Hola. I'm still in Washington. I'm bunking down with the Chickie family for this final night. I was hoping to score some quality baby time, but as the evening progresses I can see this will not be the case. She's over-tired and trying so hard to be the gorgeous, charming child we know and love but then the clouds roll in and you can see her gearing up to be seriously loud.

Today I bid farewell to old friends and new acquaintances. I hugged and promised to write regular emails and wore out the batteries in my digicam. I laughed and snarked and hugged some more. I want to take my favorite people home with me, seriously. After meeting so many of them in NYC in March, seeing them again was a joy, even as I found myself counting the hours left until the end of the conference. Someone please tell me there's some sort of quantum physics equation that explains how time absolutely races when I'm in the company of people I want to spend time with and how it drags when I'm forced to return to the day to day living of my shitty little life.

Tomorrow I get up early, kiss the baby and get on a plane. I'll fly into Detroit, grab a shuttle bus and head for the border. Once safely back on Canadian soil, I will hop into the Jeep and head for home with a random sampling of JournalCon cds blasting through my speakers. I will smoke the last of my wildly exotic Marlborough Lights (thanks, Coleen!) and marvel at the wide array of music I've been missing. Some of it will find its way onto my MP3 player, some will be ripped and mailed to friends. I will arrive home and be knocked down a la Dino Flintstone by my puppies and endure a couple of days of pouting from The Boy who didn't understand this journey in the first place. It will be the icing on the cake at my pity party.

Random stories have yet to be told, but I anticipate seeing assorted entries from behind the eyeballs of different attendees first. Some may have kept to themselves and never spoken a word to me, others choosing to stick with their posse and make the most of their valuable face time. Still others totally took their direction from me and my name tag which read:

"Meg"

"I have personal space issues - hug me!"

These particular people are the ones I will think about and the memories that will cause me to smile enigmatically in the line at the grocery store or while sitting in my Jeep at a stop sign. They sustain me on days when all I want is for it to be over. They soothe me when I am so agitated I want to choke the life out of someone and I don't care if it's me. They comfort me in the dark as I slip into dreamland, encouraging my unconscious to take up the torch and rerun those delicious technicolour home movies as I sleep.

The JournalCon experience was very much what I had hoped it would turn out to be. Tomorrow, I will ponder everything that happened and try to make sense of it all. For tonight, I am content to sleep the sleep of someone who is loved.

Posted at 7:28 p.m.