I’m home from California! Actually, I’ve been home for awhile now, but it took me quite a bit longer than expected to recombobulate myself upon getting back into Milwaukee. I don’t travel much and I usually work from home, so a whirlwind weekend of running around a convention center tackling whatever happens to come up took the wind out of my sails for awhile. In its own odd way, it was also very invigorating.

I won’t bore you all by going through the whole play by play of the trip, but I had a good time. It was naturally incredibly busy, I was on the clock almost the entire time, but it was enjoyable. It was that good sort of tiring. You know how you feel after a rough exercise, and you sit down and your entire body feels just great? It was a lot like that.

The best part was probably meeting my coworkers, honestly. I’ve met a handful of them before, but the sheer number of people we had out in the field this year was incredible. I talk to most of these people every single day, but there was something very uplifting about being in the same physical room as so many of them. I love working from home, but once in awhile sitting down with the team to plan out the day, jam out some ideas, and just talk shop can be a really great experience.

Actually, sitting around and brainstorming on something with a group of creative people is probably one of my favorite things in the world. Blogging, stories, comics… just creating things with other people. I have this distant dream of opening a little studio with a team of folk to do all sorts of goofy little projects, but none of my favorite people are local. I really doubt I’ll be able to convince anybody to move up here to Milwaukee to rent out some office space and open a studio with me. Also, that’s a massive tangent that I won’t even get into right now!

I met a lot of other people too, of course. I met a lot of my WoW guildmates, and that was awesome. I didn’t get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked, but there are so many hours in a day and I spent most of them working. I did get to meet the cast of The Guild over the weekend (including Felicia Day, yes) and some Blizzard developers. I interviewed Christie Golden, was grabbed by a bunch of fans and vendors that recognized my name, and that was really cool. Still, I didn’t get to meet everyone I wanted to while I was there. There were a few readers I really wanted to say hi to, but was so swamped that I didn’t have time to catch my breath and do it until it was too late. Oh well, maybe next year. Hi Orkchop!

No, that is not me with Felicia Day right there. That’s actually Zach Yonzon of WoW.com, he was manning my camera Thursday night and it just so happens his picture with her is the best of the lot. Curious!

I was really sad to leave at the end of the weekend, and strongly considered skipping out on my Sunday morning flight and picking up a new ticket later to spend an extra day or two in Cali. It was very tempting, but the $150 United charges no-shows/cancellations pushed it out of  “I can scrape by!” territory. It just wasn’t doable, so I went home as intended and have slept approximately one billion hours since I got home. It was a little depressing for awhile there, but I’m back on track now. It’s time to get back into the grind.

It’s a bit odd, really. Working from home, my idea of vacation isn’t laying out on a beach somewhere or anything like that. Running myself ragged on a convention floor was, to me, vacation. It was different! It was exciting, it was something outside of the norm. It was fun, and I can’t wait until next year to do it again.