Yep, this week is one I’ve been looking forward to for months. It’s Dragon*con time! What is Dragon*Con? To quote them:

Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US.

Translation? 30,000 geeks, freaks, furries, nerds, and gamers (and the people that love them!) in downtown Atlanta, GA for Labor Day weekend. Oh yeahhhh. Looking forward to seeing the guys from Ghost Hunters, Adam Savage, and the cast of Farscape and B5. And then there’s the authors, friends, artists, and just plain people-watching. God I love this con.

Instead of getting hotels rooms this year (hey, money’s tight!), we’re going to be staying with friends at their house. As part of my “thank you!” and bribe, I’m baking cookies for them. Oh and bagels. Can’t forget the bagels. Thursday we’ll drive over and end up having dinner with them and another couple we know that are coming in for the con. Friday night, we’ll be having dinner with an author friend that’s coming in for the con. Hopefully they haven’t double booked her for panels this time like they keep trying to do. Saturday is going to be insane racing around in the afternoon to get to everything we want to. Sunday’s gonna be a bit more relaxed, then Monday we drive home, complete with a kitten in the back of the car.

Why a kitten? Well the friends we’re staying with took in a stray cat, only it was a soon-to-be momma cat. She gave birth to a healthy litter, and one of my employees fell in love with the pictures of one of the kittens. So we’re transporting him to his new home when we come home. Yey for kitties with homes!

And then there’s this weekend. Saturday, during the raid, a couple of us were chatting and decided to hook up on Sunday to run “old world” heroics. So Sunday afternoon, Jared and I logged in, grabbed the others, and went racing around Burning Crusade picking up achievements. We started around 2pm, at 5:30 took a 2 hour break, then finished up around 10:30-11pm. That was 2 Hellfire Penninsula heroics, 3 Coilfang heroics, 2 Auchindoun heroics, 2 CoT heroics, 1 Magister’s Terrace heroic, and 3 TK heroics. Plus, I didn’t have the rep for the key to get into the TK instances, so add in 3 regular Mech runs to get the rep, and a regular MT run since I hadn’t ever been to it on Wrenn to get keyed for heroic mode. Oy! But damn it was fun!

So this is what my week looks like right now:
1. Knit like it’s no one’s business to finish one project
2. Go to Kara for a fun run (how fast CAN a bunch of lvl 80s cruise through there with bad jokes and puns a’flyin’?) tonight
3. Finish laundry tonight
4. Clean kitchen tonight
5. Start baking bagels and cookies tomorrow
6. Settle who’s babysitting the cats while we’re gone
7. Raid tomorrow night
8. Finish baking bagels and cookies Wednesday
9. Re-clean kitchen Wednesday
10. Doublecheck laundry pile to make sure it didn’t regrow Wednesday
11. Pack Wednesday (make sure to take items to be signed, multiple books from multiple people, DVDs, etc, plus clothes, etc., gifts, baked goods, batteries for camera, cables for eletronics we’re taking, Katamari games, PSPs, extra books to read, plus knitting for the drive)
12. Clean out car trunk of excess crap Wednesday
13. Attempt to go to bed “early” Wednesday night
14. Wake up at “deargodnoit’stooearlydon’tmakemedriiiiiiive!” on Thursday and get this whole thing started!

…

Damn. I’m gonna be busy. o.O /gets back to the knitting frenzy

It’s a good thing I went to bed early tho. I needed the rest. Turns out Friday, with all the running around I had to do, plus the store being swamped by returning teachers, meant that I was drained by the end of the day. By the end of the day, Mom had gotten home, Jared had gone to the eye docs again and gotten his new computer, and the store had it’s best single day ever since we opened just over a year ago. I’m still in shock over it, but thrilled. And to add to the happy, my friend Anne finally got the box of knitted goodies I’d sent to her earlier in the week, so now I can share pictures!

I’d made for her a shawl and some fingerless mitts from patterns found on Ravelry, a lovely online community of knitters, crocheters, spinners, and dyers that has a wealth of information. So since Anne whimpered that no one ever sends her knitted goodies, I rummaged on Ravelry and found some patterns for some things I thought she might like.

First up was a pair of fingerless mitts. On Ravelry, they’re called “Nalu Mitts“, since “nalu” means “wave” in Hawaiian. Me, I never can remember that, but I remember “wave” in Japanese is “nami”, so I keep calling them the “Nami Mitts”. Hey, it’s my brain, work with me here! I’d made a pair of them in blue and love them. They were perfect for working on the computer when you’re just a bit cold but still want to feel to type. Since Anne gets a sea breeze where she lives which can get a bit nippy sometimes, I asked her to pick a color from a range I gave her. She picked “spring green”. To me, the yarn is a spring green. She swears, now that she’s seen it, it’s moss green. All I know is she loves the gloves, thus, I’m happy.

The other item I knitted was something called a Sunday Market Shawl. This one came about because Anne saw a ball of Noro yarn on my Flickr page, showing the various colors in the ball. She drooled on it, said I needed to knit her something with that yarn, and I eyed the one green mitt I’d already done. But since the pattern for the shawl said it was great for those evenings when there’s a light nip to the air but you don’t want to wear a full jacket, hey, I’ll knit that instead! And in the yarn she’s drooling on! Awesome! It was an easy enough knit, and once again, she loved it. It was amusing when she called to say she had the box, cos she was under orders to not open it til she called me. Once I gave her permission, she chatted away as she opened it, then nothing but “Oooo!!!!!” for the next two minutes. I finally looked at Jared, who was with me at that point, and grinned. “I think she likes them. I think I broke her.” She finally said something coherant at that point, and we got on with the talking. ::grin::

So yeah, Friday was good. Saturday? Eh. We cleaned up the mess at the store, putting everything to rights again, and tried to figure out what all I have to reorder today to have back in stock for the next wave of teachers. As the day went on, the headache got worse, and the tummy decided it had had quite enough tyvm, so I had to back out of raiding that night to go to bed early and try to not be sick. Sunday was grocery shopping, laundry, and me baking two batches of bagels: one for me, and one for friends next to the store. This morning when I dropped the bagels off, they cheered and were petting them, last I saw.

I’m hoping this week will be as busy as last week was. It’s making me feel better, and not quite as worried as I was back in the June lull. We’ve got one year under our belts now, and people are beginning to rely on us for their art and teacher needs. Now if I could only get more book shoppers in! (Darn you, Books-a-Million!) This weekend I have off, and I might end up face down in the bed for most of it if this week’s anything like last week. Whee!

Oh dear… I still have to look at orders for the community college kids and art supplies! Gah! /flail

Like bagels: In Atlanta, I had an addiction to Einstein’s Bagels. Feel free to tell me that so-and-so’s was better, but dangit, I loved Einstein’s. They were something that made me oh so happy on days that I knew were going to go not so fun for me. For my birthday this year, I recieved a KitchenAid stand mixer. A truely excellent gift and one that I’ve been very pleased to use often since I got it. But the first recipe that I wanted to try on it? Bagels. Result? Oh dear god nomnomnomnomnom! Perfect flavor, perfect chew, perfect everything! There’s not a bakery in town that makes them, and there’s nothing at the grocery stores here that can come close. So, I make my own now.

So what does that have to do with “once upon a time ago, I had a WoW blog…”? Well a couple of weeks ago, I started having less and less time in my life, so I stopped playing WoW for a bit. And right before that, I’d really slacked off blogging about WoW, so between the two events, I decided that I’d revamp my blog. More Nightravyn, less WoW.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still heading back into WoW (hopefully soon), and I’m still gonna talk about WoW on here. But now it’s not a “WoW blog” per se. It’s a gaming/anime/manga/knitting/computers/random mutters/art/cats/family/life blog now.

Come on… did you REALLY think I was gonna quit gaming? Ha! /cackle and starts plotting return to nuking everything in sight in a few days or so