One of our aisle neighbors at San Diego Comic-Con this week said he was doing forty conventions this year. Man. I don’t know if I could have managed that in my twenties, much less now. I suppose it’s something you just get used to, the way people gradually work up their altitude tolerance over a period of months before they attempt the summit of Mt. Everest. True, Dawn and I have been exhibiting now at various shows for almost eight years, but I think the most we’ve done in a year is… six? And the farthest we’ve traveled is Seattle, and after a couple experimental years of that we had to scale back to local shows. Not exactly an intense training regimen, and this year we skipped out on Free Comic Book Day so hadn’t really done the public appearance thing since WonderCon. Therefore, despite the logistics of our SDCC outing going pretty much flawlessly, we still came back exhausted, which is hopefully just a matter of tired and sore rather than any inklings of dreaded “con crud.” We had an economy-sized bottle of hand sanitizer at the booth for the express purpose of trying to avoid such, after all. Dawn’s still having her chronic hip issues and I have my foot problems, but nowhere near what we were dealing with last year. Also with far greater prep time and a full exhibitor hotel discount we were able to add an extra day on both ends in order to space out the physical strain. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it was to be able to check out on Monday and thus on Sunday only have to worry about packing up our merch and display whilst looking forwards to a night’s sleep before driving home. Meanwhile we took advantage of SDCC’s free Materials Handling Assistance Program for the second year in a row, and if anything it was an even better experience. Heck there wasn’t even as much swearing and smoking this year and the Freeman staff handling the freight was constantly checking in to make sure everything was being handled speedily and efficiently. I don’t know if that was fallout from the Mile High Comics kerfuffle a couple weeks ago claiming massive incompetence, but this year for both arrival and departure they had us processed and on our way in under an hour. Having our exhibitor badges mailed out to us beforehand also made a big difference as there was no need to find parking and sort that first. So yeah, I could go on and on about details but the tl;dr of it is that things went about as smoothly or even more smoothly than I could have hoped, and yet here we are recovering regardless. I suppose five straight days of exhibiting, three of which are basically 10 hour shifts, will do that to ya no matter how well things work out for the beginning and end. All I can say is I’m glad we have nothing but a blog and cover to do this week, and next week isn’t another convention. Just the start of Episode 15, which we can thankfully, literally, just work on from home. On to Episode 15!