Entries tagged with vacation

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Blah blah blah

Missed my monthly update for September. Whoops.

Life isn't boring but it's not overly exciting which isn't a bad thing.

We leave for Florida on Thursday: a week of tiki -- hitting Fort Lauderdale for the best tiki bar in America, the Mai-Kai, this weekend -- and Disney (because of course we're going to Disney again). We're staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and I'm currently annoyed because I have to get through 3 workdays and a pre-dawn wakeup to actually get there, but I know I'm gonna be happy when we're there. Food & Wine Festival, which we haven't done since our honeymoon, and all the other awesome stuff in the World. We're annual passholders for a reason.

I'm definitely in need of a vacation :) So is Spot. And Disney is basically a home-away-from-home, so it's great to be going back for a week of adventurous relaxation.

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Anniversary Plans

So every anniversary since Spot & I have been married we've spent with friends or family (mostly family). This is fine — it's great, our friends & family are amazing — but it's an anniversary, you know? I wanted to do something on our own.

So in TWO DAYS we'll be headed to San Diego. Because I got the wild idea that going to California for our anniversary would be awesome and the means to get there existed readily thanks to excessive airline miles.

Current plans include at least one tiki bar (the Bali Hai), the Zoo & Safari Parks, seeing a live taping of @midnight (already got tickets), and possibly Disneyland. Very possibly Disneyland. Disneyland is more or less a definite but I keep saying "if" because we're trying to do this trip on the fly outside of the Zoo, and I'm failing spectacularly at not planning. But I enjoy the hell out of planning so I can't complain TOO much.

We may hit other tiki bars — Tonga Hut in Hollywood and Trader Sam's in Disneyland — and possibly Oceanic Arts and/or the Tiki Farm home base, if they're open. I'm trying to decide if hitting 3 tiki bars in one month will contribute more than one to my "once a month" count (can I skip June & July so we don't have to go to Cape Cod or Long Island during actual summer? I haven't decided yet).

And yes: we know that Los Angeles/Anaheim/San Diego are a fair distance from one another. Our rental car ranked over our hotel room when it came to luxuries, simply because we knew we'd be driving a lot.

We still need to pack, though =p

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Is this thing on?

Hey, couple folks who still check LJ! Been awhile, hasn't it. What have I been up to?

1) My mom and stepdad visited July 4th weekend and we all had a good time. We took the Essex Steam Train dinner ride, which was very nice (though kinda pricey; $80/per person, cocktails/wine not included!)…did some generally poking around in the Hudson Valley, including a visit to The Gilded Otter (a very tasty brewpub that my mom and stepdad have been going to for awhile, so she was uberpleased to share it with us [though we'd been before, on her recommendation]) and the Tuthilltown Distillery (makers of vodka, whiskey, and now Triple Sec and Cacao Liqueur, both of which I now own)…then closed out the trip with a visit to the casinos. Always good seeing my mom, and I can say that without any degree of sarcasm.

2) Last weekend was ConnectiCon, which was a blast as always. It's my third convention of the year and probably my last, since I didn't get a table at Furpocalypse. I've also been rethinking my regular attendance of furry cons, but I'll save that line of thought for a future post.

I DID learn that having a full-time job AND working a convention table is REALLY DIFFICULT and next year I am taking the Monday after off to rest, if I get a table again. 12 days in a row of solid 8-hour days (well, with one 6-hour day in the middle) wears you the hell out.

3) The job is still going well! It's been something like 100 days since I've been employed and I'm still learning — you're always still learning — but I hope they continue to keep me on because I'm pretty happy there. I have noticed I lose my spoons a bit quicker than I used to when I wasn't working, but considering my social anxiety and introversion has gotten a lot worse than the last time I worked full-time (because of things like the Job/Boss From Hell), this should be a surprise to no one.

4) Spot and I are planning our next Disney trip. Not the group trip I've mentioned (which can still be read about here: http://notacon.freeforums.net — please come over and say hi if you are interested), which will be October of 2016, but I was calling to make reservations for a different trip next year and the hotel chain offered a "Sit through our timeshare deal and stay at the hotel for like next to nothing" thing, so I was like what the hell.

And yes, we've been warned they are scams, and yes, we already know. We're not dumb with money, guys, despite how many conventions we've been to =p Thanks for your concern though!

ANYWAY! Our quick Disney trip is planned for the first weekend in December, because I have never seen Disney World at Christmas time and I totally want to. Hotel room already reserved (non-Disney hotel, but it's in Downtown Disney, so we'll deal), plane tickets already bought, and I'm currently fidgeting over how soon to buy tickets to the Christmas party.

I like having trips to look forward to :)

5) I'm trying to get back into the swing of arting, which has been on the back burner as I've been adjusting to the new job and dealing with family and friends and conventions. Finally got some work done on something for a friend this weekend, and hoping to kick up to working on a comic that was commissioned earlier this year. I don't want to push myself too much, though, because I know I'll crash…and I also know I'm going through a bit of a manic phase right now, which puts me much closer to that edge I'll fall off of.

So, not a HUGE amount going on, but enough to keep us busy. I think ConnectiCon filled all my social desires for awhile, and I'm currently having fun planning our trips and trying to nudge myself into drawing more. Meanwhile, Spot and I are cooking and cleaning and snuggling and enjoying life and being domestic…huzzah!

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New portfolio in progress, Disney excitement, etc. etc.

I've started something dubbed by Luno as "The Bawdy Bartender's Book," and it is going to be my main project this month (outside of running around in circles excited about going back to Disney World)! Poke on over to my FA journal to get the full scoop. I still have a few spots open, though if no one takes them, I will throw my own characters into the portfolio :)

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Less than a month till our Disney trip and we are uberpsyched. I am reading WAY too many blogs and forums that I have already read a bunch of times, and following far too many Disney-related accounts on Twitter. I already know a ridiculous amount of everything about it, but I'm still doing it. Because EXCITED.

Of course, after our Disney trip (with a slight bounce in October for our local convention), I will be playing the "excited as all hell about going to California" game. Apparently the secret to keeping me happy is to know I will be traveling in the near future.

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I was gonna say some other stuff but I have, in all honesty, completely forgotten. I'm gonna go back to spazzing about Disney and working on sketches :)

Current Mood: tired

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Convention Musings

So, as I think I've stated previously, I'm honestly considering not going to Anthrocon next year. Though Spot and I treat it like a little vacation (spending money on dinners out is a treat, stuff like that), it usually ends up more stressful than anything. This year at FurFright -- which is extremely local to us so requires very little cost to get there, and we can eat food from our own fridge -- I made a fair amount more money than I did at Anthrocon. It could just be the economy, admittedly, but figuring it out, the ratios of attendees to dealers is as follows:

Anthrocon - 20:1
FurFright - 33:1

Those extra 13 people made a huge difference in the money I made. I might look into other conventions and do comparisons.

When you figure out the cost of everything for a single person (counting that the room and ride were split), I actually made very little at Anthrocon; most of what I made went into paying for getting there, getting food, and staying in Pittsburgh for 5 days. And if me and Spot were to do it ourselves -- no splitting the room or the ride -- it'd cost something like $1500 (which what I make wouldn't pay for, even if you halved it). Which, when you figure it out, is a lot of money to spend to be stressed out and tired and come home with Con Crud.

I think I've just been frustrated with people lately, and perhaps come the new year it won't bother me as much. Just little things keep building up. The newest thing is that a game from the gaming room at FurFright somehow ended up in someone's hotel room. We marked the majority of the games with stickers with our contact info on them, but those games aren't supposed to leave the gaming room. The majority of the games at FurFright are Spot's personal collection, folks -- he loans them to the con for the weekend because he is the Gaming Director and he trusts people to not be dicks with them. And this is the first time in nine years that this has happened…it may just be a deck of cards, but I'm taking it as a severe warning.

Not to mention the supposed "volunteers" who are supposed to man the game room door and prevent this kind of thing often treated the entrance to the gaming room as a social area…as in, you actually couldn't get through the mass of people standing around and chatting. I ran into this a few times over the course of the weekend, and it's something that needs to seriously be discussed with the folks in charge of the volunteers. You wanna be social at a con? Don't volunteer to be part of security!

So I'm genuinely trying to decide what cons I want to go to next year. Furry conventions seem so laced with drama right now that staying away from them is sounding better and better.

It's a shame; I really like doing conventions (or I used to). It's just people who are violating Wheaton's Law have kind of ruined them for me lately.