Temporary insanity? Demonic possession? Pain in the brain figments? Had to've been SOMEthing like that. Heaven and all its little angels help me, I signed up for the NaNoWriMo. >_<

Thank goodness it doesn't start until *after* the deadline for getting one's Hallowe'en costume finished! **sigh** I will spend today and tomorrow wallowing in pirate-y decadence. And I guess tomorrow on the way to the Hallowe'en party, I'll find out whether I can write in the car without getting ill. @,@

Gaaaah - Twig, it's gonna be an F5, I just know it! (Shoot me now.) And Luns, in spite of what it's going to look like, I didn't steal Miwoi's name and switch out two letters for the main character... G-Cat picked his moniker out of my list of "gee, that's a cool-looking name, lemme write it down because it might come in handy someday". ^_^;;

Right... back to staring at my outline and wondering what the hell I've gone and done.

You Know You've Stayed Up Too Late When...

...you're on IM with a friend talking about topics such as "Sexually-Transmitted Hair Color" and whether herds of vicious Wisconsin milk cows ever decide to take their revenge by roaming the countryside and tipping over parked vehicles. And that's not even mentioning the cheese wheels gone bad. >_<

Someday, someday I will learn not to get sucked in by fanfics with monstrously long, complex chapters that keep me awake and reading until the wee small hours when I have to get up for work at the store the next morning. (...I hope.) On the other hand, perhaps I should not complain about this tendency since it has led me to meet quite a few cool and interesting people! (Bows to Twig, and several members of the Conjunction, encountered courtesy of "A Long Hard Road" and the Twigster's blog. X D)

So anyway, this post is liable to be rambling and disjointed - especially since I just scarfed an entire package of "Hi-Chew" Japanese candies. Apologies in advance. (Woo! Sugar buzz, sugar buzz!)

My Hallowe'en costume plan has undergone several radical simplifications due to the fact that I'm a lazy-butt and don't want to do as much sewing as had originally been planned. (That, and I will probably be pitching in on the roomies' outfits so that G-Cat isn't stuck at the sewing machine non-stop from now until her sister's party on Saturday! ^_^;; )

I am lucky; I lost very little to the Pitas crash, and was able to get back everything I remember being there since the site's last backup. The House of Mews was not so lucky, and G-Cat & Rissi lost their lovely sweet anniversary posts to one another. Mwrrrr. One of them has since been re-written, but I still want to grab the repair-shop morons who installed an old drive in the Pitas server rather than the requested new one and shake them until their teeth rattle and any stray brain cell they might still have in their skulls rattles back into place. RAR!

Hmm, now that I'm suitably frothing at the mouth, it's time to answer some customer mail. Mwahahahahaha! Will post something sensible later when I've had some sleep and/or the sugar wears off.

oh yeah... To anyone who hit this blog about the leather tricorne pirate hat!!

I got mine from The Crimson Chain at the local Renaissance Festival. Their site seems to be offline for an overhaul right now, but you might want to bookmark it for checking later, should you want a similar hat.

...this has been a Pirate Public Service Announcment. Arrrrr, mateys. X D

Must Remember ... next time I say "I've managed to avoid a cold so far," that I have to promptly knock on wood afterwards. **sigh** At that, I didn't come down with it as badly as the other Mews, and we're all through the worst of it now, with only a few leftover coughs lurking about.

Gaaah, I know I had about a dozen social-type things I wanted to say in here, and bugger all if I can remember any of them at the moment! Pfui. Rar. I'm sure it will all come back to me at work tomorrow; I'll take notes.

...and much as I adore the Makenshi, it's really time for a new layout. Maybe it's time to pull a Twig and push one of my own figments out onto center stage. (giggles with amusement watching the figments stampede in response... half them them are "eep"ing and trying to run away, the other half are pushing to the front and shouting, "Me! Me!")

Right. Tired. Fall down now. **thud**

It lives...

...although it's darn tired at the moment. Am getting very tired of PO job keeping our shift overtime; it's a pain in the butt not getting home from work until after midnight. *pout* Darn meatworld. Otherwise, so far I've managed to avoid the cold that's attacked the other Mews. And we all survived the visit from G-Cat's parents and their two bouvier dogs (which look like nothing so much as schnauzers on steroids).

The household collective has gotten sucked into watching .hack//SIGN, which is turning out to be rather odd experience. I'm enjoying the overall story so far, but about every other character makes me want to give them a good bitchslap. It's not even the whine factor that you mentioned earlier that's getting to me -- it's the characters who have to be cooler-than-thou or otherwise Show Their Superiority who are at the top of my "boot to the head" list. (*sigh* ah yes, the highschool nerd in me raises her four-eyed head once again...)

Have even managed to get some work done on character sketches for the Conjunction's pirate manga challenge. ^_^ Three crew members down, two to go... and then I have to come up with an antagonist(s). eh heh heh. G-Cat's been at the old sketchbook too, in spite of coming down with Rissi's cold.

Belated thanks for the giggle, Thorne! "...a cultist and a riskbreaker walk into a tavern...", indeed. ...geez, you'd think ONE of them would have seen it! X D (runs from outraged Sydney & Ashley, giggling maniacally)

I did get pictures of the sewing project you had wanted to see - will try to get them off the camera and uploaded to website over the next couple of days.

Maa, that's all the social stuff I can remember off the top of my head. Corrections & additions will no doubt follow.

Surreal Commute Day

Okay, so I should have known this morning's drive was going to be strange when I looked in my rearview mirror and realized I was getting tailgated by a little old lady with her hair up in rollers. But it didn't really sink in until a few more miles down the road... I was following a pickup truck carrying a lawnmover in its bed, and something was flapping off the handle of the mower. It took me a few seconds to realize that the flapping something was a pair of pants. And that the second something hanging from the rearview mirror was a t-shirt. And I thought to myself, 'Please don't tell me this guy is driving that thing naked...'

After a brief pause at the bank, I'm back on the road and headed for work. Driving through Irwin, I see another pickup truck. This one is parked in the opposite lane, facing the wrong direction, while the driver had a nice chat with some friend of his on the sidewalk. (Dude, I don't CARE if you have your hazard lights on, this is still a purely bone-headed move!) And then there was the horse's ass I was following on Route 30. Well, okay, it was an entire horse, in trailer, but I could only see its butt.

So anyway... made it to work safely in spite of all that. I'd rather have stayed home, as Lunar is much better company than our customers -- but, the bills must be paid. **sigh** We have marveled at Ashley's 'cheekiness', and giggled our way through "Six-String Samurai" in delighted disbelief. (Sorry we didn't call when we were supposed to, Twig! We couldn't start the DVD until Rissi got home from class, and by the time it was over... gah. Bad us. Gomen.)

I have a feeling I'm going to be losing quite a bit of spare time in the upcoming weeks to Vagrant Story.... X D

Countdown: T-Minus-One! We'll get a Lunar, and a full moon, on the same day... coincidence? I think not. X D (Note to self: get those "Who's Who" buttons made up tonight!)

So the house is in better shape than it's been in months (still cluttered as all heck, but it's much cleaner clutter now), and if G-Cat finishes the vacuuming while I'm at work, the sneezing should be over. Yay! The cats are still trying to figure out what the heck we're up to, but I think Kiri has decided we *aren't* getting ready to move again just yet.

I have not brain or time enough for social-type stuff at the moment. Will do that from home. ^^;;

Today was spent at the Renaissance Faire, and much fun was had in spite of on-and-off rain showers. I have been a very very bad cat. X D Am now the proud owner of a very Jack Sparrow-ish leather tricorne hat. (Now I only have to worry about members of the Conjunction stealing it from me... I'll have to keep close watch on it while you're here! ~_^

In related news, Rissicat just pointed me toward the website for Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is too flippin' amusing.

WAAA-freaking-HOOOO!!!!

This news just in from TorCon (World SF Convention this weekend): Our friend Wen won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Science Fiction Writer!!!

Next year's campaign: Best Novel. Mwahahahahahaha. X D

Wooo! Way to go, Dave! X D All kinds of mighty!

Fortune Cookie Wisdom of the Week:
"Start believing in your dreams and others will catch the fever."

...I'm not so sure that's a good idea; I've been having some very strange dreams lately and I *really* could have done without the 9/11-inspired one last week, thankyewverymuch. {{{shudder}}}

Anyway -- congratulations on your new car, and I hope you both are settled in comfortably back at school now. And WOO-HOO!!! We get a Lunar visit! Eeeeeeee! (does Dance of Joy)

You have my sympathies on the moving, Dave. I have a theory about what happens when a body tries to move; that's when ALL the portable black holes in one's dwelling (which have spent the last X number of months - or years - making random items disappear) decide to regurgitate everything they've hidden, so that the amount of stuff needing transportation from one spot to the other suddenly doubles.

Vel your archery sounds like mucho fun! ^^ And congrats to Tsaiko for a victory against plagiarism. Go you!

Have been trying to sketch, to get back into the swing art-wise, and I keep noticing something... when drawing full-length character pictures, I *always* end up drawing them so that the feet trail off the page. Even when I try very hard to leave enough room. Maybe I have some subconscious aversion to drawing them...? Bare feet can be a pain to draw, tho' I don't have too much trouble anymore with shod ones, generally speaking. Wonder if there is such a thing as an *anti*-foot fetish... Right. Enough babbling, stop now. ^^;;

Chaos, Disorganization and Forty-Dollar Socks

So I've survived my first Otakon. It was a lot more tiring than I expected; with over 16,800 attending members (last count we heard Sunday afternoon over the PA, which was *not* a final headcount), they really kept us hopping in the dealers' room. I saw almost nothing of the convention but the one aisle of the dealers' room which led from Joy's booth to the restrooms.

Well, I did also get to see the Art Show -- many more times than expected, in fact! According to the paperwork I'd seen, the art show was supposed to open at noon on Friday. This was also Zero Hour for the dealers' room, so I didn't get over there until about 1 p.m. or so -- at which point the staff was still putting panels together, and not yet accepting art. No big deal, that happens at a lot of shows, I just said I'd come back later. Which I did, and turned over my art to them at that time, since their system doesn't allow the artists to hang their own work (a first in my 10 years of experience showing art, mostly at SF conventions). There was still no art on the finished panels yet, at this point. Since things seemed a little disorganized, I asked one of the folks wearing a Staff t-shirt if they needed any help; I could stop back after the dealers' room closed and play gofer. The staffer pointed out the Art Show director, and told me to check with him when I came back.

So after closing out the dealers' room after a frantic 8 hours (minus maybe 30 minutes of running back & forth to the art show) and roaming back to the hotel to drop stuff off, I walked back over and offered my services to the art show director, who told me "Oh no, we don't need any help -- got it all under control!" Since there was actually some art up on the panels by this point, I took him at his word, and went out to get sushi for dinner since my coworkers were ordering pizza.

Fast-forward to noon Saturday. Otakon has an initial limit of 10 pieces per artist; after that, if there's still space left in the show on Saturday morning, additional pieces can be added. I had four more I wanted to display, so once more I begged time from my boss to run over to the art show. The director asks me to come back again at 4, since they're "so far behind from last night". I walk away wondering why he turned down a volunteer, if he's that far behind?! But what the hell, I went back at 4 and he took my additional prints. After handing them off, I decided to do a quick walkthrough to see where my first batch of stuff had been hung.

Only it still hadn't *been* hung. After being in the art show staff's possession for almost 24 hours, my art was not yet up on the panels. Nobody had seen it, nobody could bid on it, and the official art show hours were more than half over by this point. I was starting to get more than a little ticked off. The dealers' room closed at 6 p.m. Saturday, and once again I jogged over to the next hall to check for my art, with vague thoughts that if it STILL hadn't gone up, I was going to raise holy hell and demand they just hand it back over and refund my entry fee. The art still wasn't hung, but the director also wasn't available to ream a new bodily orifice into, and after another long 8 hours in the dealers' room I didn't have the energy to hunt him down.

Saturday evening I did get to see an actual event, since N-chan and her lovely friend Sionna managed to save me a spot in the masquerade seating line, and we ended up with a lovely spot. The masquerade itself had quite a few entries drop out, but those which were left were all enjoyable, with some truly amazing presentations (especially the electric-guitar-playing Black Chocobo... I *so* need a tape of that cosplay!). And when I ran back down between the costume presentations and the judging results, at 10 p.m. on Saturday, lo and behold the artwork I had given them Friday afternoon was FINALLY on display! ...though there was still no sign of the four they'd taken from me that afternoon. Grrrr. Doubled back up to the fourth floor auditorium to hear the masquerade judging (Sionna walked off with two hall costume awards - way to go! - and "Choco Rock!" won a well-deserved presentation award). Skipped eating any real dinner, roamed back to the hotel room and watched a truly *tacky* horror movie called "Thirteen Ghosts" before thudding (mostly because my roommates for the weekend had the TV remote).

Sunday, the art show hours were theoretically from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. so at 1:45 I roamed over to find out what time artists could pick up unsold work. Good thing I had my portfolio with me, as all the art had already been taken down from the panels -- and stacked ON THE CEMENT FLOOR -- according to what had sold and what hadn't. They escorted us back one at a time to collect our unsold pictures, so I was stuck in like for 15 - 20 minutes. When I finally got my turn, only the three originals I'd taken were in my stack; I'm not sure whether this means every single one of my prints sold, or if the last four were still buried somewhere in a stack of stuff that never got entered in the computer system. I guess I'll find that out in 2 - 3 weeks when they will theoretically mail me a check for what sold. Hopefully that will also include a control sheet of what price each piece finally sold for, since there was no way for me to find that out (or even whether any of my stuff made it into the auction).

Conclusion: trying to do Otakon as both a dealer and an artist is just a little too frantic. Some day I'd like to try this convention again as just a guest, or maybe even reserve a table in Artist's Alley for selling prints, but unless they get a new art show director -- or the one they had this year undergoes a severe attitude adjustment -- I will not be putting anything into their art show again. To *turn away volunteers* who want to help, when he was running so far behind, I can only assume the man had his head shoved way too far up his own anal-retentiveness.

Okay, enough with the ranting. Honest. Oh -- what about the forty-dollar socks? There was a kimono dealer there, and since I hadn't gotten a chance to check out any of the other swag enough to make me spend my money, I blew the bucks on a pair of genuine thick-soled, hook-&-eye-up-the-back tabi socks. Oh, and any number of people complimented my homemade yukata by asking whether I'd bought it from that booth. (Even the kimono dealer herself was fooled for a moment or two. Wheee! ^_^ Happy.)

High Maintenance Anime Characters

I had forgotten just how many hours of patient Photoshop "mouse-wrangling" got lost when my HDD crashed a while back -- hours and hours' worth of touch-ups to the Tasuki cel-painting scan to make it more print-worthy. **sigh** As well as how long it takes to open, crop, or save that huge honking file. He'd better be worth all this trouble....

It is very difficult to type with an insistent cat in one's lap, purring, noodging and licking and gnawing at one's arm.

New layout for the start of a new month -- and to get rid of annoying X-2 Yuna so that some people won't be impelled to gouge their eyes out anymore. ^_^;; The store has fallen into Frantic Otakon Preparation mode, which is kind'a contagious -- making me realize that I never did properly re-do the obi for my kimono, among other things. Not to mention I still have to get some stuff ready for the art show, since the boss tells me there will be room in the van to take my portfolio with after all. Kyaaaa.

Big Zen hugs to Thorne (I hope your hand heals quickly and that the spider-stitches thing does NOT catch you again!), Dave (don't give up on those last few possibilities until they actually say "NO" -- and a big "F3" flip-off special to Wayland! }: P), and Ann (in hopes that Pirate-y goodness will help break the bad mood).

Will have brain cell for other social stuff after the convention. I hope.