Sundays at Gally always have their own peculiar flavor. There is still a lot to do and see, but the specter of the end of the con hangs over everything, too. At the beginning of the day, though, it’s relatively easy to pretend there’s another two days of the con to go.

This year I spent most of my day in Program D at the discussion panels rather than in Program A at the main stage big events and interview panels as I have often done. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the day I wanted to be in both places at once. Program A held a live commentary screening of The Waters of Mars with actual NASA scientists giving the commentary. I know I would have loved it, and been nodding along (perhaps even noticing some of the same things as they were said), and both the tweets I read and personal accounts I heard indicated it was a hoot.

Instead, though, I chose to go to the panel about diversity in Doctor Who. It’s unfortunate that programming came down to a single panel encompassing every type of human diversity in a mere fifty minutes (that’s hardly enough to talk about any one, let alone all of them), but it was still good to have the conversation. Interestingly, the only time casting a new Doctor came up was at the end, when it was noted that it felt like this had been the only panel of the weekend that hadn’t discussed it.

It’s Gally time again, and the con has officially been in full swing since Thursday night. Unofficially, though, there have been folks around since at least Monday. I arrived Wednesday afternoon, but only made my way over to the Marriott Lobby (I’m staying elsewhere this year) on Thursday morning. Every year, it seems, things ramp up earlier and earlier as folks make the most of opportunities to play tourist while in town.

On Friday, the non-con story of the day was rain. The local news seemed to be making it out to be fairly apocalyptic—and to be fair, in some parts of the region there have been several inches since the storm broke—but near LAX, and for a Midwesterner, the rain seemed steady but light. I was fortunate enough to make it to the Marriott before the rain started, and I was extremely glad not to be out in it once the wind picked up.

I thus spent a couple of hours in the Lobby chatting with random folks until the con’s opening salvo: the Radio Free Skaro live episode. I sat through the first two sections (interviews with Paul McGann and with Philip Hinchcliffe and Roger Murray-Leach, respectively) before making a couple of passes around the Dealers’ Room to ogle swag and grab some autographs.

It’s interesting how unique a character each of the three days of Gally has, and how consistent those characters are from year to year. For me, at least, Friday is fairly giddy, with a “pinch me; I can’t believe how much awesome there is, and it’s only just starting!” vibe. Saturday is the super busy con-in-full-swing day that never seems to slow down. Then there’s Sunday, which always suffers a vague pall of sadness somewhere in that mental space between denial and acceptance as everyone tries to squeeze all possible awesomeness out of the last of our time together.

As the day marches inexorably toward Closing Ceremonies, the harsh reality of another ending becomes ever more undeniable and friends cling together or seek each other out, having somehow missed each other the rest of the weekend. So as I sit in the unusually empty lobby on Monday morning, I look back on Day Three with a combination of melancholy and gratitude for more great experiences.

My Sunday on the con floor started in the audience of an interview panel with Sir John Hurt. There were several memorable moments, including his answer to an audience question about whether he’d ever, shall we say, taken anything home from the set that he wasn’t strictly supposed to take. He said that after the first Harry Potter movie (in which he played Olivander the wand maker from Diagon Alley), he brought home four wands for his two sons and a couple of nephews. Then he told us that people sometimes bring their wands in boxes to him to be signed and “I remember making every one of them.”

Welcome to the madness of Gallifrey One posts for the year!

By Saturday morning, I’ve already been here in LA for three days. Arriving earlier than ever before (Wednesday morning) has proven to be a good idea. It gave me time to begin adjusting to the time change, just hang out in the lobby, and connect with a few people I’d met in passing previously. On the down—or possibly just strange—side, by the time the con actually started on Friday, I felt almost as if the weekend ought to winding down instead of just ramping up.

In part, that feeling of being well into the con is probably due to the fact that one of the big social interactions of Gally was already in full swing by mid-afternoon on Thursday: ribbon trading. Even before badges were available at the registration table downstairs, people were in the lobby feverishly trading (even hotel staff had a ribbon to trade!). And it wasn’t just ribbons. This year, I saw the largest variety of non-ribbon tradables I’ve ever witnessed. There were Girl Scout cookies, candy spoons, hand-crochet adipose babies, tiny wooden TARDISes (this last being one I didn’t see in person, but saw posted on Facebook), and plenty more I probably didn’t even hear about.

Since I wasn’t able to get my ribbons from my supplier until about 8pm, that meant I was already hours behind on trading. Time will tell whether or not I’ll give them all out now, though the key seems to be making one’s stash visible. Without that visual cue, people don’t approach you to ask for ribbons; it seems to be an expectation that has grown along with Gally’s ribbon culture. Were I a cultural anthropologist/sociologist, I’d totally do a study on the development and evolution of the culture of various conventions.