Seriously, I couldn't swing a dead cat at I-Con this year without hitting someone wearing elf ears.
So! I-Con 2007...where to begin?
Hmm. Well, the trip there was MUCH more fun this time because of the Bridgeport ferry. What a hoot! Greg got to take a nap and I got to enjoy a boat ride. The Long Island Sound is bigger than you'd think. Even though it was really windy and cold, I couldn't resist going up on the deck.
The hotel had a surprise for us: if you pay in cash they ask for an extra 100.00 in security deposit money...just in case you decide to go all Mick Jagger in their hotel room. *pout* Good thing I had extra cash on hand.
Friday was mostly uneventful because we arrived Thursday & therefore had most of the day to kill (set up began around 1PM but I think we waited a while since I knew it wouldn't take 4 hours for me to set up). Which we did by sleeping & sightseeing in Port Jefferson. I LOVED Port Jefferson. It reminded me so much of Newport R.I. before it got all exclusive & resort-ish. I scouted several seafood restaurants because there's no freaking WAY that I'm going to be on the East Coast not eating seafood. Nuh-uh.
So eventually we furbled our way to Stony Brook campus & began to set up. It was an exercise in frustration. Not because of my new shiny gridwalls (which worked like a freaking charm), but because I had NEIGHBORS FROM HELL. They encroached on my space & threw their junk in front of my table & violated fire codes by blocking access lanes and basically were brats. I had to eventually ask the dealer room liason (merchant cop!) to come over and PACE OFF what my space was supposed to be, because the bums behind me had their boxes & crap piled to within a few feet of my table. They still insisted on walking RIGHT through my space to reach part of their setup anyway. Grr!
Here I am setting things up. LOVE for the gridwalls. I know I look happy in this picture. I'm not.
That's me, sitting there in a high state of piss-off.
My saying for the weekend: "I feel like killing something...WITH MY TEETH."
Everything was better once Kris & Bob showed up, though. She'd had an eventful time finding the site, so we had a mutual bitch-fest and generally felt better. Friday night was a late night so we hung out and made a few sales and had a good time. She's not fluent in anime/manga/video game fandom so I got to be her cosplay guide for the weekend. It was fun. :-)
The grids, by the way, were apparently the ONLY things on our minds (imagine that!) when we packed because we forgot just about EVERYTHING else from the setup. No baskets, no racks, nothin'. I had to send Greg to WalMart for a couple of baskets for my barrettes. A note about gridwalls: they look neat & modern & beautiful and they are very easy to use...but you can see RIGHT THROUGH them and if there's crap & junk & ugly dealer table storage on the other side, you can see that too. See?
Oh well. They still beat the heck out of my musty old screens.
So Saturday was CRAZY day. Everyone came out with their best cosplay.![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rumdiculous, I took a pic of this guy JUST for you. :-) He was very cute and insisted that he was trying his best to smirk convincingly...but I told him he had too much of a baby face to achieve the proper demented expression Alucard usually wears.
This girl had GREAT makeup. She was the only furry I thought really pulled the look off.
Here's Ed Elric. Ed is one male character that girls do better than guys. It's the whole adolescent male thing.
I just love the red trenchcoats...they look so spiffy.
Thank GOD my friend Kris was there. She'skls_eloise here on LJ...go say "hi"! She was a huge help to me & kept me sane. She deals well with the public and takes over for me when the "goofy" begins to overwhelm me. I know I can always step back from the table to take a breath when she's there, and she'll do just as good a job as I do selling.
For some strange reason, she claims to like helping me! Funny girl! ;-)
Saturday was also "friend" day. My good pal Lisa showed up and we had a great shmooze session. Also, the lovelyshvetufae showed up as promised! She got to see the "behind the scenes" workings of the artist at a show, and I got to sample her wonderful lavender cookies. Yum! Those were a big hit. Also, I now know the correct way to pronounce her name!
Here we are; Kris, me, Shveta, and Lisa.
That's the best part of being out there at a show; getting to meet new people and catching up with friends. *much love for my friends*
Saturday night, Greg and I treated Kris and her husband Bob to dinner at "Papa Joes", one of the seafood restaurants I'd scoped out on Friday. The owner treated us well...we had a seat near the fireplace and got excellent service. We drank wine and ate a LOT of lobster and watched the rain come in off the Sound...it was wonderful. Kris and I got a little silly...I blame the lobster more than the wine. We loved the ladie's room, by the way. Each stall had its OWN sink and everything...it was like three tiny bathrooms in there! I think the guys were pretty sure we'd gone completely bonkers.
Sunday...another busy day. Sales were ok, a little "meh"...I sold everything that was between 25 and 100.00 and not one thing that cost more than that! Fortunately I had a HUGE inventory of mid-range stuff so it all worked out. I did about 30% over last year's totals, so yay me. Good thing too, as we needed to get the BRAKES on my car fixed...on a Sunday. Thank you for being open, Pep Boys. *sigh* I had gone to my mechanic JUST last week, too, and had a safety check done & bought new tires and EVERYTHING. I have to learn that you can't always prepare for every eventuality (but I just keep trying anyway. Oh...I try).
Sunday was last minute shopping day, too. I picked up an armfull of manga...found a WONDERFUL little series called "Immortal Rain" which I grabbed because of the cute guy on the covers (he has stupid, pretty hair) and found it to be a charming, adorable story. Squee-worthy! I'll probably go on about it some more at a future date. Suffice to say: it's SHINY.
Anyway, We left on Monday after all the bells and whistles and it was a relaxing trip home. I LOVE the ferry. Love love love. We hung out in Port Jeff waiting for it to arrive, & did a little last minute shopping. Here's Greg. You can almost hear Clint ("jaws") singing "farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies" as he looks out to sea...
I got a few pictures of Port Jefferson, too. I really love that place.
It's not a "prettied-up" tourist port, it's an actual functional seaport and I really like that. It just seems like a sincere little place.
Here's the ferry, coming in.
Here it is, a bit closer. Man, those ferries are ugly! But they really move.
Those were all the pics I could take. For security reasons, there wasn't much photography allowed anywhere near the ferries.
Trip home: uneventful until we reached Syracuse. A line of thunderstorms hung out just to the north of rt. 90 all the way home. I got a kick out of it...I LOVE thunderstorms and this front had lots of pretty lightning. Nothing says "spring is here" like a good clap of thunder.
The hotel had a surprise for us: if you pay in cash they ask for an extra 100.00 in security deposit money...just in case you decide to go all Mick Jagger in their hotel room. *pout* Good thing I had extra cash on hand.
Friday was mostly uneventful because we arrived Thursday & therefore had most of the day to kill (set up began around 1PM but I think we waited a while since I knew it wouldn't take 4 hours for me to set up). Which we did by sleeping & sightseeing in Port Jefferson. I LOVED Port Jefferson. It reminded me so much of Newport R.I. before it got all exclusive & resort-ish. I scouted several seafood restaurants because there's no freaking WAY that I'm going to be on the East Coast not eating seafood. Nuh-uh.
So eventually we furbled our way to Stony Brook campus & began to set up. It was an exercise in frustration. Not because of my new shiny gridwalls (which worked like a freaking charm), but because I had NEIGHBORS FROM HELL. They encroached on my space & threw their junk in front of my table & violated fire codes by blocking access lanes and basically were brats. I had to eventually ask the dealer room liason (merchant cop!) to come over and PACE OFF what my space was supposed to be, because the bums behind me had their boxes & crap piled to within a few feet of my table. They still insisted on walking RIGHT through my space to reach part of their setup anyway. Grr!
Here I am setting things up. LOVE for the gridwalls. I know I look happy in this picture. I'm not.
That's me, sitting there in a high state of piss-off.
My saying for the weekend: "I feel like killing something...WITH MY TEETH."
Everything was better once Kris & Bob showed up, though. She'd had an eventful time finding the site, so we had a mutual bitch-fest and generally felt better. Friday night was a late night so we hung out and made a few sales and had a good time. She's not fluent in anime/manga/video game fandom so I got to be her cosplay guide for the weekend. It was fun. :-)
The grids, by the way, were apparently the ONLY things on our minds (imagine that!) when we packed because we forgot just about EVERYTHING else from the setup. No baskets, no racks, nothin'. I had to send Greg to WalMart for a couple of baskets for my barrettes. A note about gridwalls: they look neat & modern & beautiful and they are very easy to use...but you can see RIGHT THROUGH them and if there's crap & junk & ugly dealer table storage on the other side, you can see that too. See?
Oh well. They still beat the heck out of my musty old screens.
So Saturday was CRAZY day. Everyone came out with their best cosplay.
rumdiculous, I took a pic of this guy JUST for you. :-) He was very cute and insisted that he was trying his best to smirk convincingly...but I told him he had too much of a baby face to achieve the proper demented expression Alucard usually wears.This girl had GREAT makeup. She was the only furry I thought really pulled the look off.
Here's Ed Elric. Ed is one male character that girls do better than guys. It's the whole adolescent male thing.
I just love the red trenchcoats...they look so spiffy.
Thank GOD my friend Kris was there. She's
kls_eloise here on LJ...go say "hi"! She was a huge help to me & kept me sane. She deals well with the public and takes over for me when the "goofy" begins to overwhelm me. I know I can always step back from the table to take a breath when she's there, and she'll do just as good a job as I do selling.For some strange reason, she claims to like helping me! Funny girl! ;-)
Saturday was also "friend" day. My good pal Lisa showed up and we had a great shmooze session. Also, the lovely
shvetufae showed up as promised! She got to see the "behind the scenes" workings of the artist at a show, and I got to sample her wonderful lavender cookies. Yum! Those were a big hit. Also, I now know the correct way to pronounce her name!Here we are; Kris, me, Shveta, and Lisa.
That's the best part of being out there at a show; getting to meet new people and catching up with friends. *much love for my friends*
Saturday night, Greg and I treated Kris and her husband Bob to dinner at "Papa Joes", one of the seafood restaurants I'd scoped out on Friday. The owner treated us well...we had a seat near the fireplace and got excellent service. We drank wine and ate a LOT of lobster and watched the rain come in off the Sound...it was wonderful. Kris and I got a little silly...I blame the lobster more than the wine. We loved the ladie's room, by the way. Each stall had its OWN sink and everything...it was like three tiny bathrooms in there! I think the guys were pretty sure we'd gone completely bonkers.
Sunday...another busy day. Sales were ok, a little "meh"...I sold everything that was between 25 and 100.00 and not one thing that cost more than that! Fortunately I had a HUGE inventory of mid-range stuff so it all worked out. I did about 30% over last year's totals, so yay me. Good thing too, as we needed to get the BRAKES on my car fixed...on a Sunday. Thank you for being open, Pep Boys. *sigh* I had gone to my mechanic JUST last week, too, and had a safety check done & bought new tires and EVERYTHING. I have to learn that you can't always prepare for every eventuality (but I just keep trying anyway. Oh...I try).
Sunday was last minute shopping day, too. I picked up an armfull of manga...found a WONDERFUL little series called "Immortal Rain" which I grabbed because of the cute guy on the covers (he has stupid, pretty hair) and found it to be a charming, adorable story. Squee-worthy! I'll probably go on about it some more at a future date. Suffice to say: it's SHINY.
Anyway, We left on Monday after all the bells and whistles and it was a relaxing trip home. I LOVE the ferry. Love love love. We hung out in Port Jeff waiting for it to arrive, & did a little last minute shopping. Here's Greg. You can almost hear Clint ("jaws") singing "farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies" as he looks out to sea...
I got a few pictures of Port Jefferson, too. I really love that place.
It's not a "prettied-up" tourist port, it's an actual functional seaport and I really like that. It just seems like a sincere little place.
Here's the ferry, coming in.
Here it is, a bit closer. Man, those ferries are ugly! But they really move.
Those were all the pics I could take. For security reasons, there wasn't much photography allowed anywhere near the ferries.
Trip home: uneventful until we reached Syracuse. A line of thunderstorms hung out just to the north of rt. 90 all the way home. I got a kick out of it...I LOVE thunderstorms and this front had lots of pretty lightning. Nothing says "spring is here" like a good clap of thunder.
And now...I'm sickl! Yep, it happens almost every time I come back from a big show. I work in rarified air here, isolated in my house doing my artwork...and then I go out in public and let 6,000 people cough and sneeze on me. *sigh* That's what I get for being a hot-house flower.
