(Lisa Williams of Placeblogger, Liz Rizzo of BlogHer & Rachel Kramer Bussel at the closing cocktail party at the Children’s Museum. More pics here.)

BlogHer was amazing. Meeting in person and spending time with brilliant bloggers and the dinners with the viviacious and engaging sex bloggers was amazing (sorry I can’t help being redundant). I think every other word out of my mouth was “awesome!”I have enough schwag (thumb drive, AOL laptop bag, toiletries, cereal, potholder) that I had to sit on my suitcase to close it. Great panels, great discussions both in session and in the hallways.

IMHO the schwag of the conference was AAG’s assemblage of sex toys at her panel (thank you J.T.’s Stockroom, Tantus Silicone, Afterglow, Devine and NJoy!). She brought 40 bags and lots of people were saying later they wished they had attended. I got a bag, but gave it to Blogher co-founder Elisa Camahort. The next day, she jokingly suggested there should be a BlogHer branded dildo. No problem, Elisa.

I brought a ton of smut of Chicago, which we didn’t have time to watch. But, Saturday night, a bunch of us trooped back to the W Hotel and we watched Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm. Based on the book by Rachel Maines, it interviews her, Betty Dodson, Dell Williams and others about the development of the vibrator. We (Rachel, Amber, Rusty, Susan, Lisa Williams, Amy and I) agreed that the overall the film and the interviews were really good. The repeated use of the metaphoric imagery (fireworks, lightning, swimming jellyfish) for scene transitions was a bit much, as was the tilting of the screen frame, superimposed against the antiquey background (I was tilting my head to watch it). Audacia has a writeup about the screening and panel discusison at the Walter Reade Theater. See it if you can.

And I’m kind of tired. 14 hours of talking, schmoozing, eating, typing, and Twittering 4 days in a row can do that to you. But it was gobsmackingly wonderful to meet in person Amber, Rusty, AAG, Susie Bright, and Cunning Minx. Susie, would you be my fairy godmother!? There were never less than 7 people each night at dinner. I regret there were so many bloggers and sex bloggers I didn’t get to meet.

The OpenSpace that my pal Susan Mernit and I conducted was what we hoped it would be and was a really good discussion. She taught me to use the word takeaway to describe learning, and not food and can sleep through anything, thank God.

AOL sponsored a lunch with their coaches, and AAG and I attended the lunch with the adorable and smart Ian Kerner.

The travel OTOH, was a nightmare. Did you know, if you use miles for a trip and don’t use the outbound leg, the return trip gets cancelled? I do now. But thanks to Susan, I learned about the aggreagator Kayak.com. The tally:

• Two cancelled flights
• 2 standby lists
• 3 cab rides
• Twice my suitcase was lost or misdelivered
• 1 cracked watch crystal
• 1 lost laptop ac/battery charger
• 1 Steve Winwood sighting. He was on the flight I was trying to get on.

I’m not sure how much more I’ll write about BlogHer. I posted a lot of links to del.icio.us (they are now set up to show here as a daily post) and have more to post, so you can get an idea of the bloggers I met and sites mentioned. There’s another Flickr set to post but I lost the power cord to my laptop. And updates on Twitter. I will do a roundup this weekend.

Plus I’m still playing with the blog. I removed “Recent Comments’ because it doesn’t live well with the Pictobrowser - it threw the entire template off and posts ended up after the template. I’ll repost those albums tonight.

There’s a ton of stuff coming up. A tea party in August. An overdue review of Audacia’s Naked on the Internet. Still undecided about Floating World. (registration ends Aug. 5th). Registering for Dark Odyssey summer camp. And Suzanne Portnoy is coming next month.

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