So.

A-kon itself went well for me as far as the till goes. The Anatole is HUGE and very pretty -- which is what you pay for in your room rate.

The rooms themselves were a ripoff. The bathrooms were basically the size of a public stall with a bathtub. The bathroom stalls at our mall are bigger, and that's no exaggeration. You had to straddle the toilet to open the door! They stripped the room of the clock ( ), iron, ironing board, information books/room service menu, and all but three bath towels (although I heard some rooms only had two). When we called to ask if we could have a clock and a couple more towels so we wouldn't need housekeeping for the rest of the weekend, they said no! They said no to a clock! And I paid $200 a night for that crap. NOT happy about that.

Any of you who were at the con -- the never ending suicide hallway. 'Nuff said.

There HAD to have been a huge jump in attendance this year. I don't see how there couldn't have been with how packed everything was even though, again, that hotel is HUGE. I've heard from more than one source that there were 30,000 pre-reg this year. That's not even counting on-site. It's definitely one of the times I felt so damn lucky to be able to pick up my badge from Artist Alley Ops instead of waiting in those never ending lines. Seriously -- some people stood in that pre-reg line for FIVE HOURS.

Okay, A-kon? You are 24 years old. Next year you will be a quarter century. HOW have you NOT figured out how to handle your registration process yet? It's been an issue all 9 years I've attended, and it's only gotten exponentially WORSE every year. Your system worked when you were the size of AnimeFest. You've more than tripled in size since then. NOTICE THAT, PLEASE.

I had a few of you stop by the table to say hello and as always, I appreciate it. I love being able to visit with you guys whether you buy anything or not.  One of you even surprised me Sunday morning with an Ed Elric wallscroll signed and personalized (with my name spelled right!!) by Vic Mignogna! I was gobsmacked and touched at the same time. I love my return customers, seriously.



But if any of you gave me the bronchitis I'm battling right now, may you step on Legos forever.



For serious. I started getting what I thought was my normal sinuses-go-wacky the Tuesday after the con, but it just went ON and ON and ON and ON and I wasn't getting any better. My mom got sick on Thursday. We went to one of those pharmacy clinics (which are a godsend) yesterday and we BOTH have bronchitis now. YAY. The CNP said I was so tight it sounded like I was struggling to breathe.

I had severe asthma as a child which made me very sickly. I went to the ER more than once with asthma attacks, and I carried two inhalers in my backpack all the time -- a regular one and a steroid one if the regular one didn't work -- and used them almost daily. Thankfully I grew out of it when I was 12. I hadn't felt anything like that since then.

I apparently didn't realize how tight I was in the chest because I got SO used to that feeling as a child or something, because the CNP made it sound really really bad. She prescribed both me and my mom an inhaler and some cough meds. The inhaler was a trip for me because I hadn't had to use one in 16 years.

We picked up all of our goodies from our pharmacy and I tore into mine as soon as we were in the car to fish out the inhaler. I took my first puff, and I instantly felt like that asthmatic kid again.

But I remembered how to use it like a pro.



_{And Elizabeth -- I know you'll probably read this. It'll obviously be a few more days before I can finish your commission from A-kon. I hope you got better instead of worse like I did!}