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….

Get in with a nagging feeling that no matter how much I do today, it won’t be enough.

• Pass by several members of our localisation team moving across the courtyard to the other building we take offices in. Realise this is a prime chance to get footage for our ‘Year at NCE’ Documentary, and send Chris to tape them moving.
• Check the thread I posted yesterday about the MiniCon; there are 37 responses and lots of questions, so I start to answer. It takes a while so I have to be short.
• Get email from Andrew Wildman pointing me to Doug Braithwaite’s sketchbook contribution. It’s great.
• Concerned that I’ll forget important stuff, I scribble down the six or so things I need to do today…
• … and then run off to a local coffee shop for some extensive brainstorming of the MiniCon. We talk for about 90 minutes, and then I have to return to the office to get anti-cold drugs in my system.
• Lunch is soup at my desk and movie trailers.
• I have five pages of notes from the MiniCon chat that I need to get into a Word .doc, so I type fast.
• Two pages into it, I get an email with questions for our interview with Titan Gaming Radio at 3pm. I try to read them over but I’ve got to keep going.
• To my surprise, the .doc’s done by 2:30. Chris and I puzzle a bit over TaskForce: Omega requirements and potential prizes.
• 3pm – sit down for a 90 minute chat with Titan Gaming Radio, which is pleasant enough.
• Get back to my desk and realise I’ve done none of my to-dos, and I have an urgent email requiring me to brief an artist… right now.
• Get the brief done by 5:30 or so, but still end up in the office at 7pm. Strike five out of six to-dos off the list.

Still can’t believe I have to go to Birmingham tomorrow. No offence to Birmingham; just such short notice.