Hampton, where they kept following us and hide first in my hotel room, which they tried to get into, and then in a stair well until we were finally able to ditch them out on the streets. This is a first for SpiceWorld. Actual Spiceworks stalkers.
Rob and I hit IHOP for a late night snack and huge hot chocolates staying out till after four in the morning.