Hey, sorry, there was more work awaiting my return from vacation than I really expected. I spend so much time twiddling my thumbs at work - how is it that I can take four days off and it's a mountain high enough to rival the Bald Eagles?

The con went well, I am told. A little exhausting, though - I'm not getting any younger. The membership cap did strange things to our attendance patterns - about 10% absenteeism from our prereg'd folks. I'm currently pondering if that means we can get away with a nine-percent increase in our cap, next year. There were about five news, network, or documentary crews trawling the convention, including MTV. Twenty years ago, having MTV come to something I helped run would have been infinitely cool. Nowadays? Meh.

There's a con policy against hand-signs or placards offering or requesting physical contact, especially in exchange for considerations - "will yaoi for pocky", "glomp me", etc. Aside from the horrid grammar and poor taste, our lawyer assured us that these signs represented invitations to solicitation, or offers of same. Definitely against the law, even in laid-back Baltimore. Thus, "spec ops" (the current designation of what was once upon a time, in a less litigious time, called con security) spent a significant amount of effort over the weekend on confiscating and collecting these signs. They had them taped together in a massive collage that took up most of the northern wall of the spec ops room. I dubbed it the "Wall of Glomp".