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unforthI'm sitting in the airport killing time before my flight. Unlike Newark, where I was stuck for about 6 hours on Tuesday, the airport in Columbus offers free wireless internet access. My brother and a friend of his were sitting in the living room watching the soccer game, and so my sister-in-law and I decided we'd drive over to the airport a little early, get some coffee (or, rather, she got iced chai and I ended up with, of all things, mulled cider), and just kinda work on our computer-y stuff (she has tons of school work, and I have nothin' much to do.) I won't be able to finish this before I have to head over to security, but I thought I'd get started.
I had a pretty good con this year. Due to some initial disappointment, I can't say that I anticipated much, but after I got there good things started to happen, starting with the discovery that Wayne Reynolds was the art guest of honor, which is awesome. I've gotten to kind of know him over the past few years - I've bought two ink drawings and one painting, which is by far the most expensive piece I've purchased - I loved it and still do. I wasn't expecting him to be at Origins, so it was really nifty to know that he'd be at his con as well as at Gencon.
I arrived in Ohio after midnight on Tuesday after massive delays meant that my flight from Newark didn't take off until around the time we were supposed to have landed.
I woke up nice and early on Wednesday, and resolved to take it easy. My theory for the entire trip was pretty simple: I was gonna do as much as I wanted to do, how and when I wanted to do it. Selfish, perhaps, but it ended up working out pretty damn well. I hung out and wrote in the morning until my brother woke up, and then spent the rest of the day hanging out with him. We bopped over to Huntington Stadium, which is a new AAA baseball stadium for the Clippers, an Indians team, and bought tickets for Saturday nights game, grabbed a late breakfast/regularly timed lunch, wandered over to the convention center so that I could buy my badge for the convention, and then went back to Ben's. Went for dinner with Ben and Kirsten, and then hung out in the evening. I did some writing, I did some work, I spent some time with the family, and all in all accomplished very little in the nicest possible way. All in all, it was a nice, pleasant day.
Thursday, I had an annoying combination of con and work to do. I found out that Akira and the Windmill folks were shorthanded, primarily due to the utter lameness of someone who had let them down, in tandem with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
toothandclaw's back injury. I offered to help out, and ended up gophering for them, which is to say running around and hunting down anything that they needed, especially food and beverage. As such, throughout the con I kept myself relatively on hand for them, and did runs for everything from beer to Jeni's ice cream to office supplies. Meanwhile, on Thurs I had a meeting for work, so I actually had to go home in the middle of the day, which was, basically speaking, utterly lame.
In the morning, Kev,eviltophat, and two of Kev's friends that I didn't know - Brian and Lisa - arrived. I headed to the convention center, met up with lots of friends, did lots of gophering, went to my meeting, headed back to the convention center, and spent the evening doing more gophering. Turns out, I rather enjoy the running around and finding stuff. Somehow, thinking about it, this doesn't really surprise.
Friday I managed to spend some time wandering around the dealers room and the art room. Every time I got to the art room, though, I ended up striking up conversations with which ever artist attracted my attention, with the result that I had long conversations with a lot of different people. It made it harder to actually figure out what I was doing about purchasing art, but I managed to bypass this problem by starting many conversations with the simple question: "will you be at Gencon?" The artists who answered yes, I still looked at their art but I decided to forestall making decisions about which of their items to purchase. Ultimately, this won't save me all that much money: for example, Wayne had at least two pieces I'm seriously considering purchasing, and so all I've done is put off making the purchase. If an artist wasn't going to be Gencon, on the other hand, I had to make the decision now. There ended up only being one really big choice in this regard, though - this picture of a drow from the cover of a Pathfinder book, which is by Steve Prescott was very tempting. I didn't even know it was for Pathfinder at first, and thought it was pretty funny, since the painting I bought last year by Wayne was also a cover for a pathfinder book. It was $600, and I considered it because he's not going to be at Gencon, but in the end I decided I just couldn't afford it; if he still has it next year, I'll figure it out then. Instead, I bought some of his less expensive pieces.
All in all, I didn't find anything to blow my budget over...at least not yet. The art room was actually really good, and it seemed like I didn't get more than a few feet without seeing something that I would really want. Fortunately, I was able to put off most of the big decisions until Gencon. Wayne will be there, as will Charles Urbach, who I've been in conversations with about what would be a very expensive commission, related to a picture he did for Sony that I really love but which he can't market in anyway because of copyright contract stuff.
(I didn't end up finishing the post when I started it; I've resumed working on it early Monday afternoon)
From the art point of view, though, I'm getting a little nervous about my Gencon budget. Presumably, I'll be buying something by Stephanie Pui-Man Law, and by Wayne, and I'm making arrangements to hopefully have a commission done by Laura Pelick. Heather Kreiter had a piece at Origins that I rather liked, so I'll be thinking about that, too, and Emily Fiegenschuh and Vinod Rams (who are married) usually both have something I want - though Vinod's not on the list, which is weird, since Emily is - they may be sharing a booth, or she may bring some of his. Storn Cook is gonna be there after missing last year, and Connie Persampieri, and Sarah Frary...all in all, almost every artist I've liked enough to buy multiple pieces from are going to be there, and doesn't even include the other artists I like but have either not bought from or have only bought from once, and is just the ones whose names I immediately recognized while look at the Gencon list - it doesn't even touch everyone else. I'm a little scared, actually, and I end up wondering...well, I had better set a maximum and stick to it (oh, there's Beth Trott on the list, too...). And of course Echo Chernik, whose work I saw at Origins for the first time and fell in love with it...right. That's kind of my point. ;)
Basically, Friday included a fair amount of thinking about art. Saturday did to. My expensive piece for this con was a drawing by Ed Beard Jr. I also bought some of the artists self-published book and I had small commissions done in the covers (mostly, please draw whatever pops into your head), and in the cover of one of his artist books Jeff Carlisle drew for me (on request) a truly awesome picture of Doctor McCoy which I love. :) Not that I don't love my other art. ;)
Friday was also the day when I actually did some gaming. I popped in to one of the games of ADGNEPSEF 555 since Pisano, Akira and Tophat didn't need me to gopher, and I played Cyd, which always makes my day.
Kev, meanwhile, had asked me to NPC for him in his first LARP, which was run on Friday night. It was based on a table top he ran at the convention last game, a Call of Cthulhu game based in 18th century France, called the Victim's Ball. I don't want to go into detail in case anyone here ends up playing it, but oddly, despite thinking I'd be least likely to, I ended up being the one who betrayed our master first. Funny, that. Anyway, the game went really awesome, and I had a lot of fun, so it was win all the way around.
Saturday I shopped, gophered during the day, and then met up with my brother and Kirsten that evening, and we went to see a Clipper's game, the local AAA Indians affiliate. They stink, and we got to see them at their stinking best, as they got blown out 12 to nothing. We wandered off in the 9th when it became apparent that there was no reason to linger (heck, I technically don't know the final score...) and then we hung out at Commfest for about a half hour. Man, I REALLY wish that Origins wasn't always the same weekend as Commfest, I'd love to come and actually do the festival. The atmosphere was just amazing, the music was good, and I got to try a Pumpkin Spice Woopie Pie by Pattycake Vegan Bakery which was made of awesome - and pumpkin. I have no idea if it was vegan, and of course I'm not vegan, but delicious is delicious. After all that, we wandered back and played Rock Band until 2:30 in the morning - exhausting and way past my bed time but still completely worth it.
I had thought to play the ADGNEPSEF 555 LARP on Sunday, but when I woke up I knew that wasn't going to happen. Instead, I looked for some last minute deals in the dealers room, hung out with people, tracked down all the people I knew there to say goodbye (though I missed a couple...sorry guys!) and then wandered back to the house and got ready to leave. My flight went perfectly smoothly, and the trip back was fine until I waited 20 minutes for my train, and then when I got home discovered that the elevator was busted (and clearly had been for days) and so had to carry my now-heavy suitcase up all the stairs. Little things like that? Exactly what I mean when I say that little things keep going wrong.
I arrived home to a mess, and though I hadn't anticipated fixing it last night, cause I was so tired, I ended up doing so anyway. It's a little frightening actually, that now I've got so little stuff that I could re-place all my furniture where it belonged in about 20 minutes. Less, probably - I also made the bed and such. And today, I failed to sleep in though I tried, did some more straightening, did a bunch of research on various stuff, and now am killing time until 1 PM when I'll walk the dog and then run a bunch of errands.
Over all, I had a nice time. It's always so nice to see people, and though many of my friends don't go to Origins, many do, and it's nice to know that I'll be seeing them again in just a couple of months. I was really happy with my ability to have actual conversations with artists for a change, and I got some great deals on books. (in all, I bought 10 gaming books - mostly to use as research materials - 1 book was full price; 3 were in a 3-for-$10 deal; and there remaining 6 were $2 each - an average of $5 a book, and all were originally at least $20.) I love the art that I bought, of course - if I hadn't loved it I wouldn't have bought it. I found a publisher that does books that I think will be very useful for novel-writing research purposes. I spent a nice amount of time with my friends and with my family, and even have made tentative plans to visit Columbus again in October. Actually, I may end up doing a kinda big trip. It's really, really looking like I won't be able to go to Japan this fall - too much time, too much money - but I found out about a con called Con on the Cob which is in Ohio in Oct. and which is heavily attended by artists (it was created by an artist) and I'd like to go, and all in all it's turning in to a tentative plan to do fun stuff that costs a lot less since I can't do the fun stuff I really want to do.
I've been left with some things on my mind - with the main one being about buying a house. I was already very vaguely considering doing this, and Ben brought it up, and he seems to think it'd be a really good idea, and I'm starting to think he's right. It's mean leaving Manhattan - I'm looking mostly in the Bronx, though I just discovered there are all kinds of nice places available in Jamaica, Queens, in my price range (this is because Jamaica has lousy accessibility by train). Other topics are how to make my current apartment liveable until I do move (answer: spend some money I don't really have on picture frames and cover the walls with all the art I've got at this point). I've got a work-heavy summer coming up but my schedule is nice and lose, which will hopefully keep things from getting too stressful. I'm preparing to try to lose some weight and I think I'm finally feeling well enough to start going to the gym again. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with things and I'm hoping that I'll be able to get all the balls back in to the air without too much trouble - the work, the leisure time, writing, exercise, eating well, the dog...being the main ones. I hope that's all - I can't think of more... ;)
Well, it took me two days, but the post is finished now. :)
I had a pretty good con this year. Due to some initial disappointment, I can't say that I anticipated much, but after I got there good things started to happen, starting with the discovery that Wayne Reynolds was the art guest of honor, which is awesome. I've gotten to kind of know him over the past few years - I've bought two ink drawings and one painting, which is by far the most expensive piece I've purchased - I loved it and still do. I wasn't expecting him to be at Origins, so it was really nifty to know that he'd be at his con as well as at Gencon.
I arrived in Ohio after midnight on Tuesday after massive delays meant that my flight from Newark didn't take off until around the time we were supposed to have landed.
I woke up nice and early on Wednesday, and resolved to take it easy. My theory for the entire trip was pretty simple: I was gonna do as much as I wanted to do, how and when I wanted to do it. Selfish, perhaps, but it ended up working out pretty damn well. I hung out and wrote in the morning until my brother woke up, and then spent the rest of the day hanging out with him. We bopped over to Huntington Stadium, which is a new AAA baseball stadium for the Clippers, an Indians team, and bought tickets for Saturday nights game, grabbed a late breakfast/regularly timed lunch, wandered over to the convention center so that I could buy my badge for the convention, and then went back to Ben's. Went for dinner with Ben and Kirsten, and then hung out in the evening. I did some writing, I did some work, I spent some time with the family, and all in all accomplished very little in the nicest possible way. All in all, it was a nice, pleasant day.
Thursday, I had an annoying combination of con and work to do. I found out that Akira and the Windmill folks were shorthanded, primarily due to the utter lameness of someone who had let them down, in tandem with
toothandclaw's back injury. I offered to help out, and ended up gophering for them, which is to say running around and hunting down anything that they needed, especially food and beverage. As such, throughout the con I kept myself relatively on hand for them, and did runs for everything from beer to Jeni's ice cream to office supplies. Meanwhile, on Thurs I had a meeting for work, so I actually had to go home in the middle of the day, which was, basically speaking, utterly lame.In the morning, Kev,
eviltophat, and two of Kev's friends that I didn't know - Brian and Lisa - arrived. I headed to the convention center, met up with lots of friends, did lots of gophering, went to my meeting, headed back to the convention center, and spent the evening doing more gophering. Turns out, I rather enjoy the running around and finding stuff. Somehow, thinking about it, this doesn't really surprise.Friday I managed to spend some time wandering around the dealers room and the art room. Every time I got to the art room, though, I ended up striking up conversations with which ever artist attracted my attention, with the result that I had long conversations with a lot of different people. It made it harder to actually figure out what I was doing about purchasing art, but I managed to bypass this problem by starting many conversations with the simple question: "will you be at Gencon?" The artists who answered yes, I still looked at their art but I decided to forestall making decisions about which of their items to purchase. Ultimately, this won't save me all that much money: for example, Wayne had at least two pieces I'm seriously considering purchasing, and so all I've done is put off making the purchase. If an artist wasn't going to be Gencon, on the other hand, I had to make the decision now. There ended up only being one really big choice in this regard, though - this picture of a drow from the cover of a Pathfinder book, which is by Steve Prescott was very tempting. I didn't even know it was for Pathfinder at first, and thought it was pretty funny, since the painting I bought last year by Wayne was also a cover for a pathfinder book. It was $600, and I considered it because he's not going to be at Gencon, but in the end I decided I just couldn't afford it; if he still has it next year, I'll figure it out then. Instead, I bought some of his less expensive pieces.
All in all, I didn't find anything to blow my budget over...at least not yet. The art room was actually really good, and it seemed like I didn't get more than a few feet without seeing something that I would really want. Fortunately, I was able to put off most of the big decisions until Gencon. Wayne will be there, as will Charles Urbach, who I've been in conversations with about what would be a very expensive commission, related to a picture he did for Sony that I really love but which he can't market in anyway because of copyright contract stuff.
(I didn't end up finishing the post when I started it; I've resumed working on it early Monday afternoon)
From the art point of view, though, I'm getting a little nervous about my Gencon budget. Presumably, I'll be buying something by Stephanie Pui-Man Law, and by Wayne, and I'm making arrangements to hopefully have a commission done by Laura Pelick. Heather Kreiter had a piece at Origins that I rather liked, so I'll be thinking about that, too, and Emily Fiegenschuh and Vinod Rams (who are married) usually both have something I want - though Vinod's not on the list, which is weird, since Emily is - they may be sharing a booth, or she may bring some of his. Storn Cook is gonna be there after missing last year, and Connie Persampieri, and Sarah Frary...all in all, almost every artist I've liked enough to buy multiple pieces from are going to be there, and doesn't even include the other artists I like but have either not bought from or have only bought from once, and is just the ones whose names I immediately recognized while look at the Gencon list - it doesn't even touch everyone else. I'm a little scared, actually, and I end up wondering...well, I had better set a maximum and stick to it (oh, there's Beth Trott on the list, too...). And of course Echo Chernik, whose work I saw at Origins for the first time and fell in love with it...right. That's kind of my point. ;)
Basically, Friday included a fair amount of thinking about art. Saturday did to. My expensive piece for this con was a drawing by Ed Beard Jr. I also bought some of the artists self-published book and I had small commissions done in the covers (mostly, please draw whatever pops into your head), and in the cover of one of his artist books Jeff Carlisle drew for me (on request) a truly awesome picture of Doctor McCoy which I love. :) Not that I don't love my other art. ;)
Friday was also the day when I actually did some gaming. I popped in to one of the games of ADGNEPSEF 555 since Pisano, Akira and Tophat didn't need me to gopher, and I played Cyd, which always makes my day.
Kev, meanwhile, had asked me to NPC for him in his first LARP, which was run on Friday night. It was based on a table top he ran at the convention last game, a Call of Cthulhu game based in 18th century France, called the Victim's Ball. I don't want to go into detail in case anyone here ends up playing it, but oddly, despite thinking I'd be least likely to, I ended up being the one who betrayed our master first. Funny, that. Anyway, the game went really awesome, and I had a lot of fun, so it was win all the way around.
Saturday I shopped, gophered during the day, and then met up with my brother and Kirsten that evening, and we went to see a Clipper's game, the local AAA Indians affiliate. They stink, and we got to see them at their stinking best, as they got blown out 12 to nothing. We wandered off in the 9th when it became apparent that there was no reason to linger (heck, I technically don't know the final score...) and then we hung out at Commfest for about a half hour. Man, I REALLY wish that Origins wasn't always the same weekend as Commfest, I'd love to come and actually do the festival. The atmosphere was just amazing, the music was good, and I got to try a Pumpkin Spice Woopie Pie by Pattycake Vegan Bakery which was made of awesome - and pumpkin. I have no idea if it was vegan, and of course I'm not vegan, but delicious is delicious. After all that, we wandered back and played Rock Band until 2:30 in the morning - exhausting and way past my bed time but still completely worth it.
I had thought to play the ADGNEPSEF 555 LARP on Sunday, but when I woke up I knew that wasn't going to happen. Instead, I looked for some last minute deals in the dealers room, hung out with people, tracked down all the people I knew there to say goodbye (though I missed a couple...sorry guys!) and then wandered back to the house and got ready to leave. My flight went perfectly smoothly, and the trip back was fine until I waited 20 minutes for my train, and then when I got home discovered that the elevator was busted (and clearly had been for days) and so had to carry my now-heavy suitcase up all the stairs. Little things like that? Exactly what I mean when I say that little things keep going wrong.
I arrived home to a mess, and though I hadn't anticipated fixing it last night, cause I was so tired, I ended up doing so anyway. It's a little frightening actually, that now I've got so little stuff that I could re-place all my furniture where it belonged in about 20 minutes. Less, probably - I also made the bed and such. And today, I failed to sleep in though I tried, did some more straightening, did a bunch of research on various stuff, and now am killing time until 1 PM when I'll walk the dog and then run a bunch of errands.
Over all, I had a nice time. It's always so nice to see people, and though many of my friends don't go to Origins, many do, and it's nice to know that I'll be seeing them again in just a couple of months. I was really happy with my ability to have actual conversations with artists for a change, and I got some great deals on books. (in all, I bought 10 gaming books - mostly to use as research materials - 1 book was full price; 3 were in a 3-for-$10 deal; and there remaining 6 were $2 each - an average of $5 a book, and all were originally at least $20.) I love the art that I bought, of course - if I hadn't loved it I wouldn't have bought it. I found a publisher that does books that I think will be very useful for novel-writing research purposes. I spent a nice amount of time with my friends and with my family, and even have made tentative plans to visit Columbus again in October. Actually, I may end up doing a kinda big trip. It's really, really looking like I won't be able to go to Japan this fall - too much time, too much money - but I found out about a con called Con on the Cob which is in Ohio in Oct. and which is heavily attended by artists (it was created by an artist) and I'd like to go, and all in all it's turning in to a tentative plan to do fun stuff that costs a lot less since I can't do the fun stuff I really want to do.
I've been left with some things on my mind - with the main one being about buying a house. I was already very vaguely considering doing this, and Ben brought it up, and he seems to think it'd be a really good idea, and I'm starting to think he's right. It's mean leaving Manhattan - I'm looking mostly in the Bronx, though I just discovered there are all kinds of nice places available in Jamaica, Queens, in my price range (this is because Jamaica has lousy accessibility by train). Other topics are how to make my current apartment liveable until I do move (answer: spend some money I don't really have on picture frames and cover the walls with all the art I've got at this point). I've got a work-heavy summer coming up but my schedule is nice and lose, which will hopefully keep things from getting too stressful. I'm preparing to try to lose some weight and I think I'm finally feeling well enough to start going to the gym again. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with things and I'm hoping that I'll be able to get all the balls back in to the air without too much trouble - the work, the leisure time, writing, exercise, eating well, the dog...being the main ones. I hope that's all - I can't think of more... ;)
Well, it took me two days, but the post is finished now. :)
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-30 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-30 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-30 05:32 am (UTC)"I'm preparing to try to lose some weight..."
Excellent!! I approve, cause I'm doing it now too. However, there is no try, much less "preparing to try"!! Dudeeee. It starts noooooow! :) "I'm losing weight, starting right now!" Way better. :)
It's easy for me to say, since I'm getting fed awesome healthy automatically portion-controlled food these days in Jersey! But I'm also jogging(!)... this is all also easy for me right now because it's the main productive thing I can do now to get over the breakup.... OMG breaking up sux. lots more than expected.
anyway, good luck with everything!!! your life in the city always sounds so hard to me! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-30 12:37 pm (UTC)Well, I was preparing to try to lose some weight on Sunday; on Monday I started actually trying to lose some weight. Given how hard that always seems to be for me, I'm leaving the try in there. ;) Good luck with your own efforts - you should yoink lots of recipes from Alia, then you can make awesome healthy automatically portion controlled food yourself! Okay, maybe you'd have to do the portion control part yourself...
I'm so sorry that the break up is sucking so much. Are you still in Jersey? Cause I'm back in NYC - any chance of you coming in to the city?