Alamo City Comic Con

We had a great time at Alamo City Comic Con this year.  It has grown by leaps and bounds since the first time we went two years ago.  Part of the draw this year was that David Tennant made an appearance as well as Billie Piper and John Barrowman.  Three Doctor Who cast members in one con!  We did our Penny Dreadful cosplay for Billie Piper while the kids wore their Doctor Who costumes.  Then we did our Tom Baker and Sarah Jane for David Tennant,  We got our photos taken by a professional both in both costumes.  Hopefully we'll get those emailed to us here in the next few days. 

Rob was very excited to meet Peter "Buckaroo Bonsai" Weller and Lando Calrisian (Billy Dee Williams), Admiral Akbar, and a guy who designed the robots whose name I don't know too.

Autographs

cosplay

Dia De Los Muertos Festival

As a bonus to an already great weekend, San Antonio was also having their Dia de los Muertos festival on Saturday and Sunday.  We went Saturday night and then enjoyed it so much we went back for lunch on Sunday to take more photos during the daylight.  The altars were beautifully lit up at night but didn't photograph very well, which is why there are two photos of everything.  I loved seeing two different altars for Gene Wilder (made by school children) as well as one for David Bowie.  The most impactful, for me, were the altars for the Pulse victims and the one for a group of suicide victims.  As a non-Latino, I am unsure of how celebratory/solemn I should be at this festival.  I kept my mom in the forefront of my mind and thought about how much she would like it there.  The experience made me want to create an altar for her.  There's been a lot of discussion about cultural appropriation these days and Dia de los Muertos certainly is one of the touchstones in that discussion.  There was a very long thread on my Facebook feed several years back about the offensiveness of Dia de los Muertos being called Mexican Halloween, a thing that it most certainly is not.  So I may be overly cautious while trying to avoid any appearance of offensiveness by stating that I want to make my mom an altar. I'm really just appreciative of the beauty, thoughtfulness, and solemnity of the altars.  Both the boys are studying the festival this year in school, Seth in Spanish class and Sylvan in World Cultures.  It was really great to be able to take them to a celebration in a much larger city than Waco to really be able to see it up close and personal.  For years MCC would host a small celebration at the Art Center that we would take the kids too.  There would be food for sale, music, dancing, altars, and crafts for the kids to do.  I loved going to it.  Then they moved it downtown a couple of years ago and we missed it.  I'm not sure what happened then, but I think the move killed it instead of growing it.  We searched for any listing for it this year and there just wasn't one.  So, if you haven't ever been to one, we took a lot of photos to share with y'all.  Enjoy!