Sunday

Let me state first that I did not have a hangover from the party the previous night. In fact, I purposely limited my booze intake because of last year’s, um, unpleasantness. Nevertheless, when you go to bed at 1 AM and get up at 7 AM your body is not going to thank you, especially when you’re running low on sleep anyway. I rolled out of bed and made it over to the Convention Center at 7:30 AM. Bless Woody and Rooth for their help in getting the receipt books up to the signup room and keeping an eye on things, but I’m especially nominating Takaza and Tango for beatification for bringing me coffee. My wonderful husband watches out for me!

Signups went much more smoothly on Sunday, primarily because we had fewer artists sign up than we had seats, so everyone got a seat. I kept a stack of receipt books equivalent to the number of seats left behind the registers, and all of those were given out by 11 AM or so. The Alley and Con Store ran fabulously all day, primarily because by now everyone knew what they had to do (too bad now we all have 340+ days to forget it all until next year!). I was able to patrol the Alley a bit more, and generally relax a bit behind the tables. I should have wandered a bit and gotten away from the Alley, but honestly I was too exhausted. At the end of the day, payout ran like clockwork – we had everyone paid and out of the Alley by a hair after 4:30 PM, my target time. If only we could have done that on Friday! Still, everyone involved did a fantastic job, and I’m very appreciative of their hard work.

After payout, we quickly packed up about 90% of the Alley and Con Store equipment (Note to self for next year: Bring packing tape!), wrapping up just in time for me to go up and catch Closing Ceremonies. The ceremonies ran pretty much as usual, though Mark Evanier had some really thoughtful and welcome words about the convention and furry fandom in general. The “gripe session” afterwards wasn’t too bad, though one famously-damaged attendee from Michigan commented that Anthrocon was so much better than Midwest FurFest. I’m sure that the irony would be lost on him that a sizable percentage of Anthrocon staff also work Midwest FurFest. If we’re lucky, he will decide MFF is so bad he won’t attend. No comments about Artists Alley, though Kage had mentioned at the beginning the intention to expand the Alley next year.

After Closing Ceremonies, I went back to Hall C and wrapped up a few things there, then went over to the staff dinner. I got there late and the line was huge, so I took some time to drop by Operations and turn in my radio. When I got back to the dinner it wasn’t too bad, and I had a pleasant meal with several members of the Artists Alley staff, Gooch and another Dorsai, and T’Chall. Following dinner, I went up to the hotel room to relax and decompress a little, and enjoy the fact that the radio headset painfully wrapped around my head anymore.

After about 20 minutes I walked down to Operations only to find Dan there dealing with the end-of-con finances. He had skipped the staff dinner (the meals are rarely to his taste – no fault of anyone’s, just the way things work out) and was feeling rather grumpy. I sat down with him and helped where I could, and ordered some pizza for him as well. Food made things a lot better, but we still didn’t get everything wrapped up there until around 11 PM. It would have been nice to stop by the Dorsai “debriefing” but unfortunately we were both completely exhausted, so we stumbled off to bed. Total hours worked on Sunday, in aggregate: 12 hours. Total for the weekend: 37.5 hours. Ye gods, no wonder I was exhausted.

Monday

We had been invited to the wrap-up meetings with the hotel and convention center, so we were up at 8 AM, with most of our stuff packed before the meetings began at 9 AM. Both venues seemed to be very happy with Anthrocon, and there are some possibilities for some neat stuff in the pipeline. We’ll see how it all comes down. After the meetings we packed up the rest of the room and saw off Linnaeus and Datahawk, our roommates. When we got down to the lobby, I looked at the schedule for the 28X bus and saw that really, we’d be better off just taking a cab. Sure, it was $38 with tip, but that cab ride was totally worth it. As worn out as we both were, the quiet 30-minute drive to the airport was just the thing we needed. At the gate, we ran into Artemis, Dbruin, and Seven, who were on the same flight back with us. We passed the time before the flight talking about the con, and Artie showed me some of the hilarious pictures from the previous night’s adventures where they went to a gay bar in fursuit.

The flight home was uneventful, and we were able to pick up our luggage extremely quickly. We had to scramble a bit to get to the Metra train, which was thankfully running late; as we walked from the bus to the station the train was just pulling in. My car was right where I left it in the Graylake Metra parking lot, and we made the short drive home and collapsed.

Still to come: Final Reflections.