PAX East 2011 and Springtime

March has pretty well flown by because the first week was essentially preparation for PAX East, then the convention itself, and a return home to allergies + a cold and then here we are today! By March 9th Becky and I were up in Boston for the first time (for either of us), and although it was cold we spent two awesome days around town with Becky's friend Jon who lives in Jamaica Plain near the South End of Boston. I'm not even going to pretend that I learned how Boston divides itself up, but suffice to say it seems like there are multiple south parts and multiple north parts that are all quite different from each other.

We spent the majority of our time in the harbor/convention center area because we were staying at a hotel there for PAX East, which took place from March 11th-13th. PAX itself was amazing and we had a lot of fun, especially so with meeting a bunch of people including Josh's friend Bryan that lives really freaking close to us but we had to go to Boston at the same time to finally meet! We also had a lot of fun running around town with Jon and then with Chris Tulach who acted as our tour guide for the majority of the Freedom Trail on the Monday after PAX. Boston is easily one of Becky's and my favorite cities now. Pretty much all of the food we had while in Boston was amazing, so that helps.

I think it was a great idea for us to spend a few extra days both before and after the con in town, and hopefully we get to do the same for PAX East next year which we're both already planning to attend. I wish that we had gone last year because then we could totally make PAX East a thing for us to attend every single one of, but alas last spring was not exactly the best of times for us and doing things like going on vacation (I was unemployed at the time).

Then pretty much within a few hours of returning to Maryland my allergies flared up and I quickly caught a cold, which I was happy that it waited until I got home where I could be more comfortable while sick, but it resulted in the next week after vacation going by relatively uneventfully and so here we are in late March and it feels like time has just flown by. Becky got sick also, but I think we're both coming off of our colds now so hopefully we'll be feeling better just in time for April!

I didn't get nearly as much reading done on the train up to and back from Boston as I thought I would. Turns out riding a train from 10pm to 8am is disorienting and left us both in a strange state of limbo during the travel because we couldn't really sleep well but it was clearly the time for sleeping. That said, reading progress has been going well especially in the last two weeks and I'm now 80% of the way through Wheel of Time book 9, Winter's Heart, and expect to be finishing it up any day now. I'm still planning on tackling A Game of Thrones before April 17th when the show starts on HBO, so hopefully I can accomplish that without many problems. After that it'll be back to WoT for the home stretch of books before the last book comes out early next year.

Oh, and I absolutely have to mention that I finally, FINALLY, finally got to buy the new Battletech boxed set which I've been dying to get my hands on since my first GenCon 3 years ago when it was out but I wasn't really in the position to buy a bunch of things while I was there. Even better than that, I got to buy the new boxed set and it hasn't even been released yet! Yay! Now let's play some F'ing Battletech!!!