Fast, fast day. For some reason listening to a 32-year old interview with Gene Roddenberry (I don’t even like Star Trek… but hey, I like my pop culture trivia) has made me slow down.

• Get another sketch in first thing… well, ‘sketch’ isn’t really fair, it’s more of a painting. Al Davison continues to impress!
• I joke with Andrew Wildman via email that he now needs to ‘raise his game’ – he hasn’t done a sketch for the sketchbook he’s really happy with, yet. A conspicuous silence.
• Straight into a meeting with my boss and our Biz-Dev manager at 10, in which I manage to get said Biz-Dev manager squirming when I suggest that we should do something for no money “because it’s good for the community”. I actually feel kind of sorry for him… but I also win the argument. Yaaay!
• Bounce emails back and forth with Andy at Omega Sektor, and chat on the phone with another Stephen, the ‘Omega Sektorian’ about his presence on our official Forums.
• Start working on the inevitably large announcement story about the MiniCon for our official sites…
• … half way through, get an email with Melissa Bianco’s flight details. She’s going to have some early mornings but I know she’s a trooper. At least… I hope she will be.
• Lunch is at our local coffee haunt, where Aero/Chris and I start hacking out the mammoth schedule for the entire weekend. We have something like 24 hours to fill and it’s not easy when we have multiple ‘tracks’ of activities, but we make progress. Somehow we decide having Hamidon raids on all four EU servers in the same night is a good idea.
• Back to desk. Expenses, really overdue. They expand into a massive pile of paper as they leave my wallet. As usual I wonder where these all came from. Worry about how I’m going to use the Excel sheet I have to use on my incoming iMac (Google Docs??).
• We get quotes for the two vans we’ll need for the MiniCon – one long wheelbase transit and the other a minibus for staff. Together they’re… very expensive. It’s the damn Bank Holiday weekend – we have to rent each for five days.
• At 5pm, sit down to re-record sections for the podcast, as we needed some extra bits and time has moved on, making some earlier takes irrelevant. I realise half-way through why professional voiceover types do their job in a sealed room without anyone else present. Somehow when you have to speak properly, and someone’s watching you, it gets harder than usual.
• Later, I listen to Chris laugh as he hacks my lengthy bloopers down into a usable form. It takes a while. We maybe use 20% of what we recorded.
• Amanda calls at 6pm to remind me I don’t have to leave until we have dinner later. Glad she called, I’d forgotten….
• Talk to Melissa at NCNorCal about the MiniCon, her flights, etc. She is, as I thought, a trooper about it. Phew.

Right. Plenty to do and miles from home….