I'll be leaving for MFF tomorrow morning, so I hope to see lots of you there!
Back home Tuesday 26th, and hopefully a lot of pics will follow.
Until then...

So, with less than a week to go until my trip to Chicago, who am I going to see?

...It means it must be  White-Paw's birthday on Sunday. Go poke the otter with spoons. :)

I had a wonderful three days at  tenderpaws &  rocky_raccoon_uk's place this weekend just gone. Big thanks to both of them for putting on such a great party - lots of fun & grub to be had. Tender Paws made a tremendous effort to turn his garage into a haunted house style attraction and it worked wonderfully. Was like a ghost train... without the train :)
Was a great chance to meet a lot of folk I knew from cons past, plus many new faces, too.
Here's some pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finbar.....7637066299306/
I'll probably crosspost a few of my favourite shots here during the next few days.

I'm going to be staying with  tenderpaws and a few other furs in England for the next few days. Really looking forward to it -a nice bit of furry fun in the lead up to MFF.
I'd normally say I'd be offline for the duration, but I'll have my iPad with me and will be checking in now and then whenever I find a wifi signal :)
Home on Monday night.

With roughly a month to go, here's da meme!
Oh, and I'm ditching the art questions as I rarely draw.


Where are you staying?

I'll be at the main hotel.


How are you getting there?

Direct flight from Dublin to Chicago O'Hare.


When are you arriving/leaving?

I'll be arriving on Wednesday afternoon, but staying in a different hotel for that first night. I'll be making my way to the Hyatt sometime early Thursday afternoon and will probably be there around 1pm.
I'll be leaving for home late Monday evening.


Who are you rooming with?

 AndyFox & most probably  Taigitsune, too.



What is your gender?

Testicles. Two of 'em.


Relationship status?

Single.


How old are you?


35 now, but I'll be 36 before the con.


Height?


About 5.7


Who will you be with during the con?

Hopefully as many people as possible. I tend to drift a lot during cons - from group to group or person to person - and there's a lot of folk I want to see this year. Mostly familiar faces at this point as I've been lucky enough to have already met 95% of the people I know from FA. But if you've never met me and want to say hi - please do!


What fursuits are you bringing?


I only have Peaches, which makes it easy to decide.


Can I give you hugs?


Of course you can... but not if you've got a cigarette or greasy food in your hands!


Can I kidnap you to my room?


Sorry, but that ain't happening.


How will I find you at the con?


Big orange & cream goat - can't miss me. Or, out of suit, overweight & balding with a Nikon D5000 around my neck.
I'll have my iPad with me and can be contacted by Twitter at dairishgoat. That's if the hotel Wi-Fi doesn't crash because of 3000 furs looking at porn on FA.


Last time/last con/last meet/last chat we talked so much and now you forgot my name? Why???


Unless I know someone well, I'm absolutely terrible with faces. Remind me.


Can I buy you drinks?


Soft drinks only - I don't drink alcohol.


Other cons you may go to?


As regards US cons, I'll probably be at FC in Jan. European cons - I should be at both Confuzzled & Eurofurence next year. Maybe Scotiacon & Golden Leaves, but not sure on them.

The phone company upgraded our 'net connection today, meaning I can upload videos to Youtube in a fraction of what it once took.
So here's three videos left over from Confuzzled '12 & Eurofurence '12:


Splenda & Sweet N low at CFz 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijl-.....nFu7qb8Pu2oV4Q

Hotel lobby fun during Eurofurence 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzq.....nFu7qb8Pu2oV4Q

Ticer the Tiger doing a skateboard trick during Eurofurence 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZfd.....nFu7qb8Pu2oV4Q

A wonderfully unique commission from  omfgitsmiller


http://www.furaffinity.net/view/11745109/

I'm still 50/50 on attending FC in Jan.
Who would I see there?

You can find me on Twitter as DaIrishGoat

Don't expect many tweets, though! As I said, this will mainly be a communications tool for linking up at cons etc...

After about a year of thinking about it, I finally bought myself an internet tablet today - an Apple Ipad.
I bought the mini version, as my main reason for getting it was to have something easily portable to take on vacations ( particularly to cons ) as it'll make linking up with friends easier.
I'll probably sign up for Twitter soon, although probably not to tweet much - again, just to make it easy for me to link up with friends at cons etc...

I'm still never buying a cell phone, though! :-P

There's no furry things here, but if anyone's interested here's my photos from the Flightfest air show held in Dublin on Sunday afternoon:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finbar.....7635545033114/
Between 2pm and 5pm, about 30 planes of various types ( a mixture of commercial airliners and military craft ) flew at a low altitude down the River Liffey in Dublin's city centre. Amongst them was an A380, the biggest passenger plane in service.
It was a pretty cold day but the line for the ice cream van was still a mile long.

Did anyone happen to get a pic of me with  camelia?

The group shot from Eurofurence was made available earlier:
http://www.thalian.de/g2/main.php?g.....g2_itemId=6185
I was in the back row, but I guess standing on a chair paid off :p

Here's my remaining videos from EF.

A crowd of suiters making their way over towards the nearby shopping mall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZpcbN7qocs


Some fun with  manukoa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uziCFo8BFc


Two more clips of  snugglebunnyfursuit's piano performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm1r8S2I9C8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_tTWNQnJ5k


And finally, some balloons being released into the lobby on the last day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSnB2XSO8_I

I've been slowly uploading the short videos I took at EF to Youtube.

Me getting attacked by  titash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7yZV7mMUU


 thabo on the mechanical surfboard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGxqO3P1SD0


Two short clips of  keenora on the surfboard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8fMKvIEky8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyAais_TLE


Part of  snugglebunnyfursuit's piano performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rsGT12l3zU


And a few suiters walking about the streets of Magdeburg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKy64T4R_G0


I have a few more that I'll put up over the weekend.

First off, many thanks to everyone who had time to chat or hang out with me during the con. Regardless of whether we had dinner/drinks together or just talked for 5 minutes in the headless lounge, you're all fantastic people and I really appreciated it.

 tenderpaws,  Ant,  darkstud88,  baccala30,  manukoa,  thabo,  Ditzy_pomeranian,  buster-lapin,  Flamedramonuk,  electrowolf,  shadowulf,  snugglebunnyfursuit,  tigersclawswiss,  Gwyndolium,
 wruf, and many others.

And of course  albus, who was a great roomie over at the Intercity hotel.

Many important things happened - meeting the Mongrels, Thabo in a hamsterball, the floating shark, getting attacked by Titash, staying up until 5am twice and seeing the joyful chaos that was late night at EF, Snug Bunny's excellent piano performance, the amazingly long fursuit parade and the thousands of onlookers who turned up to watch ( including the Mayor of Magdeburg, I believe ), the fursuit flashmob in the shopping mall, the hypnotic mirrored ceiling in the bar ( looking up while wearing a fursuit was slightly surreal ), and so many other things that are too numerous to mention.

I did a lot of fursuiting, particularly at night, although I found myself somewhat worn out after the excesses of Friday's parade. In fact, the fursuit parade was so intensive I ducked back to the hotel before the final stage. The route was 1.5 miles long and we were all being stopped every 5 seconds by kids. A great experience, but I just couldn't do any more.

The only downside was that my hotel room was looking out over the platform at the train station, so pretty much all night there were tannoy announcements or the heavy rumble of trains. I think I only got about 4 hours sleep or less per night.

All in all, a great con and I'll try to be at the new venue in Berlin next year.

I just spent all day getting these photos ready for upload. I ended up with over 650 after editing... so much for my attempts to cut down on pics! :P
Anyway, here they are:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finbar.....7635252502333/
As ever, if you see your suit in these pics then feel free to repost on your own FA.

My Eurofurence adventure starts on Tuesday morning ( very, very early ), so I'll be offline from tomorrow night until Tuesday 27th.
Looking forward to seeing lots of you there!

A few days back the frame on my glasses broke as I was wiping the lens. I've had this set about four years, so it's not like they were new or anything. Went into my local optician to see if I could buy a new frame, only to find that the company doesn't make them in that style anymore. He tried to get the lenses into a couple of other similar frames, but no luck.
I'll be getting an entire new set of glasses in a couple of weeks... but before then it looks like I'll get to look like an ultra geek at Eurofurence with my current glasses held together with sticky tape. :P

So we're down to just over a week until Eurofurence. On Tuesday 20th I'll be taking a 7:20am flight to Berlin ( which means being at the airport by 5am... arrrrgghh! ), and so long as everything goes to schedule, I should be in Magdeburg by 3pm.
So, who am I going to see?

I think I've pretty much posted all my favorite photos from Confuzzled 2013 on FA now, the full 879 shots having been available over on my Flickr page for the past couple of months.
I'll hopefully have some new photos to post once I get home from Eurofurence towards the end of this month, and maybe in between I might actually try and draw something again - it's been months since my last pic. We'll see how it goes.

Let's try this again.
I reserve the right to lie through my teeth.

I signed up for Google + a few days ago and am still scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how it works ( or what the point of it is ). Am I just incredibly slow or is it simply not very user friendly?
Hmm...

Some of you may have seen a news story about a black bear that wandered into a bar in Colorado. It's covered in this report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbhTjmd5E3g
Thing is, the place it wandered into was Lonigans Irish bar in Estes Park - which is one of the places me and  andyfox had dinner in while we were in the area last month.
Small world, eh?
Sadly, we didn't visit the same day as the bear.