You Can't Take the Sky

First of all, I'd like to thank Mimbles for use of her digital photographs in this entry - I'm still using a film camera, which, yes, I know, sooooo last century. But still. Whatever.

I had a tremendous time at this Shindig. We had people from Melbourne, the far north coast, Wollongong...all coming for a weekend of Firefly fun with other Browncoats. The Shindig was held at Glengarry, where girl guides go to have healthy outdoor adventures. The park manager and his wife seemed a bit bemused by the idea of a bunch of people sitting inside watching a "failed" telly show when they could be running around in the jolly outdoors. Each to their own, I guess...

My coorganiser (or am I her coorganiser?) had arranged a giant banner to advertise our whereabouts:

On the Friday night, we unpacked food and drink as the attendees arrived. Hung up banners inside, and Wanted posters on all of the bedroom doors. Bit by bit, everyone arrived, chose rooms, introduced themselves. We got the fire going, which was a blessing, and Mim provided a hearty and delicious minestrone soup for us all.

I had brought along a data projector and stereo, so that we could watch the series on the "big" screen. After a bit of a kerfuffle with the data projector (I didn't have the required lead to connect the data projector to the laptop. Oops) we got it all working (thanks to Mim's husband).

We watched the US Serenity high definition trailer (drools) about 4 times!! With appropriate Woos! of course (when you see Joss's name, when Mal says "Good" and shoots the operative, when the text "loved by millions of fans worldwide" appears - lots of fun!) We watched the full blooper reel ("How'd you like a bite o' that green apple, America?") Then we watched Serenity (the pilot), and ate strawberries ("ooooh, Granpa"). I think we stumbled off to bed at this point, but it's all a blur.

Next morning, up early to make pancakes for the hungry hoards. We played horseshoes and took ridiculous numbers of photos of the kookaburras that were hanging around hoping for food. There was also a moment of drama when one of the kookaburras flew into the building - but luckily we had a birdhandler with us and she got it out of the building with minimal damage to either the bird or the building!

Then we took ourselves down to the obstacle course - I took the easy option of watchin' and learnin', sittin' with those who had already finished the course - whilst others threw themselves into conquering the obstacle course with abandon (there were many sore muscles the next day!)


















Clouds started drifting in, and it got a bit cold, so we went back inside to play Bwah!! Damned good fun - I recommend getting a copy!

Dinner was a big old barbecue - piles and piles of good food and just a little alcohol was consumed. There was dancing by the young ones while cleaning up went on in the kitchen. We rearranged the loungeroom and launched into Firefly Trivia (which your narrator hosted - don't host trivia when you're a bit tiddly, because there is no Heart of Glass in Firefly...)

There were three teams:

Alliance/Blue Hands (I think...they kept changing their team name!)

Cunning Hats

Mudders

Much hilarity ensued. There was also prize driven trivia, which was way difficult - but everyone did brilliantly, and everybody walked away with a prize (up for grabs: Finding Serenity, Firefly boxset, tshirts, Serenity comics, Browncoats mug, Jayne's cunning hat, a Serenity bag and something else that I can't remember now...)

We also handed out some schwag from UIP - postcards and a Serenity brochure. Mim had made some tshirt transfers to commemorate the weekend, and also some Browncoats Downunder business cards. There were Serenity pens and magnets as well.

We watched the trailer again (it's sooooo shiny!) and then watched Jaynestown. Mim and I sat up the back and congratulated ourselves on a job well done by drinking tequila shots...

Sunday was hungover cleaning and clearing out time. Shindig was watched in between bouts of cleaning, and driving assignments were handed out. We warbled a rendition of the Firefly theme song (nixygirl has this on video, can't wait to see it) and started off in a Browncoats convoy, back to our respective homes.

Thanks to everyone who came along, mega thanks to Mim for her superb organisation, thanks to Jenski for kicking the shindig off, and, of course, thanks to Joss and the cast for providing us with something to get silly and fanatical about.

There's more shindigs where that came from. Browncoats is good people, and as we move rapidly towards the release of the movie, I can't recommend enough getting into the community and meeting all of these fabulous people. You'll be happy that you did!