The weather is messing with my resolve – if it doesn’t decide to fall one way or another, I will be up in arms. I had been planning on scooting to Victoria some time this week to take advantage of my vacation (and also because I’m a terrible daughter who hasn’t been home in 6 months), but I don’t want to a) scoot in the rain or b) take the car. I’ll decide tomorrow – I can still get in some Quality Time with mom (and hopefully come out sane on the other end) if I leave tomorrow and return Friday. If I don’t end up going, I’ll have to come up with some other kind of Adventure so I don’t feel as though I wasted my vacation – that would make me sad.

I can’t believe it’s already September. I’m happy about it because I love the fall, but it seems as though the summer just flew by without much stuff happening. I’m fairly certain I have enough Fun Things planned to get me through the rest of the year – I have a really hard time coping with the 9-5 when I don’t have anything to look forward to – but it’s weird to realize that fall is here. On the other hand, it’s time for boots and sweaters. Hooray!

Day One of my vacation is going to be exciting: groceries. We have no food in the house that isn’t a biohazard, so I’m going to take advantage of the weekday to buy food and Diet Coke because I’m totally out again. YEAH! EXCITING! WOOOO!

happy slime is happy and slimy

We’re back in one piece and (so far) disease free, just as promised.

We opted to skip the last day of PAX for a casserole of reasons, all of which turned out to be the best idea ever when we heard reports of 3+ hour border waits and epic downpours later. As it was, it took us exactly three hours from door to door and we were home just after 2pm after a fantastic weekend of nerdy goodness and excellent friends. We were a little sad to be missing out on the last day, but at the same time we were PAX’d out – we spent the ENTIRE day there on Saturday, and had seen (almost) everything we wanted to see. Heading downtown sounded good, until the logistics of it all came up – $25 to park, massive crowds of people, then a really long drive home when you factor in everyone ELSE trying to get back to Canada – ugh.

So, how was it? Completely awesome. We had a total blast, and got to see and touch and play so many things. Some of the highlights for us:

• Seeing Derek at the Dragon Age II booth! Derek has worked for Bioware forEVER, and is the main reason Ed and I met in the first place – he organized Fragapalooza ’97, and I stayed at his house for the event. We hadn’t seen him in years, and it was completely awesome to catch up and see him doing so well.
• Ed got to sit in on the D&D panel he was drooling over – he was first in line to get in, and he had a great time
• Getting to play Fallout: New Vegas, Little Big Planet 2, Super Scribblenauts and Kirby’s Epic Yarn
• Spending all my money at the Scott Pilgrim booth
• Spending some quality time with the Suttles family
• The successful stalking of MC Frontalot
• The Plants vs. Zombies section
• My Bionic Moustache
• Coming up with the World’s Most Awesome Idea with Ali – details to come later

No con could ever be perfect, though:

• A recession-caused noticeable lack of swag (we still got a lot, but last year I ended up with enough to do 8 or 9 giveaways)
• No booths for Jet Set Radio Futurer or The World Ends With You Again
• We sat in on the Rage 3 demo panel, and while it looked awesome, it also looked an awful lot like Fallout 3
• The Haunted Cafe
• We didn’t get wristbands for the Frontalot/Coulton show – all 2500 wristbands were given out before 8:30 that morning
• I wasn’t the only Ramona there! I suck at cosplay.
• No chance to play/see Portal 2, Duke Nukem Forever, Guild Wars 2 or Dragon Age 2 – the lines wrapped around the booth and if I didn’t stand in line for the Olympics, I’m not going to stand in line for a t-shirt.
• This booth. Seriously? You’re marketing your company like this on PURPOSE? The guy at the booth saw me taking pictures of his banner, so he gave me a poster. Um, thanks. You’re a fucking idiot, and I’m glad your booth was on the hidden level that didn’t get as much traffic.

So much fun. Will definitely be doing PAX11. Will continue to try to convince friends to come along – seriously, people. PAX is a total blast. Why do you keep fighting me on this?

click to view my pax10 pictures

Great. I’m left to my own devices for 4 measly hours, and I managed to find a ghost cafe and eat haunted – likely poisonous – fish and chips. I couldn’t just go for the burger – no, I had to be adventurous and get the 7-Year Fish special, served with undead fries and Diet Coke of Lies. Not even the ketchup was safe: “Fancy Ketchup” appears to be American code for “tastes like red ass oh god get this out of my mouth I want my mommy”.

Ed and I parted company around noon because he wanted to watch men play Dungeons and Dragons and I .. did not. I sat on my rear for a bit, playing on my DS (don’t tell my iPhone) and stalking MC Frontalot, which i did successfully. I saw Scott Kurtz and Wil Wheaton, but am faaaaaar too cool to stand in line for autographs so I had dirty nerd thoughts from afar and went on my way. After my aforementioned haunted lunch, I spent some money and played my games and tried to count the nerds gawking at my tits. There weren’t many, and I don’t really blame them – sure, my rack is mighty, but dude there’s Portal 2 and Fallout: New Vegas and Little Big Planet 2 and and and. My boobs can’t compete with that, and I’m silly to have tried (but i sure am comfortable).

So, haunted lunch. I was famished and without an emergency pocket sandwich, so I stumbled upon a cafe with a relatively small line in a place where I swear no cafe was earlier. Still, I ignored the warning signs because i was too excited to see that the cafe had Diet Coke for not all my money – I waited in line and ordered.

My second clue that something was wrong came from the instantaneous fish n’ chips they gave me. See, everyone else had to wait 5 or 10 minutes for their food but mine was ready before I walked two feet to the condiment area. It seems my fish was destined for me, but had been awaiting my arrival in the deep fryer for 7 years – it was very overcooked and sad. I was too hungry to argue though, so I loaded myself up with tartar sauce (the scary kind that doesn’t require refrigeration) and horrible ketchup and crossed the huge empty room to sit on the floor. I settled in against a soft wall, tucked into my expensive and questionable convention lunch, and relaxed.

Until i looked up and saw nothing across the room.

No line of people. No cafe. No tables filled with lunching nerds. There was NOTHING across from me; nothing where, a few short minutes ago, I had stood in line with a few others to collect the goods I was presently chewing on.

Obviously, everything is haunted. My otherworldly theory only solidified when the contents of my stomach did the exact opposite a short time later. Man, all I want is one good uncursed meal. Is that so much to ask?

This year, I’m armed with anti-bacterial hand goo. I hate both goo and anti-bacterial things, but I hate being sick even more. It strengthens my resolve that every time Ed goes to the bathroom, he regales me with stories about large hulking nerds who aren’t washing their hands on the way out. Ewwwww.

Day One was short but fun. We opted to return to suburbia a little early so we could take turns going to a movie -Ali and I went to the early showing of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (what? She hadn’t seen it, and this was only my third time) while the boys babysat; then we met in the parking lot to trade vehicles and children so the menfolk could go to the late showing. Hooray for figuring things out so everyone gets to have fun!

It is early and we are off to PAX again. Sadly, it is not quite early enough – I do not know if we’ll be able to get tickets for tonight’s nerd rock show. I will be sad, but I am old and shouldn’t be out past 9pm anyway what with my oldness and all.

Today is all about boobs and comfort.

To the nerd emporium!

I’m on vacation. You know what that means: NO PANTS! More so than usual, even! I packed for PAX last night, and only added a pair of emergency jeans as an afterthought. Since I won’t be on my scooter all weekend, I am not going to wear any pants and I’m going to put things in my hair. Look for me on the exhibition floor – I’ll the the one either totally-not-cosplaying as Ramona Flowers, or without pants and covered in merit badges.

Excited! A little ridiculous! Hooray!

This was in my shoe this morning:

this is somewhat unusual, even for me

Yeah, I don’t know either.

So. On Monday, I went to the dentist (again – I should just move in) to deal with the last of my cavities. While I was there, I asked if something could be done about the shards of tooth that were causing me untold grief – they didn’t necessarily hurt, but I couldn’t stop poking at them and it was cutting my mouth up pretty badly. I was hoping they could either file the pointy bits down, or yank them out until we dealt with the whole thing.

My dentist is much more ambitious than I would have thought. He decided that the tooth needed to come out, and it needed to come out now – so we’d be taking care of that while we did the fillings. I had virtually no time to psyche myself up for this, but it was too late to turn back: a tooth would be coming out, whether I was fully on board with the idea or not. Bring on the Novocain!

And, they did. Nine shots of it. It might have been more; I actually lost count of how many times they jabbed me with that goddamn needle. It took a considerable amount of time, effort and horrible nightmare-inducing implements of torture to yank the offending tooth out of my head, and I bled into soggy gauze for about 6 hours afterward. I was woozy as hell and completely frozen on the left side of my head – that much Novocain might SOUND fun, but I’m pretty sure it held all my logic and reasoning abilities hostage because it sounded like a REALLY GOOD idea to buy some lottery tickets and send my banking information to that nice Nigerian prince who will give me a large sum of money in exchange for my help.

The dentist helpfully gave me a prescription for some T3s, and I toddled off towards the office so I could collect my gear and go home. There, I passed out until Ed arrived, and he went to collect my drugs for me. I slept some more, exchange the disgusting gauze for some more, and woke up in a considerable amount of pain: something about having my face fucked by surprise dental surgery and being propped open for two hours while people diddled inside my mouth for fun.

It’s been two days since the extraction, and it’s both better and worse than I feared. The good: I’m not in agonizing pain; it’s just tender and sore and I can’t open my mouth fully. The bad: It still hurts (but I won’t take the T3s unless it’s bedtime), and it feels GROSS – the spot where my tooth used to be feels like an overripe melon and it’s horrible. I’m not supposed to be poking at it, but every time my tongue wanders over in that area I shudder a little. I’m trying to avoid having a grand old time because it hurts a little to laugh and smile, but I assume that’ll get better soon. Advil helps; as does ice cream (but mostly because it’s delicious).

In conclusion, I do not recommend breaking a tooth to such a degree that it requires an emergency extraction and I am ready for my mouth to stop hurting now.