Held Hostage by Artists

This is the first time I've been on the internet in ages, having spent the past week running the front desk at the American Society of Aviation Artists' annual convention (meeting this year at the Navy Test Pilot School). Dear God, those people were disorganised. They could really take a lesson from anime conventions; Katzucon is always far better organised, and they've got hundreds of teenagers in costume running around, as opposed to a few dozen adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, and older. You wouldn't think grown men would need to be reminded three times a day to turn in their lunch order forms. It really drove the Navy guys nuts ("What do you mean, they don't have an accurate to the minute schedule written in military time? Do they even have a schedule? Why did they only start planning this last week? Are those paintings for sale? They're not? How about that one of the fighter plane over the Swiss Alps? You're sure?").

On the plus side, I got two pieces of free art (an oil and watercolour of a biplane in the clouds as a graduation gift from an old family friend, and a pen sketch of an F-18 in front of the TPS hangers that one of the artists had done as an exercise in perspective and geometry and wasn't keeping), and got to spend five days watching TPS students mill around admiring the art show. After four years at Hollins, being surrounded by a bunch of guys within five or six years of my age was a strange feeling. They all wear flight suits and have military haircuts and are next to impossible to tell apart.