I knew I'd officially been gone from home too long when this conversation transpired:

Amy: [snip] costume research while chicken cooks. hi.

Brian: hi

Brian: I am also cooking chicken

Amy: the stuff you had in the fridge?

Brian: yep

From an email I sent to Val today:

I'm really struggling with the weightlifting, and something just doesn't seem right. I've had to lay off lifting a bit this month because of Atlanta trips, but I'm getting exhausted during weightlifting sessions and it's not the kind that I get a second wind and bounce back from. Something's not right, and I don't know what.

There was more said than that, but it's unimportant. Val's response was unequivocal:

"Nope. Forty-five inches." He shrugged, folded the fabric neatly back onto the bolt, and handed it to me. Ok, I thought. So my dress won't be emerald green. I took the bolt from him and wandered back to the 'luxury fabrics' section of the store with a sinking feeling. I compared the width to the red and blue velvets I liked. They, too, were 45" widths. I grumbled (audibly) and mentally scratched options 2 and 3 off the list.

White is not a color for dragon*con. Black is a far better choice. A black shirt soaked through with sweat doesn't turn transparent, and the dirt, grime, and grease of equipment never shows up against it. There's an art to staying clean, dry, and daisy-fresh at 'con when you're a tech staffer.

I haven't mastered it yet, but part of it appears to hinge on changing shirts a lot.

I'm mostly making good on my promise. Mostly.

The third year will be the charm(s), the boots, the skirt, the shirt; anything but the mundane. "At last," some of my friends will say, one in particular.

I'm not the dressing-up type. Or maybe I'm the perfect dressing-up type. It depends on how you look at it. For the flamboyant, the outgoing, dressing-up is a simple matter of tossing together bits and pieces and letting your personality do the rest.

While making my packing list for dragon*con on Monday afternoon, I began thinking about what clothes I wanted to take. They needed to be comfortable, easy to move in, sweat-absorbing (because anyone who thinks they won't sweat while racing around to set up for the enormous costume contest is seriously deluded), and somewhat funky.