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We arrived home last night around 8. We all slept horribly last night (between the cat and the child, there was nearly a double homicide at 5am in my bedroom) and we all have a cold in various stages of progression.

But we had a wonderful time. The convention went very well - our department is consistently one of the smoothest-running of the con and we all have fun working together, the food was pretty good and I actually got a decent amount of sleep, which I have discovered makes a huge difference in my ability to cope four hours into a work shift.*

After the con, we drove back to Michigan with my brother and a good friend in tow, to reunite with our no doubt grandparent-spoiled child and work on getting whatever we wanted out of my mother's house before it goes on the market. It is to my eternal regret that I wasn't able to get pictures of some of the better treasures from the basement Box of Horrifying Toys, such as the kangaroo puppet with half of its face rotted away and the doll that I think was a Christmas tree ornament, with its head pulled away from its neck and hanging disturbingly low to one side. An ornament for Jack Skellington's Christmas tree, maybe.

On the non-horrifying end, I pulled out my old large doll cradle (large enough to put a human baby in) and trunk full of doll clothes for K. I engaged in a ruthless washing machine Darwinism on the clothes by sending them through the washer and dryer and surprisingly, pretty much all of them made the cut. I discovered an astounding number of unmatched doll booties and socks - not a single pair in the bunch. K has adapted to this without blinking - currently her doll is wearing one white bootie and one blue bootie on its feet, and is doing her best to put a larger bootie on its head as a hat.

Eventually, we packed up a stupendous amount of stuff in our car and drove home, stopping in Champaign and Lafayette on the way. It was so good to see our friends. I miss them dreadfully.

I am astonishingly tired, so I will end this here so I can chase K to bed and collapse.

*Since it occurs to me that no one reading this blog would have been reading since I last did Acen in 2005, a quick translation: we have worked as staff at Anime Central, an anime convention in Chicago, for several years. We normally work in the video rooms, where hot and cold running anime is on tap 24 hours a day during the con, doing stuff like checking badges, changing dvds and making sure nobody steals the dvd players. If this doesn't sound like much fun, the draw is that several of our good friends run the video department, so we get to have fun hanging out with them while we work. Plus we get to watch lots of anime as well as get into the convention for free.