We Take Ourselves With Us

We're back!  A little later than last year, but still back!  After finishing our school and work days on Thursday, we set off for our annual last summer sojourn to Toronto for Fan Expo.  We were making pretty good time until we hit the Gardiner Parking Lot (Expressway).  That added about an hour to our travel, so we barely had two hours at FE, but we made the most of it! First we ran to the back of the Convention Center for the LEGO booth. With the coming relaunch of the Star Wars franchise, this year's FE was filled with Star Wars-themed booth displays and merch.  Penn's doing the robot here. And, surprisingly, it appears that Scooby Doo is having a moment.  This Mystery Machine is made of LEGOs, and there's a new video game coming, too.  As an aside, a few weeks back, I saw Rochester's own picture perfect Mystery Machine broken down on the side of 490.  Whoever owns that thing is a van artist. This statue was lovely, but it looks oddly disembodi...

Well, today got off to an exciting start. Halfway through my shower, the fire alarm went off.  Of course, I was the only one awake, and I have two kids who would rather toast in a fire than spring out of bed. In the midst of trying to save them from death by roasting from laziness, I shouted to Ned to call the front desk to check that we were really in Towering Inferno mode.  Funny story ... it seems that the smoke detector can be set off by shower steam.  And, it seems this happens frequently in our particular room.  By which I mean, our former room.  Sigh.  At least we were spared the indignity of rushing into the lobby in our jammies screaming "this building's going to explode."  And, on the plus side, everyone was up in time for breakfast.  Check out the cool elevator we would have avoided by running down 14 flights of stairs to flee a nonexistent fire. Ned took it all in stride, saying it was a classic, charming NY hotel story:...