C6 day one! Yea… Ummmm… I am spent at the moment. Holy crap it’s been a day. Not sure where to begin or what to say. It’s about 1 am and we are operating on a fine combination of caffeine, whiskey, sleep depravation and exhaustion. I think I’m averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night. 😉

I’ll post more tomorrow but wanted to give you some quick hits. Archive party was incredible! Met some amazing people, my favorite so far would be Johan from Sweden! Lee Bullock is an animal! Had to get that in. 🙂 I had long conversations with Oscar and Luis Villagomez tonight about Lili Ledy and saw some insane factory photos. I learned more about Lili Ledy in 30 minutes from those two than I have in all my time on the boards. The convention is insane! Saw some amazing tattoos and cool stuff at the booths. I haven’t scoped too much stuff yet, just been too busy. Ran around getting all of my “con” stuff out of the way first today. Autographs, prints and general crap. 🙂

I picked up a few things for myself, nothing too wild yet, but fun stuff none the less. BTW, the girls are totally kicking our ass at getting free pins! Holy crap those two are on point with them. And yes, you do need two lanyards. It’s not even funny! The 3PO “golden shower” pin is by far my favorite!!!!!

We’ve also seen some incredibly rare shit! Totally blown away!!! I’ll get some photos of them but there was some amazing things being sold EARLY this morning.

Sorry guys for the lack of quality with this one. I’m not sure I can think straight right now. I’ll try and grab more time tomorrow to get some stuff up. Especially for the room sales.

You. Are welcome! 😉

So we totally rocked Disney yesterday! I think we pulled a 10 hour Disney bender! We would’ve went longer but we were starting to get tired, hungry and needing a break in the a/c for a bit.

The best part about Disney was the fact that, despite our fears, it was pretty empty. We rode every ride we wanted to before noon. The longest line we stood in was for Big Thunder Railroad, and that amounted to roughly 20 minutes. I think my personal favorite was the Buzz Lightyear ride. I don’t know what it’s called but you get to shoot lasers at alien targets. It even records your score! So naturally, upon finding this out, we just HAD to do guys versus girls. 🙂 . Let’s just say we totally demolished the women. I think my score was something like 565,000 and the highest girls score was 56,000. Nothing like sweet victory! Never mind this was a ride clearly aimed for 8 year olds. Or the fact that I was on full in Call of Duty Modern Warfare assault mode. We still won! And thats all that matters. Chalk another victory up in the battle of the sexes boys!

I also would be remiss if I didn’t mention Star Tours. Two words, absolutely incredible! The only drawback to Star Tours is its in a totally different park from Magic Kingdom. So you either need a park hopper pass or a separate park ticket. Bummer. Other than that, the updated ride is amazing. We rode three or four times and had a different ride each time. The best was Hoth and Naboo. And yes, Jar Jar was in Naboo. 🙂 .

I do have to tell you about the worlds biggest Star Wars prick though. At the end of the ride, Disney naturally drops you off at the store (Merchandising!). Well there’s this new attraction at the Star Tours store called Build a Droid. You basically have bins full of astromech parts (legs, feet, body, dome, Mickey ears) and they are in all different colors, types and styles. You then are allowed to build whatever droid combo you want. Well Aimee had stood in line while Shawn, Sarah and I rode Star Tours again so Shawn could build a droid for he and a friend of his back home. When we got there after the ride, Aimee overheard this idiot at the front of the line mention how he was going to build one of everything. That’s right folks, 25 separate droids for his collection. Shawn literally stood in line for 30 minutes behind this ass hat while he argued with the Disney worker over what colors he was missing. Needless to say, I went to management to rectify this situation before Shawn stood there for hours. Idiot. Still mad at that.

Last but not least after dinner we met up with a bunch of collectors that started trickling in. Mattias, Broc, Steve, Josh Blake, Shane, Gallo, Mike Ritter, Elling, Derek, Gus, BradP and a few others. It was a great time and one beer turned into 3 and 10:00 pm turned into 1:30. 🙂 . And thus starts the celebration no sleep marathon. 😉

I’ll upload more pics later. Once Shawn tells me how to upload a giant batch. Today we are going to help set up at the convention center and then off to Harry Potter world! Keep an eye here and on FB for updates and photos.

See you all soon!

Finally! After a few delays and some frustration we finally made it to Orlando. Weather is good, although its been raining on and off all night.

Soo glad we upgraded to a condo! Holy cow this is awesome! We can see Universal Studios from our patio! We’ve had a wonderful night having dinner with Aimee’s brother, enjoying our evening with Shawn and Sarah and getting all of our C6 gear unpacked. Room sales watch out! We are coming for you!

Tomorrow we conquer Disney!

And…. card backs for the party all made it safe and sound as well.

We made it through! Even with 1500 card backs!

Aimee and I joked with each other that the security guys would mistake the card backs for bricks of drugs! 🙂 Thankfully they didn’t! They didn’t even give us flack for our little goody for JoeY! 😉

And now… It’s time for a bloody Mary and to chill out before the plane takes off. Keep checking in. I’ll try and update as often as I can!

Well, well. Here we are, about 12 hours to go until we depart for Orlando! I feel like a kid before Christmas, nervous, anxious and most of all excited!!!

We have our bags packed, all 5 of them. One of the most interesting parts of this trip is trying to figure out how to transport 1500 (or 41 pounds) or Manatee proof cards down to C6. We’ve devised a plan that involves 2 carry-ons, a messenger bag, Aimee’s purse and my work laptop bag. I’m not kidding you when I say my carry-on bag weighs more than my checked bag!

Some of you might be asking why we are traveling with them? Well… Good question. 🙂 I guess part of it is some responsibility to ensure they arrive safe and sound. And part of it is not fully trusting the post office. And the other part would be we are just a tad stingy!!!! 😉

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Signing off for now. I’m going to try and get some rest so I travel day can get here faster. Happy travel day eve everyone!

We are exactly two weeks away from the start of C6 now! 🙂

So I thought what better way to start the countdown than to reveal a few more buttons that we’ll be giving away. I alluded to a few more in my earlier post, well, here they are!

These are all limited quantities, and we’ll only be handing out a few each day (25ish). You’ll be able to find us all over the place, but mostly the Tattoo area, artist booths, collector panels and especially at the Archive Party. All you have to do to get a button is find us and introduce yourself.

Can’t wait to see you all down there!

During Celebration 5, one of the coolest things to do was collect buttons to put on your badge lanyard. Most of them were done by other collectors and some were really creative, Oceans11 Stormtrooper one comes to mind. Almost immediately after the convention, on the plane ride home, my wife decided that she was going to make buttons to hand out during Celebration 6.

Fast forward to this year, and she’s not only created a few, but we have a total of 6 buttons that we’ll be giving away during the convention. Add to that we have a few exclusives that may or may not be revealed as we get closer (we haven’t made up our mind yet on how much we want to share about those! 😉  ). A little background on the buttons. The character images are hand drawn/painted by Aimee and displayed on a complementary color background. All you have to do to get one is come up and introduce yourself to one of us at the convention!

So without further ado, I present our Celebration 6 exclusive buttons!

Well… According to my “official Celebration 6” app we have 52 days, 5 hours and 56 minutes until the start of C6. And we are finally starting to get some news in.

First, as most of you know, we have the Star Wars Collectors Archive party. It’s being held on Thursday, August 23rd. Shawn and I are part of the 25 sponsors for the event. Not only are we giving away some ultra cool card backs with a special manatee flare. But, all proceeds raised from the part will be donated directly to the Save the Manatee Club. And to top it all off, we have an official coin being created just for the event. You surely won’t want to miss this.

Over this weekend we got some details on the autograph guests that are going to be at C6. One of the hugest guests is none other than Ian McDiarmid himself. It’s a first time convention signing by him and I’m sure he will draw huge crowds. Luckily I already have him! However there are a few others I’m looking to snag, more details on that as we get closer. You can read more about the autograph guests here.

Another cool piece of news that came out at the end of last week, is the announcement of the tattoo pavilion coming back to celebration! I’m still debating if I want to get another tattoo, but I can assure you my wife is getting one and is all but locked in. I’ll definitely be posting images of that!

There’s also been ongoing news and images coming out about the Celebration art show. So far we have three rounds of artists prints shown. I have my favorites, what’s yours?

And last but not least was the word about the C6 exclusive Hallmark Ornament that leaked out over the weekend. They did a great job with it this year and it’s actually an ornament 3-pack. The exclusive is Obi-Wan, Ponda Boba and Ponda Boba’s severed arm! Definitely going to attempt to pick that up!

That’s all for now. But I’ll be updating this blog as we go along and definitely at Celebration itself.