Hard to believe I’ve been to 50 Boskones. (Yes, I missed Boskone 3. If I’d have known it was the only one I would miss, I would have made more of an effort to go. But it wasn’t a real Boskone, so I didn’t.)

#51was pretty good, or so I hear. I missed a lot of it because I got sucked into working on Registration, and one night I was just too sleepy and crashed early. But I accomplished a lot of what I wanted to do – especially catching up with old friends and renewing acquaintances with new ones.

I drove to the hotel early, figuring I would get the car in and under cover before most of the Thursday storm. From the hotel, I trekked into downtown Boston to have lunch with Deb Geisler and Meg Frank. (Meg was staying with Deb and having fun attending her classes at Suffolk University.) Alex made it in later in the day and we had a late dinner together at the hotel lobby bar.

Friday was a lazy morning, and then a flurry of activity trying to get the new registration system working well enough to process the huge line that had accumulated by 3 pm. Everything worked fine on Saturday and Sunday, when we had more stations set up, but on Friday we had only 3 stations working and it just wasn’t enough. At least we did get everyone processed in time to get to the start of the program at 5pm. At lunch on Sunday (dim sum in Chinatown), Alex and Steven and I did a lot of brainstorming and think we’ve figured out what needs to be done to make it work better next year.

Saturday night we had to wait a while for dinner, as the weather was nasty and the hotel restaurants were crowded. But I had a nice dinner that night with Brother Guy Consolmagno, Bill Higgins, and Dennis McCarthy. I later enjoyed Guy and Bill’s presentation on the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Alex and I got away for dinner at Rosa’s on Sunday night, a nice Mexican restaurant that makes guacamole at your tableside. I played some games at the Dead Dog, but didn’t stay up too late. Alex was lost to me by then, as he was buried in a new book and stayed up half the night reading.

On Monday we took our time about checking out, helped Suford with a jumpstart in the garage (actually, we didn’t help her, as there was something more serious wrong with her car, but we tried), and had yummy French toast at the local diner before I dropped Alex off and headed for home.