Fun and Frolic

Kobo Cover!

I finally made a cover for my Kobo Vox! I totally stole the idea from Gord, who wondered why I hadn’t done one myself yet, since I was complaining about not having a cover yet.
Well, I had to fix that.

I went to the library, but they didn’t have anything suitable for sale, so I ended up at a thrift store, where I snagged a copy of A Little Princess for $1. It was a touch shorter than I’d been looking for, but the book itself was too perfect to pass up. It even had one of those ribbon bookmarks that I left in place.

I made a big mess of my living room floor with all the paper shreds, but it worked out really well! I used my Dremmel to smooth out the edges and make sure the corners were rounded enough

Check it out:

no images were found

no images were found


no images were found

no images were found

Ta da! I’m very pleased with how this turned out.

(Also, I set up a new gallery plugin. I’m still getting used to it. I can’t find a way to import my old gallery photos yet.)

Con-G 2011

Con-G 2011 was the most awesome thing ever. I plan to post a full report, but we know how those plans always go. Here are the highlights:

– 700+ people attended!
– We had a voice actor guest!
– It was Nightcrawler! omgsquee
– Brad is the nicest guy ever
– We had Ricky Dick and Dawn as guests!
– Going out for sushi with all the staff and guests
– Playing tag in the hotel pool with Con-G staff & Brad (in borrowed swimwear) was the best de-stresser ever
– Dawn is amazing and incredibly down to Earth
– Driving Brad in the Bampf-mobile to the downtown Guelph sushi restaurant while being followed by Ricky and Dawn in their huge white Hearse
– The Evil Laughter Contest was the best event ever to be thought up at 3am while getting the program ready for printing
– Getting praise on 4chan (wut)
– The Twins are amazing, as always
– We are now officially a registered non-profit organization

Weekend Fun

I had a lovely weekend.
I got some costuming done with . My Latias gloves and gauntlet things are coming along.

Watched the next-door neighbours try to build a deck. When I got home on Friday, they had wood and gravel in the driveway, and a bunch of their buddies and a guy who was presumably someone’s dad. They got a good start, but then it rained.

Until Sunday morning.

Fortunately, the deck they were building was small, and with the help of every scrap of daylight available, managed to make it look like a deck. No railing or anything yet, but they can put chairs and a BBQ on it, and really that’s all you need for now.

Josh and I went to the OSCS for some archery. It’s been well over 10 years since I’ve picked up a bow.
I knew I shot backwards as a kid, since back then my weak little girly arms didn’t have the strength to pull back with my non-dominant (left) hand. However, my dominant eye is, for some reason, my left, so I should have shot lefty in order to aim properly. Since it’s not like I have ingrained shooting habits, I chose to try shooting lefty. May as well, eh?

Seemed to work ok. It feels like I have an easier time aiming, but it’s been a while and I don’t really know how to do it the “real” way, so time will tell.

What I do know is that I’m not very good yet. As seen on tv the internet.
Turn your elbows out, people. If you think it’s out enough, it’s not. If it is out enough, it will twist back in on its own. See above. I managed to hit myself with every third shot or so. I am just that awesome.

Now the back of my left arm aches and my right thumb is sore from supporting the bow improperly. Also from helping Josh drag a big heavy lateral filing cabinet into the house yesterday. 😛
I have fencing practise tomorrow night, and I know I’m totally going to get stabbed in my bruise.

I really want to keep going to archery, but I also have to get costumes done by Anime North, which is now less than 3 weeks away! Ack!

Con-G 2010

Con-G 2010 was awesome!

We had 530 people this year! *happy dance*

About 350 people attended in 2009, and our estimated attendance (based on numbers we pulled from our ass) was 500, so we are very pleased. Very pleased indeed.

Highlights:

  • Real guests! We had guests this year, and the attendees loved having them! Lar deSouza, Dr. Holocaust, Featherweight, everyone was fabulous!
  • Things ran pretty smoothly! There were some bumps, but overall it ran well.
  • My parents showed up! I’m very glad that they got to see me do something like Con-G. ^_^
  • From what I hear, our panels went very well. I only got to go to one (the one I did on “Running an Anime Business”), but some sounded so awesome and I wish I could have listened!
  • People brought some amazing costumes! This means that they take our con seriously, and consider it “worth” bringing their A-game.

Lowlights:

  • Some highschool girls trashed the bathroom and I had to play the adult and talk to them about it (I did extract an apology, so I consider it a win) and clean up the bathroom.
  • Technical failure at the dance (ie iTunes hates me), but the day (and the dance) was saved by having an actual DJ in attendance who pulled out his laptop and made the dance awesome. We’d like to invite him back to DJ next year.
  • Technical failure involving the hotel’s phone lines and internet service, resulting in it taking hours to get the ATM re rented set up. The delivery guys who brought it were fabulous, though. Issue resolved with a $1.25 phone splitter and the phone line at the hotel front desk.
  • Technical failure involving the live streaming video in the green room for the Masquerade.

Most technical failures have been discussed and solutions/workarounds for next year have come up. ^_^

Here are some photos from Con-G the my parents took (like I had time to take photos):

Here’s our Flickr Gallery and Facebook Gallery.

We made some graphs to show the attendance from a number of Canadian anime conventions, starting from their first through fifth years. Our 50% growth over last year places us at the high end of average in terms of growth.

Should these we continue to follow the same trends as the other cons, we’ll likely end up with over 700 people in 2011.
Yes, this is what happens when a bunch of science nerds run a convention.

We’re aiming for bigger and better in 2011!
We’re not sure how big Con-G will get, eventually, but convention space is limited in Guelph. We have a feeling the con may become self-limiting before we have to impose a registration cap, which would be nice (’cause capping is lame). We’re not in Toronto, so we won’t ever end up as a 30k+ person convention or anything crazy like that.

Countdown to Con-G

I always know when I’m really anxious/nervous about something when I start destroying my fingernails like crazy.

FIFTEEN DAYS UNTIL CON-G PEOPLE!!

I had thought I was being pretty good about Con-G this year. I’m totally excited for it, and I’ve been working hard at being as calm as possible about all the last minute work we’ve all been doing.

I’m also, apparently, really freaked out.
My fingernails are so short it’s starting to hurt when I pick up objects.

Sitting down to think about it, I can come up with all sorts of reasons that I’d worry this much about Con-G. But none of them are things I’ve been consciously thinking about.
Thanks a lot, subconscious. Now my hands hurt because of you.
What’s the point of carefully developing a huge healthy Ego for 28 years if it can’t shield me from an overactive Id?

It’s getting harder to sit still at work. Con-G hovers in the back of my mind (even though I still dream about being a dinosaur researcher – that’s a scientist that is a dinosaur, not a scientist who studies dinosaurs – instead of conventions).

Con-G is awesome, fun, and scary as hell.

FIFTEEN DAYS!!!

Ack ack ack!

Flickr or Self-Hosted?

I’m trying out taking a photo every day for January. So far so good, but I haven’t done anything with them. We’ll see how long this lasts. So far, most of the photos are boring.

I’m trying to decide between posting them here in my Gallery, or posting them in my Flickr account.

Do you prefer viewing photos on Flickr or on a personal website?
Do you prefer using Flickr or a personal website to post your photos?

If I use Flickr, there are many, many ways to integrate my gallery with my WP blog. Plus it’s super lazy and easy to upload and sort photos on Flickr. With groups and tagging, there’s even a chance that more than 3 people would see my photos! Not that my photography is awesome or anything, I just like comments.

If I keep my photos here, I’ll have to change to a new host. I’ve been with this host for years, and I’m ridiculously brand loyal, but there’s just not enough space to start hosting lots of photos. Upgrading to a new package here isn’t very beneficial, so it would pretty much have to involve switching to a new host. This blog is on Modhost.com. Everything else I own (except SKS) is on DreamHost because of the practically limitless space. I just don’t like the DH control panel interface. I much prefer cPanel, otherwise I’d have packed up off this server years ago.

This sort of ties in with my website amalgamation post, in that I’m still trying to determine the direction I want to go with my website(s).

What do you think? Flickr or self-hosted Gallery? I even made a poll! Come to RaspberryPaws.com to vote!

DTAC Recap

I had lots of fun at DTAC yesterday!

I drove down with yesterday morning and met up with everyone there. I parked my car at the Kipling subway station and we took the subway downtown. It’s way cheaper than parking downtown, and way less stressful. Well, usually less stressful. 😛 More on that later.

The con was really fun! It’s really mainly a LobbyCon, where most people just hang out in the hallways and don’t pay admission. Admission is only charged if you want to get into the Dealer’s Room or into the panel rooms. If you just want to hang out and have fun with fellow cosplayers, there’s no admission enforcement.
We got to meet up with Dr. Holocaust again, which is always really fun. He’s such a nice guy evil supervillain.

We met up with Mark from ConBravo! and got our half of the joint Con-G/ConBravo! printed flyers. They look really snazzy, and I’ll have to scan one in later to show everyone.
We gave out lots of those! I don’t have exact numbers, but “lots”. At least a few hundred, anyway, plus the ones that the ConBravo! peeps gave out. Plus we still have loads leftover to put at The Dragon and whatever.

paid admission to enter the Dealer’s Room and give flyers to the dealers there and talk to them about being dealers at Con-G 2010. In terms of benefiting Con-G, it was worth the $10 to get in, but in terms of being allowed into the Dealer’s Room adding to my con experience it wasn’t worth the $10. 😛

While we were there, though, we picked up volumes 1-16 of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga that will be the second half of Con-G’s donation to the Guelph Public Library.

After the con was fun too. had to leave early, but I went out to The Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner with Draco, Tom, Other Caitlin, Aesees, some guy I forget (sorry, dude!), and Mark.
Dinner and the company was awesome! Leftovers for lunch today FTW.

After dinner was kind of a mess.
We went back to Union Station ~8ish and hung out chatting for a while. Draco was originally going to take the subway back to Kipling with me (since I’d have to carry all the Con-G stuff) and then I’d drop him off at his place and then go home.
Mark offered to give us a ride to Kipling, and Other Caitlin and some other guy (a different other guy 😛 ) a ride to one of the GO stations. He set out with Aesees to pick up his car (her car was closer, she’d drive him to his car and he’d come back for us) at 8:25 and told us to meet him outside in about 10 minutes.
Toronto being what it is, about 15 minutes later Other Caitlin, Draco and I went outside to look for him. In a span of a bout 2 minutes, not only did we not find him, but we were accosted 3 people who just needed “a few dollars for the bus home”, including a guy who yelled and swore at us. Great. As we went back inside, we saw that guy being talked to by security.
We went back into Union to wait, but of course none of the people left there had Mark’s cell number. It was getting later and later, with periodical sweeps outside to see if Mark had arrived. The guys did the sweeps after that, since they at least tend to only get accosted for money.

By 9:30 we were getting really worried. We wanted to leave (taking the subway/GO respectively as originally planned) but we didn’t know what had happened to Mark, and didn’t want to just leave him hanging if he did eventually show up. I had texted and Christian for Mark’s number. Christian replied that he didn’t have it.
We planned to do one more sweep, then the subway people would leave, and then the GO people would leave at 9:45 when their train arrived. Tom would hang out for about a half hour after that (if it came to it) to keep and eye out for Mark and let him know what was happening.
On our final sweep before enacting that plan, Mark arrived. By that time it wouldn’t actually save any time for the GO people, so they stayed to catch the train at Union and Draco and I went with Mark.
We both got his cell number.
Apparently what had happened was a huge cab cluterfuck when they got Aesees’ car and had t wait 10 minutes so they could pull out of the parking lot without getting smashed by a cab. The Mark got his car, and was promptly pulled over the the police because his right blinker was out. He got talked to for a while, but I don’t think he got a ticket, just a warning. That’s why he was so ridiculously late.

We drove around for a while looking for Draco’s place, since no one had a firm idea of how to get there from Union by car. We saw a big fire (?) on Dundas that had 5 fire trucks and 2 police cars. We didn’t actually see a fire or anything, though, but I heard on the radio this morning that there had been a big fire on Dundas last night.
replied about this time with Mark’s cell number, lol. ^_~
After Draco was dropped off, Mark took me to the Kipling station a little while after 10, and I went home, arriving by 11pm. 😛

It was still fun, but I wasn’t planning on the extra adventures. ^_~ I’ll post photos later when I get the chance.

Last Weekend

This weekend was fun! Well, mostly. Some parts of it were sad.

The original plan involved going out wedding dress shopping with Garrison’s fiancée and my mom. We all went out for tasty breakfast, and then headed to Hanover to start our search.
Erin is a good bride to shop with. She had an idea in her head of what she wanted, but she wasn’t a bridezilla about it. Once we found the dress, we knew we’d found the dress, and didn’t have to look at 47 million other places to make sure we had “the best dress ever”. As it turned out, the dress was the first one she tried on, though she did try on 7 or 8 afterwards just to get through the other ones she had liked on the rack. It’s not poofy, but very elegant. It looks just stunning on her, too. I’d post a pic, but I forgot to get them off my mom’s camera. Plus, there is a really-low-but-non-zero chance that my brother might see my blog some time in the next 8 months.

To top it off, the dress was on sale for 1/2 off, and we were done shopping by noon!

Then we came back home and my mom and I got ready to go to Ms. Thielman’s memorial service. We met up with Dan Lynch there, along with most of the high school teachers. I got to talk to my favourite teachers, Mr. & Mrs. Taylor, for about 5 seconds, but that was nice.

The service was nice, too. It consisted of a few people who had known her standing up and saying a few words. There was a lot I hadn’t known about her. I’m not surprised, but I think it would have been nice to know before now that she loved Star Trek and wrote sci-fi stories for her writing group.
She had a small beige marble urn, inscribed with her name, and below that “Boldly Go…”.
Star Wars music, among other things, played in the background of the memorial photo montage CD.

By the time we got back, it was too dark to go out and plant the Letterbox I made for Kincardine.
My mom and dad and I went out early Sunday morning to try and plant it. We had a lovely little walk and found a great place, but there wasn’t enough time to backtrack and make viable clues to lead other people to it before I had to leave (before 10am). 🙁 So I had to un-hide it and take it back to Guelph with me.
At the time, I was really pissed off at the stupid Guelph parade, and the stupid city of Guelph fort having a parade in the middle of the day instead of at dusk when floats could be lit up, and more importantly, instead of at a time that would have let me do all of my tasks for the weekend. 😛

That said, once I got there I had an awesome time at the parade!
Con-GinGuelphSantaParade2009
I’m the one in the green dragon PJs! ^_^
We walked along and gave out candy to little kids. When the candy ran out, kids were just as happy getting a high-five or hugging Tiger or Guilmon. A couple times I had to rescue when she got stuck in a pile of children way back from where our group was. Haha!
We all had a blast and are totally doing it again next year!!
Now all we need to do is find someone who has cable so that we can watch the recording of the parade!

New Letterboxing Stamp

I carved a new letterboxing stamp for myself today! I haven’t been out letterboxing much lately, because I was tired of using my store bought stamp. I didn’t want all the local Guelph letterboxes to have that in it, but until today I hadn’t had the time to sit down and carve one for myself.
Here is is, along with a scan to show detail:
10651072
My trail name is KittyCanuck, so that’s what I tried to convey with this stamp. I think it turned out pretty well, considering it’s the second one I’ve ever done. ^_^

This is a little heart I did for practise when I first started letterboxing. Very simple: 1069

I think tomorrow I’m going to go out and do a bunch of letterboxes with my new stamp! Yay!

Good Times

Fencing was really great tonight! They taught us a new technique. Well, an old technique, from about the 1850s, but it’s no longer in use in modern fencing. It involved blocking with the sword pointed down instead of up. It was really fun! ^_^

We also ordered some equipment, so by next week we’ll have our own stuff and won’t have to use not-quite-fitting community equipment. I’m really excited!
I wish it was still nice out, though. If it was still summer we’d be able to practise in our backyard, but if it’s really crappy out the grass will be too slippery. We could practise out in front of the house, but I bet Guelph has some silly by-law about no swordfirghting in the street. Crazy, I know.

Here is my thumb a week and a half later: 1059

Now I’m sitting in my jammies in front of the fireplace with a book and some tasty spanakopita. Lovely!