A blast from the

Once upon a time on Friday I was doing practicum up at the undergraduate campus (there's a clinic up there too so I'm there once a week).  Afterward, I decided to grab a slice of pizza and people-watch.  Turns out, the university was having a comic-con of sorts, and I saw these two parked cars outside.  One of them was greyish tannish and the other was white—and they had weird stuff on their roofs.  When I got closer, I soon realized that the first car was none other than the time-traveling car from Back to the Future, and the white car was the Ghost-busters car!  The guys who made them were hanging out talking to people; they make replica cars and drive them around places.  I got pictures with both of them, of course, but they're on my phone, which doesn't always like to talk to my computer because I'm bad at technology.

Then yesterday, I was at a family convention to recruit participants for my lab's eye tracking study.  The convention was actually pretty huge—complete with giant moon-bounce slides, about six or seven trampolines, and a petting zoo (including a llama, or maybe an alpaca).  There were actually quite a few SLPs there advertising their clinics.  And there were stormtroopers walking around.  Yes, that's right, stormtroopers from the 501st were there, just strolling around, super casual.  Well, as casual as you can be in a stormtrooper suit.  They even sounded just like stormtroopers when they talked; they had a mic and speakers in their helmets, I presume.

My lab director has an obsession with Star Wars that rivals my own (and perhaps surpasses it).  He was so excited, when he arrived we immediately left our booth to go look for them.  "I see him!  He's over there!"  And of course we had to get a picture with him.  After one with both of us in it, I wanted to take one with the stormtrooper shooting my boss—but I couldn't figure out how to work his smartphone.

"How do I make it take a picture?  It's stuck," I said.

The stormtrooper cocked his head to one side and asked, "Are you from the past?"