Chaos, Panic Disorder . . .

Well, I said I'd update soon but I decided to wait considering I knew there was a good chance I was going back to the Fair and would have more pics. Trust me. I have pics. Lots of them. And even one video . . .

First up the general stuffage. Right now I feel crappy but that's to be expected. I hate the fact I have at least 7 months until I can take a vacation again >.< I'll really be stir crazy by then. I didn't get all I wanted to do on my vacation but I did get a lot of needed stuff done, which is good. I decided not to rush my Forte costume for the camp out this weekend and I'll get it ready for a future event. Even though the Captain, who just showed up, said I should stop playing DS games and finish the costume before then. So, motivation to do it or just forget about it? We'll have to see because it needs to be completed by Friday, and that includes all construction, gluing as well as plastic and paint and I don't foresee me doing that within the next three days . . .

For those on my list who are with Tanjou. Good news is, I found my install disk for my scanner so I can put it on this comp . . . bad news is all the scans I've done are still on Axl which means taking the time to get him hooked back up again and try to find the folder without the aid of a backlight. Not going to be easy. I want to make one go at trying to get the rest of the stuff off of him. Right now it doesn't look like I'll get to that until at least weekend after next (considering next weekend is the campout and all this week I work late.) But, have no fear, I will get to scanning again. Hopefully sooner than later.

We've had a few storms go through, one bad enough I saw the lightning reflect off of mum as she went to go close a curtain (I was taking pics of the dark sky until loud thunder drove me inside >.<) and heard the crack out back right after it. She said she never saw the lighting but tasted weak sulfur on one side of her mouth. Definitely a very close call . . . And she was inside to boot >.<

Now for some random pics.

There was a miller on the wall so I stretched to get a pic of him/her. I liked the wing pattern. We also had a beautiful rainbow after one of the storms. I loved how it ended over the house. Hopefully it's a good sign that things will be on the upturn financially for us. We also had a frog join us and hang on the window for one night. He stayed quite a while. Sis even got a pic of the frog with a huge moth nearby. I also uploaded four more shots of my helmet construction for Forte.exe. Not much, just showing where I daringly used my glue gun to fix places I had messed up with stitching the sections at too sharp or too wrong an angle to make it uniform.

Fair was good. Friday was a literal washout considering it rained, sometimes heavy. There were some suspected rumbles of thunder that were confirmed by friends where they had the storm bad enough that it started their phones ringing for no reason >.< Sunday was better though it started to rain a bit toward the end, luckily after the last performance by the extreme world tour sponsored by freestylemx.com. We also saw the tiger exhibit (though it was touted as the Tigers of India exhibit the music they played before the performance was modern African . . . oh well, at least it sounded good.)

Fair pictures ho!

This is my pitiful attempt at splicing a vid together. Thanks to an innovative thought plus VirtualDubMod, I managed to take a bit better footage with my camera and record a voice message on my MP3 player and splice the two together to get audio to the video. However . . . my audio quality sucks. Period. Hopefully I can get a real camcorder in the near future and not have to worry about video/audio quality. I hope.

If you want better video footage, to go Digi's YouTube vids of the fair. Much better audio >nods nods<

In a nutshell things are rather depressive around here right now. Sis is leaving, coming back to only visit. She's packing her car now with what she can carry so she can leave tomorrow. Not that I begrudge her going back to help her family, but it's not easy on us here to see her leave knowing there is a 99% chance she is never coming back . . .

Well, on a cosplaying note, I ran across yesterday a blog's album (the whole site's in Chinese, just so you know) and some con pics of some rather hardcore cosplayers. One as X Series Zero and another as Zero Series Zero. I so want to know how they made those, especially the X Series Zero's armor . . . that and what they're made out of . . .

In other news.

Work was semi ok. Open was a bit rough. The opening manager is still waspish, but that's ok, I just give it right back to her and she backs down. We had one customer while I was on cash complain about their whole order yesterday so instead of dealing with them I snagged the first manager I could see to deal with them. That was after I had a customer swear at me that she wasn't going to pay for her order because she thought it was too much and almost caused an accident leaving my window (aka, cutting out of line.) And one incident I heard about after the fact because it happened in lobby and I was on cash at the time. Apparently a customer who was more than just a few sheets to the wind was standing off to the side waiting for his order to be taken. When the opening manager told him to please get in line so they could take his order apparently he started swearing. So she called our 'bouncer', our maintainance man. So when he told the person to please not use that language the man called our maintainance man a piece of s*. To which our maintainance man told the other man to please leave if he was going to use that language. So the man called our maintainance man more foul words. The maintainance man told the other man that he had a choice, he could either leave the easy way or the hard way, it was his choice. So, while still swearing, both at the opening manager and the maintainance man, he left, pushing several customers out of his way as he did so.

As another worker agreed with me, the strange ones were out in full force today . . .

So after work I ran my errands and came home at the time I expected to be here ^^ I hit several stores, both for food for the upcoming weeks (we have an Ocean State Job Lot and, of course, their products rotate faster than an revolving door and I found some nice, made in China with Chinese printing on them, some rice and wheat puffed cakes that are pretty good. They're smaller than what we're used to for a rice cake but still very good) as well as went hunting for cosplay items. Only one store carried purple face paint so I stocked up on that as well as a tube of white. I found the perfect dowel to stabilize the handle for my new tomahawk and the right colored wig ^^ So now I can get to work on at least that much of Dingo's outfit (meaning his hair/headband and the tomahawk.) I'm going to just sand (if I have to) and use my regular craft paints and the clear sealant to protect it from scratches instead of the plastic cover and my hammered metal paint. Pics tomorrow of the various stages of construction (not that anyone's going to actually care, but meh, I want to record it here.)

I hope to get it all done by the weekend so that much'll be done. Then I can work maybe later Saturday (there's a special lunch going on for a long time worker who quit and I was invited to it) to make space in my room so I can get to work on either Forte's helmet or part of Armadillo's armor. I think I have the mechanics finally worked out on it (at least how I'm going to do it.) I have enough mats to make the majority of it so there's no problem there, nothing I need to buy for the understructure (for Forte I just need to pick up some more black and get some yellow foam so I can see where the pieces are going to go before I do the outer covering. (Just so I can keep track of all this, the current time working on just the tomahawk is 1 hour (give or take a few minutes) for the whole thing save painting. That, due to drying time, is going to take a lot longer. And where it's so late I'm not going to even take the wig out of the bag to see what I'll need to do to turn it into Dingo's hair.) I'm not going for perfection so you can see where I heavily glued the wood 'blade' to the foam cover over the plastic canvass that was rolled around part of the 'shaft' that's made out of a dowel that just fits the interior of our printer paper rolls. Yep, rocket science here. I might make a better one later that's not quite so glue laden but that'll be for later. I might make a spare, just in case this one gets damaged at PortCon. Yesh, I plan on going to both PortCon (where it's back on South Portland across from the mall) and Otakon as well.

While waiting for the paint to dry I decided to go through LJ/IJ and see which posts didn't migrate. I had a few here and there and a scare about how many missing posts I had for one month (Sept 07) until I checked and they were posts I didn't need to migrate -.-;;. December of '07 I had basically every post LJSEC decided to double post -.-;; So I had to weed out the true entry from the double (checking for mood/music because the double didn't have that. Usually it was the second post but sometimes it would be the top post so I had to check carefully . . . ) I might at a later date go back through it all again to put in music/mood/tags but for now I just want to get all the posts safely over to IJ, just in case . . . But it's kinda funny (and sad, in a way) when I go back over the old posts, especially the one for 6/9/06 when the opening manager started going super ratty and I was ready to throw in the towel to how she is now, still on and off ratty (I almost believe it when someone said she had to be bipolar because of her mood swings) but at least bearable (especially when compared to the store manager.) I think the best post, considering what happened a bit over a month ago, was one on July 29th, 2006 "So, as far as I'm concerned . . . 'm not going to even consider Otakon anymore. If it's going to be that much of a Herculean task just staying down there and getting around the convention center, forget it. I'd have  more stress worries than fun and for that amount of money it wouldn't be worth it." Heh, and I'm SO glad I didn't remember that post nor followed it. Because even if I was kinda ignored by a clique, I still had a blast >huggles Digi< and will be back again next year with bigger and better plans >nodsnods< Down to four posts to fix in Nov '04 but I'm about ready to crash so I think I'll do that tomorrow. Not bad average. Most of the posts transferred over without a problem. Only a rare handful I had to repost.

And that reminds me. Someone else has taken over ordering stock. We NOW will have enough stock to last us until the next truck \0/ Happy am I, yesh ^^

Oh, and I'm working here and there on a new *coughyaoicoughexecough* ficlet that should hopefully be done sometime in the near future and ready for betaing.

Busy etting, yesh ^^ and a happy ettin too ^^

Yep, I made it back safe and sound (considering Monday we didn't leave MD until about 5 (supper break) we didn't get to CT until midnight. So 7 hours really wasn't that bad, considering we took an alternate and more scenic route to miss NYC during rush hour. All along the way we were greeted by a pretty lightning display from a pretty bad storm.

Tuesday we left around noonish and with one gas stop in Hudson, MA and a few more frequent rest stops, and taking a bit of a scenic route to miss Metro Boston, we made it back home at midnight again. Poukie was so cute (in a strange sort of way.) She was so disbelieving that we were really home she just looked at us like we were strangers. Then, when realization set in she wouldn't leave us alone, purowing and talking more than she ever does. I figured she'd greet us then snub us until she got over the fact she was left here (with others somewhat coming up to feed her) for 8 days without her family. But instead she was disbelieving at first and clingy for the next few days. She's still pretty clingy now, even though it's already Saturday and we've been back a few days. Guess leaving her for more than the three days of the Kennebunkport Retreat or PortCon is too much on her fuzzy mentality.

So, after weeding out the good pics from the bad (which meant I culled it down to about 1/3 of all the pics I took) here's the link to my Otakon 2008 gallery. 351 pics of the trip down, Otakon and the trip back. Otakon 2008 - What a trip. First three galleries are the trip down, the next three are each day of Otakon and the last two were the trip back. If you want to skip going through sets to find Otakon, here they are.

Otakon - Day One    Otakon - Day Two   Otakon - Day Three Maybe next year, if I can go, I'll get more cosplayers?

And speaking of Otakon 2009, I'm going to make another effort, starting earlier this time, to make it back down there. I had a blast this year and I hope next year can be better. After first hand observation of costumes (you can tell me a thousand times but if I see it once I usually can figure it out better being the visual sort of person I am) I got to rethinking my Armored Armadillo costume and not only the construction (which is fairly simple for a crafter) but the mechanics of getting it there, walking in it, especially up stairs, and not killing anyone with the tail, considering I might not have anyone there with me. So I decided I still might try it as a challenge but I'm not going to do it for a con. Instead I'm going to go with my other favorite X series boss (at least from the first game) Storm Eagle. After seeing (from a small distance) how they did the moonkin feet, I think I have a better grasp of feet-making.

Though being entirely enclosed in Baltimore heat is going to be a pain. At least I have the Days Inn this year so it's only a straight beeline to the center and not a meandering stretch. Safer that way too. If I can get it done and have enough money for two cons I'll try it out at PortCon and see how it goes (considering there's no steps, just an elevator) and work out any kinks in case I do go to Otakon (though PortCon is a month almost to the day before Otakon . . . and I don't think my stepdad could take two cons in a month period.) But, we'll see. I really want to go back to Otakon. Even though I felt lost in such a big place I still had a good time.