Several times a year we pack our toys and head out to do a show. Sometimes it’s a one day show, sometimes it’s a couple days. This past weekend it was the Emerald City ComicCon in Seattle. It’s a BIG show and it lasts all weekend. Lots of artists come to talk to the fans and sell drawings and push their new comic books. Celebrities, like actors from Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Serenity come to sign autographs and pose for pictures. And dealers, like us, set up tables and sell goodies to the fans. A fun (and profitable) time is had by all!

It is a lot of work to pack up our stuff and haul it 300 miles away, set up displays, and haul it all home when it’s over, but it’s worth doing, and it’s kind of fun too. We enjoy all the customers we get to meet face to face, since we are a mostly mail-order business. I particularly enjoy seeing the people who come in costume. It’s a lot of effort to come up with even the simplest costume, and I admire folks who put out the effort. Some of them show up in incredible detailed outfits. They don’t always pull it off perfectly, but if I can look at them and know what they were going for, I think they’ve done a good job! Oh and the T-shirts! It seems like every year I see about a dozen T-shirts I would LOVE to have, I always wonder where they find them. The net, of course. Here’s my favorite from this year click here

The other cool thing about the comic book show is just being completely immersed in this group of people who are so diverse, yet all share common interests. You see every kind of person at these shows, from families toting kids around to old folks, from extreme geeks to punks with green hair. Lots of tatoos and piercings as you might expect with people who are so into art and fantasy. These things all seem to go together. Plus we can chit chat about stuff like who’s going to be the new Doctor (Doctor Who) and we’re all on the same page. I think they always wonder if we just sell the toys or if we’re into it – we’re into it.

So it was a crazy weekend. Drove to Lacey, WA, dropped off the RV at the campsite, drove the rest of the way to Seattle. When we set up the booth it seemed like the toys would never all fit, but a few hours later the toys were on display and the extras were tucked underneith the tables. Then we drove back to Lacey (stopping for dinner along the way), and spent the night in the trailer. Why do we camp in Lacey when the show is in Seattle? Because there’s an Airstream club campground there that is only $18 a night, which is SO much cheaper than getting a hotel in Seattle, and we know the trailer is safe there all day while we’re working the show.

We got up at the crack of dawn the next morning and drove back to Seattle. Ran the booth all day and it was crazy how much stuff we sold – people were shoveling money at me so fast sometimes I didn’t even know what they were buying! Dave spent the day running around and restocking form the overstock we’d hidden under the table. By the end of the day the booth was picked clean of good stuff. So we headed back to Lacey, stopping for fast food along the way and eating on the road, picked up the trailer, and headed home. Got home about 11pm, dropped off the trailer, packed more toys for the show, got to bed about 1:30am and slept a few hours.

We got back up at 4, left the house by 5, back up to Seattle, loaded in the new toys, got everything displayed just in time for the doors to open. Ran the booth all day Sunday, not quite as busy as Saturday, but still busy all day long, I barely had a break to leave and go peek at the celebrities! Packed the van with the leftovers, and hit the road for home. Makes for a fun, profitable, but very busy weekend!

Many thanks to our friends who ran the retail store for us while we were gone, and our petsitter who takes care of the critters when we can’t be there!

Today is our day off, the store was closed, and so we were out running errands this afternoon. We got home mid afternoon to find a message on our machine saying the alarm had gone off at the store half an hour before. So we pulled up the security camera to see if there was any activity there and saw this:

Yikes! Firemen in our store! Well, luckily we’re insured. Dave hopped in the car and headed down there while I called the alarm company. They were very good. They got the alarm activation and could hear voices in the store, and so they called the police just like they are supposed to. The police told them there was a fire incident in progress and that there were police there already.

By the time Dave got there everything was back to normal. The fire had been some minor thing in the store next door in our building, which luckily had NOT set off the sprinklers or caused any damage to our section. Whew – close call! Our store had been locked back up after the firemen investigated, and they did no damage to the door getting in because the landlord has a key. So all around an interesting end to the day, but luckily not a bad end!

A few years ago Dave gave me a bread machine for Christmas. I enjoyed using it for a while, then tucked it away in the cupboard and hadn’t used it in a couple years. But a week ago we were out of bread and I had bread flour in the pantry, so I pulled out the machine and made a loaf of white bread. It turned out nice, and made some good sandwiches, and the leftovers made a nice stuffing to go with a turkey breast I cooked.

So today I tried a new recipe, Sally Lunn bread. It’s good, kind of sweet.

Mmm, smells like bread. Actually the best part of baking bread is that the whole house smells like bread!

Barclay says, please can’t I have some of that bread?

I do enjoy the simplicity of tossing ingredients into the bread machine and three hours later you have warm bread and the house smells wonderful. Pretty slick!

I’ve been thinking about this ‘nothing in life is free’ thing that we have been trying on Barclay. Not that i have been trying it too well, if it burdens me, I’m less likely to do it than I am to be lazy and do it my regular way. One of the things I don’t do well is get him on a feeding schedule, mostly because Alki free-feeds, so there is always food down, and he doesn’t care much about his food anyway, so his bowl always has food in it too. I’m supposed to pick it up and not let him have anything until I choose to offer it to him again, but I can’t be the dog food nazi, I have other things to do, so I just leave it down and he’ll come snack when he wants some. In my mind it’s healthier if they don’t develop an obsession with gulping down every kibble the moment it appears. I’ve never had fat dogs, so I must be doing something right.

Plus, Barclay is not that bad, he’s actually pretty darned good, so I might be more devoted to the cause if I really thought he had issues. Basically the more I think about it, the more I think I’m OVER-thinking it. He’s not trying to dominate anyone or rule the house. If anything he is a pretty ‘soft’ dog, who if not eager to please, is certainly eager to stay off the radar, and just likes to have fun.

Today I came home and on purpose played run and chase games with him. He didn’t know it but there were some important lessons hidden in the games, things about responding to his name and running towards me when I call him. He was just having fun running and chasing and fetching and doing all the stuff he enjoys anyway, and needs to do to burn off energy. And I got some exercise too – I was panting by the time we came inside! Running my butt off 🙂

This whole dog training thing is a puzzle. What worked on Alki doesn’t work on Barclay, and what works on Barclay probably won’t work on the next dog. Maybe that’s part of the fun anyway.

I went through today and labelled almost all of my posts with tags (I skipped quite a few of the original ‘picture-a-day’ posts). So now if you want to go back and look at cute pictures of specifically cats, or Alki, or chickens, there you go!

Ok, here’s my question: If someone forwards you an email, and the information in it is blatantly false, do you tell them, or just let it go?

I have several people who have me on their forwarding list. We laugh about it because I do computer consulting and have warned people about opening forwarded emails – it’s a great way to get a virus or worm, especially since there could be damaging code hidden in JPG files or movies. I’m pretty paranoid about those things, and because of that I’ve only had one virus slip by me in many years. Most forwarded emails go right in the virtual round file.

I’ll read them if they are just text. My point is that sometimes there’s something wrong in there, I always want to tell them about it. It’s easy enough to look these things up on Snopes and confirm or bust most of them. Sometimes I see where another recipient busts it and does a reply-to-all. I have to say that’s a great way to at least stop people from forwarding it further, but it must be a little humiliating for the person who started it.

I’m a sceptic, I take everything with a grain of salt. It’s kind of sad really. Dave says I’d be no fun at a party, because someone tells a story and I’d be fact-checking it! A few years ago there was an email about Mel Gibson being passed around, and the story it told was just too incredible to be true. Click here to see the Snopes entry. I told the coworker who had passed it around at work that it wasn’t true, and she got indignant. I had spoiled her fun. But it’s not true, I protested. Yeah, she said, but it was a good story!

Stuff like that explains why I was cruising down the highway and heard the DJ on a radio station in Colorado Springs talking about the kidney thief story as if it were a fact – I just about drove off the road when I heard that!

So what do you do when you get an email that you know is false? Do you correct the sender? Do you do a ‘reply to all’ and let everyone know? Or do you round file it and go on with your day?

I was digging around on the laptop, cleaning up, when I found this picture of our house under construction, which I found on the county permits website. This was 1994, 5 years before we came along.

So here we are at our new (to us) house, complete with my Mustangs in the driveway. I really miss that white one, that was a nice car – black leather, big stereo, comfy. Terrible handling though. Maybe I don’t miss it that much. Notice the color of the house. Dave said it was taupe. I don’t think that’s a real color. When people asked me what color my house was I’d say yellow, and Dave would say ‘no it’s not’, so we’d go outside and look and sure enough, it wasn’t yellow, but it wasn’t really any color! Note that it looks the same color as it does in the picture above, and that picture is black and white! Well, we soon solved the color problem.

We have LP siding on our house, and you may remember the LP siding class action lawsuit because their siding wasn’t properly sealed so it would soak up water and rot. Our choices were to replace it, or deal with it. The LP settlement was ridiculously cheap, it wouldn’t pay to actually replace it, so we decided to deal with it. One hot summer we went around the whole house, cleaning up the edges of the siding and treating them with a rubberized polymer to seal them. Every single exposed edge of siding was treated with this white rubbery stuff. And when we were done we had to paint the whole house.

No, it’s not pink, it’s ‘morning rose’. We have no CC&Rs so we can do whatever we want 🙂 No matter what the neighbors think. I liked it, it was bright and cheery. Oh look, another mustang!

But a couple years later we added the big shop, to contain our business. With the prospect of a two story pink shop towering over the neighborhood, we knew we needed a less obnoxious color. We picked a dark forest green. Some people said that would be too bold, we should paint it taupe! But with the stand of trees behind the house, I think it blends right in and looks very sharp, especially with the white trim. Our painter suggested going with a lighter color on the sun porch to brighten it up. I really like it.

We’ve been here ten years, almost exactly – I think we moved in on valentines day and celebrated by sitting on the floor and eating pizza. This is the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place, and I have to say I feel like we’ve really made it our own.

Oh, and you can’t see it because it’s covered, but there’s still a mustang in the driveway 🙂

Our ‘territorial view’ was always a nice peek at the hills, and just the corner of the cattle barn up the road. Last summer:

Then a few weeks ago DH said ‘could we always see the road going up the hill?’ and I said yes, because we could just see a bit of it. Then one day he said ‘could we always see that house up the road?’ and I said I didn’t think so. And then a couple days ago I realized I could see a barn I’d never seen before. Seems the neighbors are cutting down the trees on the other side of their rusty barn. Well, it’s nice having a bit more view, just don’t tell the tax man!

toothpastefordinner.com

Having grown up when Pong was new and cool, I still love video games, and they are without a doubt my favorite time waster. Not much time for them in the summer, but in the winter, when we’re stuck inside, I love to play play play. Especially games that involve exploring. Can’t hardly put them down to go to bed!

My favorite when I was a kid was Adventure, on the Atari 2600. I knew that game inside and out, and all the easter eggs, and every cool thing you could do like carry a dragon around and fight other dragons with it. Spent hours playing around with that.

Then in college we wasted huge amounts of time playing Dungeon Master on the Atari ST. This was miles ahead of anything they had on PCs at the time. Ah, the warm fuzzies I get just from looking at the screenshot! Oh no! A Mummy!

Then there was Wolfenstein, oh about the time I got out of college. Great fun running around and exploring and looking for hidden passages, and shooting nazis of course. But the best was yet to come…

Doom! The ultimate time waster – because now we could network and play together, and hunt each other down, and have giant frag-offs that lasted all afternoon. At work. When we should have been working. Nothing like launching an RPG and hearing a tormented cry from the guy two cubicles over! Oh, bless the people who created Doom. Probably precipitated the fall of the American capitalist system. So much productivity lost…

I don’t think anything gave me as much pleasure as Doom until KotOR came out – that’s Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. For a geek what could be more fun than to be completely immersed in a Star Wars universe, surrounded by familiar aliens, Jedis and Sith, lightsabers and blasters, and ship that looks a lot like the Millenium Falcon? Nothing. Nothing could be better.

But KotOR came out in 2003 or so, and I played it shortly after that, so why reminice about it now. Because it is set in a very immersive universe, and the clever way they worked in all kinds of side quests that you may not even run into the first time you play, and different choices based on if you’re playing good or evil – or switching back and forth, it can be played over and over again. Slightly different things happen, you see cut-scenes you never activated before, you have little adventures you never ran across previously. I’ve played it at least four times, haven’t played it for a couple years but I’m playing it again now, and I’ll be playing it again after that.

One of my favorite things about KotOR is you can play as a man or a woman – finally a videogame that acknowledges women may be playing! Or maybe that option is there because they thought some men would want to play as women – let’s not even go there! I appreciate being able to play as a woman for a change. And that hunka-hunka-star pilot in the screenshot is Carth, the first guy you meet and he is your companion through the rest of the adventure, along with other characters you pick up along the way.

The original KotOR is just the best of the best as far as videogames go, in my opinion. KotOR II was not nearly as engrossing because it didn’t have all the hidden side quests. Pretty much everything in it had to be done to complete the missions. So there was no reason to play it again and again. Recently they announced the next KotOR will be an online version, one of those massive multiplayer games. I don’t have much hope for that, we don’t really have the high-speed connection to play stuff like that out here in the boonies anyway. But I guess we’ll see what the future holds.