I dun goofed, guys. Really really not good.

Interrupting Leaky writing for a minute because I HURT MYSELF :(

If you’ve followed/added me on any other website you’ll probably already know this and will have heard me whinging about it, but LOOKIT I LEFT THE COUNTRY IN A WHEELCHAIR

With Fawkes obviously because I’m the most badass. Went to hospital when I got home, and now I’m in a big uncomfortable leg brace, and it’s more than a week later. Doing all of the sadface. Apparently I damaged (or tore) ligaments in my knee, so I have to take it easy for a while!

Thought I’d avoided Leakyflu too, but then I got sniffly, and started coughing, and then coughed up blood in work, so I guess I wasn’t immune. Between that and my leg, I’ve missed 4 shifts at work, which is going to sting my pocket next month! Both are on the mend though, and I’m going back to the hospital for a follow-up this evening.

If I met you and you’re reading this and I haven’t mentioned you by name, fucking deal with it I haven’t forgotten you, I just don’t fancy going through a MASSIVE LIST OF NAMES. You’re all lovely. I promise. I was going to write something else as well but idr what OOPS OH WELL

So yeah, after I left the film ticket desk at about 2, Ceri and I headed off to the Wizarding World park for a bit before the opening festivities, wearing robes (Ravenclaw, of course), which was probably a bad idea because, as had been hinted by the previous days’ weather, Florida is WARM. So yeah, we melted our way onto the Hippogriff ride and I went on one of the dragons! But time was tight, so we had a quick browse around Hogsmeade and melted our way back to the RP for the GRAND OPENING. Lots of little technical bugs etc, but the sentiment was all still there. Punctuated by songs, so we saw Hank play, if I remember, Accio Deathly Hallows? 

Then we got let loose on the park again! Very bizzare atmosphere, totally awesome. Took FULL advantage of the free pumpkin juice (Which tasted weird, but was kinda addictive) and shedloads of free butterbeer, which was GORGEOUS. Tiny queues, so we did the Forbidden Journey, which looked stunning, even the queueing area was awesome, it’s very strange to walk around Hogwarts… Also rode the other dragon, and went on the Hippogriff about 10 times with Ceri.

The strangest bit about it was wandering around and just walking past Evanna Lynch and John Green and Hank and all the Starkid folks like it’s nbd whatever. That was something of a theme for the entire week.

OKAY THAT’LL DO I’m off to unrealistically plan all of the holidays so I can spend all the money that I don’t have! I’ll carry this on tomorrow probably

Leakycon! Landed in Tampa on Sunday evening, got on a swanky as fuck coach up to Orlando, checked into the hotel and SLEPT. Which was nice. Monday was Disney day, which was… All Disney and magicy and awesome. Disney is Disney.

Tuesday, we hit up some shops, I bought some $160 sunglasses because I’m a tool and they’re pretty and have the Cubs logo on the conner of the lens. After that, we went and met up with some of Ceri/Rebekah/Kerstin’s side of the internet for a meal. They were all lovely! Walked(/danced, in mine and Sharif’s case) around Citywalk for an hour or two, then went back to the hotel for about 11pm, planning to get a good load of rest, then get up early for Leaky registration opening on Wednesday morning! But no. we got back to the hotel,  flicked through twitter, and saw that Leaky’s twitter was talking about opening registration for a couple of hours, at like… 1am. We wondered what kind of queue there was, so Rebekah rang the Royal Pacific’s front desk, and asked if their reception area was full of wizards. And got hung up on, for some reason. So, we all piled into a taxi and headed over, and found the ‘official Leakycon area’. Ceri and I got registered, got our swag and were done in 10 minutes, Rebekah didn’t get her stuff because they “didn’t have the ‘s’ surname stuff out yet”, and Kerstin’s stuff wasn’t printed out properly. We hung around and chatted with a few people for a while, then headed back to the hotel for, as would become a theme, about 3 hours of sleep.

So, we got back to the RP at 7am, like they’d told us… And when we got there, we were told they couldn’t do anything until 9. So, lots more hanging around, trying to catch another 5 minutes of sleep on a bench.

Come 9am, come massive queues, we hung around in the queues a bit, then I wandered off to try to find out where my volunteering orientation would be, so I could get that done before I volunteered on thursday. Got bounced around a bit, ended up asking Maureen Johnson, because she had a walkie talkie, who was lovely, but knew about as little as everyone else. Eventually found out, and was told “Well, I can’t really teach you now, but… Well, are you doing anything until the opening ceremony thing?” I wasn’t, so I ended up volunteering for an extra 4 hours on Wednesday, helping set up and run the film ticket desk. We needed 4 people, and we had 2, so we recruited Frak from Pottercast, and Scarlett Byrne (Pansy Parkinson in the films), and we all hung out and gave out film tickets for a few hours. They were both awesome, and Frak had brought his sketchbook with him, so we all had a browse.

I’m realising that this is getting really long so I’m going to stick this up as “part 1” and write “part 2” later!