My sense of time is also totally scrambled. I didn’t get home until 2am, and then slept the sleep of the undead, striving to ignore the existence of sunrise. I woke up late and had to scramble to meet my students for our Monday feeding.

It was the best Skepticon ever, though. I caught a half dozen Missouri p tep, and best of all, a half dozen large egg sacs that I smuggled through the airport and brought to the lab. One of the reasons I had to get into the lab this morning was to get these spiders sorted and labeled, so that I could set up a distinct line of Missouri-born spiders separate from our Minnesota natives. We are going to have a lot of spiders to track for the school year. So yes, best conference ever.

Oh, yeah, and the conference itself…that was pretty good, too. I very much liked the organization, with multiple tracks of ‘workshops’ during the day, with a couple of featured talks in the evening. You could just explore and sample various events, and then later get blown away by the excellent speakers before retiring to the bar. They really were most fabulous speakers, too. Ashton Woods was fierce, Rose Eveleth made me think even at 8pm, Juhem Navarro-Rivera gave a surprising statistical analysis of nones (Guess what? Separation of church & state isn’t the most important issue on their minds, it’s social justice), Indre Viskontas talked about music and minds (good timing, since my granddaughter is coming to visit this week), and Cora Harrington was a total surprise. She’s a lingerie blogger, which I didn’t even know was a thing, but she took a skeptical look at myths about women’s underwear. On Sunday, Miri Mogilevsky talked about ritual as a way of coping with grief, something on my mind this year as several of my colleagues here struggled with cancer. Also unexpectedly, the most ferociously anti-clerical, pro-atheism rage-talk of the weekend came from Marissa McCool. Who says social justice activists are too soft to do a barn-burner?

But most of you missed it. It’ll be back August 14-16 2020, in the same place, so mark your calendars now so you don’t forget. There will be a completely different slate of speakers, but the spiders will also still be there.