I got in touch with Jeff Watkin’s the founder of Syracuse Heroes Expo, and managed to squeeze myself in.Yay!

Jeff is a great guy, and he’s going all out to make a neat event for people in the upstate and central New York regions (and anyone who wants to travel in). Check out the Syracuse Heroes Expo website to see all he’s got going on.

It’s primarily Comic con, but it’s got all sorts of stuff for fans of anime like a costume contest and anime screenings. They’re showing Ghost Hunt, which gives them high marks in my book!

Of course because I just managed to get in touch with Jeff today (a bit of email and phone tag and a lot of procrastination on my part) that means I only have 2-3 days of prep time. EEK! I’ve already designed on button specifically for the con. We’ll see if I have time to actually make it. I’m debating bringing my 3 inch and 1 inch press along to make custom buttons on the fly for people. Any opinions?

I also have to make my and my co-worker’s Halloween costumes. I’ve convinced three of my co-workers to be Pac-man ghosts with me and my boss to be Pac-man. There will be pictures, oh yes, there will. Besides that I have to make another costume for a Halloween party I’m going to on Friday.

So of course, what did I spend my time doing today? Marking my manga “read” or “not read” in my book database. According to my notes so far I have 130 volumes of manga that are unread. -_- I think there are more too, because I also noticed, again, that it’s missing a lot of my books. When I pack my books up to move I’ll have to do a thorough inventory. According to my database stats I’m still skating just under 2,000 manga. I wonder how much it will go up after an inventory?

I went to NYAF last weekend and am still exhausted. I have some pictures to put up (like the Ronald Mcdonald Sephroth and Colonel Sanders Cloud) and I want to talk about the trip but I’m too tired.

I spent most of the weekend exhausted because for various reasons I didn’t get much sleep, and had to get up early each morning. One of the various reasons was a toothache that woke me up at four am on Saturday night/Sunday morning. I called my dentist and moved up my appointment from next Tuesday to today.

I thought I was just going to get some x-rays and maybe some pain medicine. Instead I got a root canal! ugh. Monday I go get a crown, because they had to file down my tooth to do the canal. (Which, by the way, sounds horrible when it’s being done.)

I feel like I lived a whole week today! It actually started on Sunday night when Mindy messaged me for details on our booth at the 2008 New York Anime Festival. Since it’s coming up this weekend she thought we might want to firm up our plans. I’ve been so distracted with my house purchase that I haven’t been paying too much attention to it. She also pointed out that she didn’t see us on the Vendor list. I assured her they’d cashed my check and we had booth 330.

Of course once we finished our conversation I decided to wander over to the NYAF website to check. It’s not like I haven’t had my check cashed and not gotten a table before. And what do I see? Booth 330 is registered to another vendor! EEP. Plus, I realize looking over the vendor packet that I don’t have my DTF-17 Sales Tax form that I need to open up my booth. Cruising over to the IRS.gov website I see the requirements are that the form be sent 20 days prior to the event. The event is four days away.

Did I mention it’s past Midnight on Sunday when I realize all this? Of course brain goes into full panic and worry mode and I didn’t get much sleep. I did manage to come up with a few plans and solutions, but since I couldn’t act on any of them the rolling thoughts didn’t help too much.

So I was very sleepy when I got into work the this Monday morning and started to making phone calls. First call was to Mark at NYAF, my contact in the sales office. He confirmed that the website was wrong and that Mindy and I did have booth 330. Also that we could set up Friday morning since we’re going to miss the Thursday check in. Next I called my father since he does a retail business in NY state, he probably has a sales tax form. He’s out of state on a golf trip but I was hoping he’d be able to tell me where it was.

No such luck, though I did put in a call to his accountant on his okay to ask for a copy. Which I did multiple times, and which they said they faxed, but never arrived. My mother’s friend owns a hat shop, so I wanted to ask her how she’d gotten hers. Mom said she’d ask, and I called the IRS to see how quickly a form could be gotten, if I could possibly rush a request through for a fee or something. According to the very nice lady I could submit a form online, and in two days if it had been approved they could fax me a copy of the form and that was the fastest way to get it done.

That would mean I’d be in limbo until Wednesday when I’d find out if I could get a form. Thank goodness for my mother’s friend who produced a number for the Syracuse office of Taxation. A quick call there and I got a form to fill out. And my boss let me leave early to deliver it and pick up my sales tax cert. Whew! Crisis averted!

Just as I got into the car, relaxed and assured that all details had been covered for my trip, when my cellphone rang. It was my home inspector, with what I thought was my radon test results. It was the last portion of the home inspection that was started on Saturday. But actually it was to let me know that the owner of the house had apparently been furious that the radon testing equipment was there and she’d locked him out of the house and was holding his equipment hostage! She’s not only kept him from his equipment, but is threatening to throw it out! This is bizarre because she was fully informed about the inspection and the testing. This causes a flurry of phone calls between me, my realtor, the listing agent, the home inspector and the home owner. The final resolution was that she surrendered the equipment to the listing agent who will give to the home inspector tomorrow. Then we’ll find out what the radon test results were or if they were compromised.

Then I went home and hid under a blanket for a few hours.

I collect BJD’s (ball-jointed dolls) but I vary rarely take pictures. I’m not very good at it. But I’ve recently started selling these uber-cute Japanese erasers when I go into a dealer’s room instead of an artist alley at a con. I’ve been meaning to add them to my shop, but I needed to take pictures first. I decided to photograph them with one of my dolls for scale. And what do you know, some turned out decent. (I think I figured out how to work my camera. Now I have to figure out how to get better lighting.)

The doll is a Bambicrony Slate-Gray Pepe. I call her Rune.

Rune is fond of sweets, like ice cream.

Kogepan (sweet pastry with custard) though she’s never sure which end to eat it from.

And she especially likes anything strawberry flavored!

And who doesn’t enjoy some ramen?

She likes quite a bit of Asian food actually.

She likes tea over coffee. She likes milk in it too.

And she likes her friend Mr. Penguin.

She especially likes to take tea with Mr. Penguin.

It makes her feel sophisticated.

Margaret spotted one of my buttons in Funimation’s latest video podcasts! Check out the “Funimation Update: Quickie 8/18″. They did a feature on Ball Jointed Dolls, and at time code 1:32 you can see one doll wearing my “Yes, I will KILL You In Your Sleep” Button. Hee!

It’s fun to see how far it traveled! I wasn’t even selling at that con. ^_^ That button was actually inspired by the reactions my dolls got at cons. “They’re pretty neat, but creepy. I’d be afraid it was going to kill my in my sleep.”

This weekend I sucessfully pulled off a ”Game night.”  It was something we’d been talking about for a while at work. We wanted to get together and play boardgames or card games. It seems like the perfect opportunity to so something fun that doesn’t cost a lot of money, involve traveling or complicated arrangements.  Problem was, where to have it. I live in a tiny studio, and the situtations of my friends at work weren’t too different. Margaret offered her house, and we were talking about when to have it. Then my parents told me they were going to Atlantic City for their wedding anniversary, and said I could borrow their place (which is close by work) to have it! Yay!

I got a group of friends from work, plus Margaret (dreaming0 on the forums) to come over on Friday night after work. It was kind of last minute (I think I gave everyone about a week’s notice…some people less). Because most my friends have kids and there was next to 0 time to find a babysitter I asked if it was okay for everyone’s kids to come over to my parents’ too. Parents agreed. (Double yay!) Margaret’s daughter came over as a baby sitter and and the kids played (mostly) in the back room while we played in the front room.

We played Apples to Apples, which I’d gotten for Christmas and hadn’t had a chance to play yet. We had a good time and I even won a round… after getting NOWHERE the first two games. We ordered pizzas and I had gotten some treats and snacks. The kids made a mess but were generally well behaved for kids that were up until midnight. Now we want to do it again!

Margaret has a huge collection of games, though we might have  some trouble getting everyone behind playing Munchkin and the like. (I want to though!) And Rob and Maria are campaining for a round of Lord of the Fries. I think I want to stock up on some of the “standards” like Balderdash (which I’ve never actually played) and Pictionary. Anyone have other suggestions? We’re hoping to make this at least a monthly event.

On Saturday, after Anime club… did I mention Syracuse has an anime club? We do, and it’s been pretty cool. But anyway, after Anime club, Margaret and I decided to see Dark Knight since we’d both hadn’t had an opportunity before this. I thought it was a really good addition to the Batman movies, and a nice followup to the Batman Begins. I really liked Heath Ledger’s Joker and it’s sad to think we’ll never get to see it again. He was brutal, psycotic, scary and really dark. I heard the director would prefer to keep the next Batman movies both in the relm of reality and not use any of the villians already used in films. So the relm of reality lets out Clayface, Killer Croc, and similar villians. And Posion Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Bane, the Riddler, and Catwoman are out because they’ve been used before. What does that leave us with? The Ventriloquist and Scarface?

As a side note, I do wonder about the rating on Dark Knight, which is only PG-13. There were some uneducated parents who obviously weren’t aware of how violent this movie was. Just when we were about to see Two-face’s (gruesome!!) makeup we heard a voice calling out from the audience.

“Mom! Why are you covering my eyes! I can’t see.”

“Moooom! I can’t see, move your hand!”

(Then slightly muffled)

“Mom! Mom! Move your hand, it’s too low. I can’t breathe!!”

I know from my time at Blockbuster that parents don’t take notice about ratings for violence. Warn them about nudity or sexual jokes and they take note, tell ‘em some people get sliced up and they don’t care… until they see it happening and have to deal with little Johnny’s nightmares.

The forum that was located at:

http://www.randomfandom.com/phpBB2/

Has been updated and moved to forum.randomfandom.com

I had planned to move it next week, but a test run I did this weekend came out perfect so I decided to move up the date. (Also I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it again. ^^; )

The forum software changed so much that required a new install, and then conversion. The good news is that means that if something went wrong, the old forum is there with no changes. The bad news is that the new install, even though all the users, posts, topics and pms have been copied over, had to be moved to a new location.

I’d actually wanted to do that anyway because the old location was spambait. Now the forum has it’s very own spiffy subdomain. Old links to the forum are semi-broken, as any link will take you to the message that the domain has moved. I hope to find a solution to that soon (I’ve heard you can do something with your .htaccess file, but it sounds all very complicated…I will have to do some more studying.)

Things are moving along in the “Cleaning up the webpage” department.

Fic.randomfandom.com now matches my Fanfiction.net profile, and all currently published chapters are uploaded. For people following my fanfiction, I plan to have a new chapter of Discoveries out by this weekend.

I’ve been revamping my offerings for sale as well, installing a new shopping cart. It’s still got a long way to go. I’ve got the actual payment part cut off so you can’t actually buy things there yet, but if you want to take a look shop.randomfandom.com is coming live soon.

Happily, the Fruits Basket weekly discussions are still going strong as well. (Mostly thanks to Hymina, I need to get caught up!) Check out this week’s discussion in the forum: http://randomfandom.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=396

Plus, on a non-website home related note. I’m going to look at a house today for the second time, and I think I might put in an offer! Oh, I am going to be poor. ;_; But I will finally have space for all my books!

Last week I heard that Terry Fator, the 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” was coming up to the TurningStone Casino, only abotut a half hour from me. If you haven’t heard of Terry Fator, look him up on Youtube. He’s amazing. He’s a ventriloquist, who uses his puppets to do impressions…song impressions. I saw him do Etta James, Dean Martin, Louis Armstrong, and Garth Brooks. He sounded just like them (even the women!) Unfortunately the tickets had been on sale since May and were sold out. Boo!

However, they just added another show and I got tickets for my mother and I! Generally my mother and I have almost no shared interests, however we both really got into last season’s America’s Got Talent because we were rooting for this guy to win. It will be fun to do something together that we both enjoy.