Fending off forty screaming children with a balloon

And you think I'm joking, don't you?

Actually, the morning started off with a call from Bill Seney, the Sgt. Major of the Musketeer Auxiliary, reminding me that everyone was meeting one floor down in the SFF.Net Suite for the Musketeer Planning Breakfast, and was I planning on joining them any time soon?

As I was in my jammies at the time, I said, "Um. . .sure," and proceeded to go into Full Blown "Oh, My God I'm Late" mode. . .and realized that I was almost crippled from lack of sleep, walking around so much and general exhaustion. Lyndon, being the kind and wonderful husband that he is, offered to give me a massage, which I gratefully accepted. "I'll even pretend to be Swedish," he said.

I thought about it. "Can you say, 'The power of Christ compels you?'" I asked hopefully.

He gave me The Look™. "I love you, honey, but this whole Skarsgård thing is getting a little weird."

Fifteen minutes later (because yes, I'm just that good), I was knocking on the door of the suite. The rest of the usual suspects were already there, hashing out the performance order and giving the Cardinal (James Hartley) and his Henchwenches the lowdown on your average Musketeer performance. We also got our first view of the OOAK doll made of the Musketeer Captain (and yes, this thing looked exactly like Elizabeth Moon, down to a read carbon steel dagger and sword) that would be going into the EMF auction tomorrow. Mentally I had three hundred dollars put aside for bidding on this doll, it was that gorgeous.

After the get-together, I went back upstairs to collect some of my stuff and head over to the convention center to browse the dealer's room. There's this one jeweler who sells gorgeous opal jewelry, and I hung over his wares faunching after some of the more goregous pieces (unfortunately they're also expensive as hell, so faunching was all I did). I then stumbled across the dealer that sold Discworld stuff -- since Lyndon introduced me to Discworld and identified with Death (it's a long story), I bought him an utterly great t-shirt with a Paul Kirby illo of Death. . .holding a kitten. Hey, it's our 11th wedding anniversary tomorrow -- I need to give him SOMETHING cool for being forced to celebrate it at Worldcon.

More. . .