On the road again: Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 4

The con's big activity for today was the Anthony Awards brunch. Bouchercons run their award ceremonies with speed as the top priority, so the food was buffet-style, standard hotel breakfast fare, which is to say eggs and bacon and sausage and bacon and fruit and bacon and biscuits and bacon. Did I mention bacon?

Where SF Worldcons draw out awards with multiple presenters, Bouchercons have a single presenter announce them all. This year's Toastmaster, Ridley Pearson, did something unusual: He presented the awards in as random an order as he could manage. He wrote each category on a small piece of paper, crumpled those sheets into little balls, and put them in a small jar. The con chair chose the first one, and then winner of each category chose the next category. Nice idea.

You can easily find all of the winners online, but I was particularly happy to see Dana Cameron, one of my fellow contributors to The Wild Side, walk away with the Best Short Story award for "Swing Shift." The same story had earlier garnered Dana the Macavity award, so it was a great weekend for her. My congratulations to her.

Finding dinner tonight proved to take more time than I had expected, because this part of downtown St. Louis appears to roll up the sidewalks on Sunday. We finally ended up at Rosalita's Cantina, which served up far better TexMex food than we had feared we might get. Everything we tried was good, the server was very nice and attentive, and all in all, I'd recommend it to anyone in downtown St. Louis looking for a solid TexMex meal.

Tomorrow, I leave early for a day of taxis, airports, and traveling that will, I hope, result in me being home tomorrow night.