Read more in this series here.

Thursday was in the past; now it was time for Friday. After breakfast and checking in with the registration team, I went over to the class space because I was doing a Spanking 101 panel discussion with some folks. After the discussion part, I spanked Partner 1 (you can see the results here) in front of everyone.

Once that was done, I was sort of at odds for a while. I stopped off in my room for a snack, walked around the hospitality areas, spanked my long-distance partner, and checked in on the various classes from time to time. Around 2:30, we had a medical issue arise with a participant and that was an unexpected thing because she needed to go to a specific type of medical professional. Fortunately, she found one nearby and Greybeard was able to drive her there (since she couldn’t drive herself due to the medical issue). It turned out she was okay, but it was a big scare for us, both on a personal (she’s my friend) and professional (holy shit what does this mean for the party) level. That took up quite a bit of time, and during said time I also had to work with our banquet captain (the person in charge of the convention space) to set up for Spanking Carousel. We had a full 25 percent of the main ballroom to use, and we had to make sure the chairs were properly spaced to allow for as many spankings as possible.

Spanking Carousel (our version of Spanky Hawkins) went really well. We borrowed the wristband idea from Oasis so people would know who was willing to spank whom — and you’ll remember we discussed this several times during the run-up to the party — as well as the bingo idea, but instead of doing a costume bingo, Shannon did a bingo card where you actually had to talk to people and learn something about them to get your bingo spot checked. Carousel turned out to be an immensely popular event — we had about 100 chairs for tops and it still wasn’t enough — and I gave 18 spankings during the hour I was there, which averages out to about one spanking every three minutes. I left Carousel in the hands of the staff at 5:30, though, because I had to meet up with our DJ and make sure he had everything he needed to get set up for dinner.

Our original DJ was going to be BobDJ, who has DJ’d at Lone Star and TASSP, but due to health problems he couldn’t make it. I asked a friend of mine who’s done a little DJ work, and he agreed to join the fun. He did a great job, and everyone seemed to enjoy the music. While he finished setting up, I went upstairs and changed out of my Carousel costume, and then I came down and talked to people while they waited for the dinner buffet to open. We learned that we really only needed one bar, not two — the party only had 265 attendees, not all of them had arrived yet, and not all of them wanted drinks. I made some announcements at dinner about the team, how thankful we were that everyone was there, and what was coming up, and then we ran into our first big hurdle.

Late registration.

We had registration open until 6pm on Friday, but a lot of people didn’t make it in until after that, and they wanted to register and play on Friday night. We found ways to make it work, but one of our learnings (I hate that word so much) was that we needed an on-call registration person for after-hours registrations. We’ve made plans for that for 2025, and while we prefer people register during designated hours, if they absolutely have to register outside of them we have a plan in place.

Once we dealt with that, 80 percent of my polycule (P1, P2, and NP1) crashed in our rooms for a little while. I’d been on my feet most of the day, and they hurt. I hadn’t thought I should take a break, but I was convinced to do so, thank goodness. It got me energized enough to play in the dungeon, which was one of the best dungeons I’ve seen at a spanking party if I do say so myself. Run by A51, the dungeon had more than a dozen play spaces and plenty of chairs for people to sit in when they weren’t playing. If I had one issue with it, it’s that it was a little too dark with only the colored lighting running, but there wasn’t much we could do about that; the ballroom lights weren’t on rheostats so we couldn’t dim them as much as we wanted. The TASSP dungeon, in contrast, used dim overhead lighting to set the scene, while the Lone Star dungeon used mostly colored lights. Next year we might consider having A51 bring in some floor lamps or plain white lights to intersperse with the colored ones. The music was also good, but I think that’s because we used my spanking music playlist that I’d been curating for years. Not every song was about spanking or sex; some of them just had a good beat to play to.

I’d thought that I would be staying up all night, like a lot of other people do, but after P1 and I played in the dungeon we wanted to have some sexytimes. After the sexytimes, we were both wiped out, and it was decided that I needed to be fresh and ready for tomorrow. Fortunately we had several other staff members who were more than happy to stay up late, including StormyGin, who did an amazing job keeping track of all of our volunteers. I had my walkie-talkie on in case someone needed something, and I do remember getting a call on it around midnight, but I don’t remember what it was about. I just know that StormyGin and Assaulted Peanut were on top of things, which only reinforced my belief that we made the right choice in adding them to our leadership team.

Next week: Saturday!