Scraps (n. ,fem., singular)

Not totally, of course, there was the scanning and the PhotoShop cleaning of the print pages which did get done. And all those grays I was erasing stray marks to be able to pick them up better? They totally dropped out anyway. Apparently 20% cool gray is ass for scanning. Oh well, just tweaked the levels and left them out. I was kinda worried how they’d print anyway so it’s probably just as well. If it’d been only a little uneven I just would have gone back over it with the airbrush to fix it. Oh, well, live and learn.

Other than that, nothing had really happened tonight. I had totally planned to start on this week’s strips tonight, at least getting pencils down but, well, no. Didn’t happen. And I’m not going to beat myself up over it, either. I can definitely get Wednesday’s up tomorrow night so there’s no crisis and after pushing myself so much these past couple of weeks I think a night off is not uncalled for.

Now about July… July is going to be a “chill” month for me. Of course I still have the comic and my eHow articles to do but here are some things I’m not going to be doing:
*taking on new projects
*scripting Act 2 of Wedding Tarot (it’ll wait til August)
*committing to new projects for future months
*throwing a party (it was a possibility, but no, I need the break)
etc.

I also plan to curb the superfluous spending for the month of July, kinda like a lifestyle detox. Of course, that just meant that I ordered the print gocco machine tonight rather than waiting on later this month, but I’ve been planning to order it for 2+ months now and it will actually be used for an article, at that. But enough excuses. Aside from things like gas and groceries and necessary art supplies it’s gonna be nix on the other frivolities. We’ll see how that goes

And now that the 8-pages all about cars is finished I can actually say that without jinxing the project! Now just to scan them at the office tomorrow and do (hopefully) a minimal amount of clean-up in photoshop before sending them off to the publisher. Hopefully they’ll be to his liking and I’ll know before long which publication they’ll be in and when! Whee!

Now it’s off to bed at a decent hour… finally.

Probably. Sigh…

So last night I had a sneezing fit. Today my head starts getting very stuffy, my ribcage is sore and I start coughing. This is _so_ not a good time for me to get sick, I’ve got so much to finish. Of course, this is exactly why I’m now on the precipice of illness (and a coworker is getting over a case of bronchitis, timing sucks!) because I’ve been working so much and not getting enough sleep. Vicious cycle and I really do know better, just sometimes it’s what has to happen.

Ended up giving in to the zombie-like feeling, the ickyness and the stormy weather and took a nap after work. Would have been a longer nap but the phone (finally) woke me up. And I’d left it in the other room on purpose, too! Oh, well, it allowed me to finish a beading example and a card project, both of which are for the articles I’m looking to get finished up tomorrow night. Still have writing and editing to do, but the long part, the examples, are complete and I’m really jazzed about how they both turned out. Definitely worth sharing.

Comics for the week are done and uploaded, that was tonight’s goal. The next two nights will be spent wrapping up my eHow articles for the month leaving me Friday-Monday to get the print submission done on time. Sounds doable right now, let’s hope that doesn’t change. Maybe I’ll get lucky and have some time Thursday for inking the remaining 6 pages (one of which still needs pencils but at least has panels and letters). Dashing off…

So. I’m over thirty and apparently my skin just got the memo because the last few months I’ve been having such odd issues with my skin, well, hatin’ on me! It’s not so much blemishes, I doubt I’ll ever be rid of those if Mom’s any indication though it’s nothing like high school *shudder*, but for the first time in my life I have _dry_ skin. Not even dry skin, but selectively dry skin. And I’ve always had (and still have by and large) oily skin so the fact that it’s dry in some places just totally confuses me.

So I’ve been testing various moisturizers and all and so far there are plenty that work great on my arms and legs but not so much on the face. My Sephora order came in today containing two items that are safe for sensitive skin and also for oily skin. Hopefully between the two of them (one to use before bed and the other to go under my makeup that’s supposed to “mattify” as well) I’ll be able to improve the situation. Getting older is hell, though I do prefer it to the alternative!

And I am tired. It’s nice to know that I can move 90% of my furniture on my own, but still… I think a new bookcase is definitely in order, though. In moving stuff around it became painfully obvious that I have a bunch of books that have no shelf space to speak of. Now they are mostly stacked on, under and around my bedside tables and while that’s all well and good, it’s not a permanent solution. So this weekend, I think I shall go look for another 5-shelf bookcase and put it along the dining room wall where the current 2-shelf one sits between a three and the bar. That 2-shelf will then, I think, get moved underneath the framed painting on the opposite wall. There’s enough clearance there to still have enough room to move through to the kitchen and it’ll balance the area nicely, I think. Limits my options for party flow, but not entirely as that flat surface can be utilized as necessary.

I think I sprained my toes. This is what comes of rushing from one room to another while simultaneously scanning comics and moving furniture to make way for the carpet cleaners that are coming tomorrow. I’d have been fine if that folding stool hadn’t been moved. But it was. And then were my toes. It’s not horrible, it’s just one of those things. And I think I’ll definitely be wearing flats tomorrow just in case.

Managed to get this week’s comics finished this evening in totality which is good because I really should spend some quality time on the print submission this week to get back on track for the July 1 due date plus draft the next article tomorrow night. Thursday is Mom’s birthday so that’ll be another SCA meeting missed in favor of the birthday dinner. (Note to self: call and order her birthday cake tomorrow!)

So I engaged in a bit of retail therapy last week and I was really surprised that my ring from ice.com came in so soon. Isn’t it pretty? It’s almost too pretty, but not quite, lol.

Anyway, aside from admiring the new pretty I managed to get two of this week’s comics completed and the third about half-way there. Which is good because I need to pick up non essential items from the living room and dining room tomorrow night because the carpet cleaners are coming Wednesday! Lovely two day warning, huh? But, hey, it’s a freebie due to renewing my lease, so who am I to really argue. I figure I’ll stash the dining room table (thank goodness its lightweight) and chairs on the bed and roll up the rug so they can cover the most area. The Abyss is still off limits and I’ll probably just close both bedroom doors just to avoid the headache. It’s the high-traffic areas that need it anyway.

So, today’s headache? RSS feeds.

I absolutely adore Google Reader, it saves me so much time every day and I know many people feel the same way about their chose feed readers. I also adore Google Analytics for tracking Random Acts… stats. The one thing it doesn’t track? RSS subscriptions. I could have more readers than I thought, so I decided to look into ways to track RSS subscriptions.

Enter FeedBurner. Now, I actually have misgivings about using this service but many people do, even some webcomics I know of, and it really would be nice to have those numbers, so I install it and set up the feed. Oh, look, it allows you to alias your domain for the reader url instead of there’s, that’s nice, I even managed to create a DNS entry all on my own. Of course, it didn’t quite work. So I backtracked, deactivated that option and set the various urls to point to each other. Baby steps.

Well, that took care of the out and out error message I was getting, but now the RSS subscriber in the url field looks for feeds.randomactscomics.com (which doesn’t exist). I’ve been able to use validators to see that randomactscomics.com/feed/ and the feedburner url are both valid but I don’t see anywhere to tell Wordpress where to look. Sigh… I think it might have something to do with the Comic Press plug-in but I can’t be sure, nonetheless I’ve thrown myself on the mercy and wisdom of the plugin’s forum to see if there’s a known solution or trick I’m just not aware of.

Worst case scenario is I deactivate the lot and just let those go untracked until I find a better solution. But I hate taking steps backward!

Now I’ve got Carol Burnett from Annie running through my head. I spent the evening editing a couple of articles and finishing some clay doll parts for one of them. Between all the typing and mousing and drawing and now the clay stuff my right hand is really smarting. Time to dig out that elastic brace and some ibuprofen!

I can hardly wait to check out my pageviews for Random Acts from today. I threw $5 at a Project Wonderful ad (lasted for about 7 hours on a high-traffic site) just to test and I know I got 15 clicks (12 uniques) from the ad but I wonder if more people went to the site directly instead of clicking through. It’ll be interesting to see how many archive crawls I can detect and, more importantly, how many come back later in the week. Basically I earned the paypal money from the eHow WCP and if it’s in my PayPal account its ‘play money’ in my mind, so if it doesn’t pan out, it’s no great loss. If it does, well, then I’ll try a few different sites/days/hour combinations as long as there is funds in the paypal. Thinking about buying a newsletter ad for next week, too, again just to experiment. Baby steps.

For a brief fraction of a moment. On the comics at least. Managed to get this week’s strips done tonight and at a reasonable hour, too. It has a lot to do with some streamlined backgrounds this week compared to the host of details involved with the last week’s mini-arc. If I can keep them minimal but complete, I will be happy and done sooner. Buffer is a long way off, though, as I’ve sorta used up my wiggle-room on the RA… print submission. I have til the end of the month before I break my self-stated deadline to the publisher and I don’t intend to break it. Work work work

But the rest of the week can be split between the print special and my eHow articles, which should get me back on track and in line with all of my deadlines. Maybe I’ll even have a chance to get more script written on Wedding Tarot!

Does anybody else remember the Bill Engvall “Here’s Your Sign” routine? Specifically the one where they’re moving and the current idiot walks up and asks the obvious question? What does Bill say?

“Nah, we just like to box everything up and drive it around the block every now and then.”

Or something like that.

This gives me a good idea (I hope) of how to deal with the Abyss (which has returned to its previous state of sustained entropy… sigh). Not so much with the driving it around, but, when are we the most judicious about what to keep and what to throw away? When we move. Specifically, when we pack. So if I pack up all the loose stuff in the Abyss with that critical ‘would I want to pack this around’ mentality in place, then maybe I could cull the crafters herd in there and be able to organize it as I unpack it again. At least that’s my theory. Because in order to get order in there, I have to take all the stuff out (except the furniture, that can stay where it is) and at least this way it won’t be scattered and stacked on every available surface (like last time). Might seem like a little extra work to box it all up, but I also have a couple of storage units I bought at IKEA that are yet to be used, so I can fill those instead of boxes as well. Anyway, it’s a plan, now I just have to find a moment to implement it!

Been working hard to get this week’s comics done and while that _is_ done for the week, I’m nowhere but titles on my articles and the Barony website is still unupdated. Drat. Well, tomorrow night, if Mom is able to rest peacefully, I might get some stuff done (she’s having the -scopic surgery on her knee to repair her meniscus which she tore a couple months back) while over there. Just treading water, folks, nothing bad or anything, just really really busy.

So. This weekend was my first Con and overall it was a very pleasant experience. As usual, the trip over there was half the fun in itself, but that’s a road trip with Palmie and I.

We finally got to Panama City and had dinner in a Pirate Ship (that the 70s forgot) before heading to the hotel. Palmie’s all like ‘I see nerds, we must be in the right place’ and right until we saw the land speeder and I braked to stare at it, we seemed fairly normal. SO much for that! I also ended up with the first guest sighting (Brian from Ghost Hunters) as we entered our building.

The Con Registration Desk had closed by the time we wandered over there (right around 8:00). And, well, this is the one main issue that I had this weekend: a lack of organization. Now, no registration hours were posted on the website prior to the Con BUT since there were film screenings going on into the wee hours and a poolside mixer that evening until around 10 or so, it seemed logical that reg would be open later in the evening. Uh, no. We were told to come back in the morning, 8am to be specific. (Found out later that the volunteer that told us that was supposed to have gone to get one of the head people to check-in “stragglers” but was too lazy. Regardless, it was an issue.)

Saturday morning we make sure we’re up and dressed and headed over to the Con area right around 8am. Yeah. No one there. Finally a staffer walks up and we ask about picking up our badges and she rummages around a bit and tells us that Reg won’t be open until 10am. Uh… the first panel starts when? Oh, right, NINE. See the problem? Turned out to be some sort of mega-miscommunication and it was 2 minutes to 9 before they finally got the box of badges and list of pre-regged sheets (because yes, we were prepaid, all we needed were our badges and bags). It wasn’t just us, of course, there were some vendors who couldn’t get into the dealer room yet, either.

Thankfully this was the only real hiccup. They could have used a tighter ship when it came to scheduling and making sure the panels ended when they were supposed to, but they were pretty good about posting revised schedules as the day progressed. Palmie and I have different opinions on this matter. She says that all cons run this way (though that’s not entirely true as Spectrum had a different experience at GenCon, but whatever) but I look at it from a basic, event planning 101 stand-point: you set a schedule and you do your damnedest to stick to it. You have people available to get your attendees what they need to enjoy the day they paid for. I don’t care if some actor is running a workshop that people paid $20 a pop to attend. They paid for an hour, clear the room after that so the next group can get in. Also, having planned wiggle-room to change over areas is a really good idea–think back to high school when you had so many minutes to change classes. It is, literally, textbook.

Okay, now that that’s done, let’s get to the fun stuff. The hotel was pretty nice, not too crowded despite the various things going on (if there were more than 200 people at Wrath of Con I’d be utterly shocked), and the restaurants never had a wait (which was crazy… I don’t know exactly how folks managed that). The only panels I was planning to attend were the Ghost Hunters panels at 9 and 10 on Saturday. Everything after that were stars of shows I didn’t watch. The Ghost Hunters were fun though did start (and end) about 30 minutes late. Ended up going to the Jerry Doyle Q&A with Palmie and Spectrum and it was an absolute riot! Man! I sorta want to watch Babylon 5 now. Later that day I took in the rescheduled Art, Comics and Manga panel which was pretty cool and chatted with the moderator afterwards, being brave and self-promoting a little bit Not sure how many of my flyers got picked up, but a few did. Hey, they aren’t exactly my target audience, not really, so it was cool.

The dealer room was jam packed and kinda small BUT very fun to browse. I ended up buying a set of marabou-trimmed horns and had a watercolor caricature done on Saturday and then picked up some books on Sunday, signed by their respective authors. Not exactly sure when I’ll have a chance to read them, but I’ll add them to the stack. Also picked up a lot of cards and flyers of things to check out later and follow up on if they prove interesting.

Sunday morning I really didn’t have anything I wanted to do other than that last trip through the dealer room. That accomplished, I found a comfy chair to commandeer, took out my art supplies and penciled two pages of a Random Acts… side project (more info when there’s concrete data on that, I promise) while Spectrum and Palmie did their thing for the morning and early afternoon. Due to some interesting schedule issues and a missing Jerry Doyle (temporarily) we didn’t end up hitting the road until 4ish. Later than I’d wanted to leave, but I was getting so much work done and they were having a blast so it really didn’t hurt anything.

After stopping at IHOP for an early supper we rolled into Tallahassee a little after 7pm, exhausted but happy. Nice first Con. And I know, I know, Dragon*Con will be vastly different. I’m looking forward to it.