I finally finished the third chapter of Knight Commander. Please feel free to read and review at your leisure. I’m working on chapter four right now…

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I was feeling pretty sick most of the last week, which was making existance kind of miserable. My stomach was queasy for most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Friday. All I could do was sit and not try to exert myself, though I think what had happened was I worked out my abdominal muscles at the fitness center the night before. I did not eat until quite some time later, though I did drink quite a bit of Gatorade because I was sweating heavily after my two hour workout. I was really trying not to exert myself, but thanks to Jody, he showed me what was going wrong with my workouts. I was doing sets in cycles, rather than sequential. Not having had to actually use weights before, I didn’t know that. I really felt the burn early Tuesday morning, and I guess when I had something to eat, my abdomen probably didn’t like that and decided to retaliate. Oh, well… I guess all I can do is try to take it a little easier on my crunches. For those days, though, I was sitting at my desk and playing a shitload of EverQuest, since Jody felt sorry for me and offered to help me level a little bit. So, we took one of my low-level characters (a level 7 paladin) and worked her all the way to level 24 in less than two days. I got her to 25 last night, but I was only three percent into 25 and then promptly died at Dawnshroud Peaks (geh), so I lost her level and am back down to 24. Oh, well.

Earlier today, I finished I, My, Me, Strawberry Eggs. What an awesome series that was.

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Upon my return from Anime Expo (with which I will finish writing about, please be patient), it seems as though the pace of my workplace has increased by a factor of twenty. Days that I used to look forward to of relaxing and just enjoying the quiet from time to time, has turned into a whirlwind of activity and report writing. eBay’s network operations center is far more documentationally oriented than PayPal’s, so getting myself integrated into the new way of things has really been pushing me above and beyond the standard quiet shifts over at PayPal.

Bleh.

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Day Two: Torture Chairs

I got a completely late start this morning. I had intended to wake up at 7am, so I could take Timmy down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. I found it funny that we’d yet to enjoy breakfast over in the restaurant downstairs once since we’ve been here, and here we are, almost half the convention is over. Todd woke up first before 10am, and then as I was realizing exactly how much time we had left before the voucher booth closed at 1pm, I snapped awake and started kicking people left and right to wake up.

This year, as a special to those of us who pre-registered for AX as well as booked a room at the Hilton (though I’m not sure if the Marriott or the Coast offered this as well), they issued four vouchers, one for every name I put on the list. Each of these vouchers is good for either the Music Video Contest or the Masquerade. You can exchange the voucher for either one, and you can only do the exchange at the vouch booth in the Marriott, which is just across the little convention street from the Hilton. The hours of operation were 10am to 1pm. Now here’s the big kicker. You would think that with four guys in the room, it would not take us much in the way of getting ready with two or three hours to get over to the Marriott. However, these lazy bastards left us with about fifteen minutes to spare, and when we got to the line, they capped it off! I was about ready to rip someone some new orifices for being paranoid about the voucher line, as I kept explaining to the guy in front of me that the AMV contest was tonight, and there was no other time to exchange the tickets.

Luckily, using logic and my awesome powers of persuasion, we were able to slip in and get our tickets. So, the only real errand that needed to be run was accomplished and we ended up with sequential tickets. One would think that everything was fine, but wait, there’s more. Dave, Todd, and I went to the Kajiura Yuki concert in the same main events hall that we were going to see the AMV contest, and I noticed that the sequential numbers we were given have a slight flaw. Out of the four numbers, two of them were aisle seats. In other words, two of the seats were on the left side of the row, while the next two seats were on the opposite side of the row, one row back. We would not be able to all sit together, but later on in the day, we would figure something out.

The Kajiura concert was interrupted for me, though I did get to hear the one song I’d been dying to hear since I’d heard it online under a month ago. A friend of mine from Fanime had been trying to get a hold of me since before we arrived at the Hilton yesterday, but due to the amount of noise and frustration, I didn’t hear the voicemail until the first day of the convention. Brian Doan, who was the master of ceremonies for the Fanime’s Der Cosplay, ended up being invited to act as the MC for AX’s Masquerade, and since we’d worked together on staff back in 2001, we’d kind of missed one another. Being on staff with someone of a like mind tends to bond people together, so while I came away from Fanime with sourness, I didn’t forget the people who made it fun through all the bullshit. Brian was one of those people. Anyway, he called me in the middle of the concert, and I invited him up to the third floor of the Anaheim convention center to meet me and chat. We ended up chatting all the way until the AMV contest at 8pm. It was good to see him again, and I hope we keep up contact a little better than in the past.

Thomas informed us prior to the seating period, that he had an extra ticket for the AMV contest, since Alma decided not to go. This meant Timmy could go, but then we had another pair of tickets that were separated from each other. Jody’s eyesight was pretty poor since he had lost his glasses a while before AX started, so we sat Jody and Timmy together in seats that were in the 300s, while the other four of us sat in the 2000s. The AMV contest was long and the seats they used for the audience were torture on my back and rear end. I made it through three and a half categories before I just said enough is enough and went back to the room, downing a couple of Aleve’s and ordering room service. As an aside, by this point, I had spent over three hundred on room service alone.

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Day One: Discovering Drunken Master

I got an early start on the day, after speaking with Thomas about getting into the exhibit hall before everyone else. A mutual acquaintance of mine, Hugo, runs Paradigm Entertainment, and he needed some assistance with setting up his booth. I’ve worked in the exhibit hall at Anime Expo before, several times. In 99, with Jody, we sat in the exhibit hall pretty much the entire convention. It was actually the most fun I’d had that year, mostly due to the fact that Jody and I would just release a year’s worth of attitude on people coming up to the booth by totally fucking with their minds. Anyway, I wanted a head start on the exhibit hall, and not wanting to have to wait in the huge-ass line that usually forms before the hall opens on the first day.

Thomas and I moved heavy boxes between the U-Haul outside the convention center and the booth. Now, ordinarily, this isn’t much of a problem, but AX decided to not allow dollies or handtrucks inside the center, so all we could do was to bring the handtruck to the entrance and then offload it by hand and then walk the football field length to the booth within the Hall. Luckily, though, we only had to make three trips and after that, it was pretty much just putting manga into protective baggies for the rest of the morning until they opened up the hall. There were two other girls that were there in the booth, and we just sort of took our cues from them, since they were direct (paid) employees and I was just looking for early entry into the hall in exchange for manual labor.

After the hall opened, though, my feet were absolutely killing me. Thomas and I walked around, looking for a particular dealer (*cough* J-List *cough*), then we stopped by Drunken Master. Drunken Master is a dealer in HK Cinema, as well as a nice selection of Japanese movies, though they didn’t have the one Esumi Makiko film I was looking for. I ended up buying Shaolin Soccer, 2009 Lost Memories, Time and Tide, Battle Royale Special Edition, The Returner, Dummy Mommy without a Baby, and Fulltime Killer. Did I go a little overboard? Not really. Turns out that since I was helping out an exhibitor, I got the 25% discount on everything at their store, so for a little less than $140, I walked out with eight import movies, which is a great deal! But right then, my feet really started hurting and we decided to abandon ship and return to the room and watch some of the bounty I had won.

Room service was pretty much the preferred method of getting food today. I think I ordered five bowls of popcorn shrimp from the menu, and blew about $150 in room service charges for just myself. Todd, Jody, and Timmy alternated their time between the Hall and some of the Video Rooms (Timmy got himself some loot; he picked up an Ein plushie, and a huge Love Hina poster), but Dave, Thomas, and I holed up in the room watching Shaolin Soccer, The Returner, and Dummy Mommy without a Baby. Shaolin Soccer had us pissing ourselves with laughter, because it was just so damn funny. The Returner was an awesome Japanese sci-fi flick. I’ve seen Dummy Mommy four times, now; the other two guys seemed to not appreciate it as much as the other movies I picked up, but then, Shaolin Soccer is a tough act to follow, considering the nature of the two comedies.

Tomorrow is the Anime Music Video awards, which I’m planning on using my ticket voucher for. Oh, that’s right. I forgot to talk about the ticket vouchers. This year, as an incentive to pre-register and book a sponsor hotel early, AX offered AMV and Masquerade tickets. As we had four adults registered to the room, we got four vouchers to use on either the AMV Contest or the Masquerade. Now, I’ve never been big into the cosplay scene, so I’m going to pass on Masquerade and hang out at the AMV Contest until it ends, which will probably be around 1am Saturday morning.

At the end of the day, though, we all pretty much passed out while watching a movie we ordered through the hotel’s entertainment system. I woke up three hours later with a severe case of heartburn and so did Dave. So, at about four in the morning, we both walked down to the front desk and asked if they might have something to help us out. We were looking for Pepto, Pepcid, anything that would make the hurting stop. What happened was, we ended up having to pull the Cruiser out of valet parking and drive over to the nearest 7-11, where I bought the very last Pepcid on the shelf. Lucky! Anyway, Timmy took the opportunity to go to Video 3 and watch Lupin the Third TV for an hour, and I’m sort of waiting for him to return while also waiting for my Pepcid to kick in. I’ll end this here and move on to Day Two when it happens.

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Journal entry being written…

Anime Expo 2003 Exhibit Hall Archway
Before opening, look how spacious this year’s Hall is!
Paradigm’s Booth, where I spent all of Thursday morning helping out…
The Exhibit Hall after opening… it got crowded real fast!

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The Cast of Characters

Todd: My Roommate and one of my best friends. We’ve been going to Anime Expo together since 1996.
Jody: Todd’s younger brother, he’s gone to AX a couple of times in 99, and 2000.
Dave: Close friend, he’s been going to AX since 99.
Timmy: My nephew, this is his first AX ever.

Before Dawn Broke:

The day before the day before Anime Expo, I went to the car rental place and picked up one of the ugliest vehicles in which to travel: The Chrysler PT Cruiser. It’s big enough to fit all our luggage in, but barely large enough for people, which was our mistake in selecting it (I went to the car rental place with Jody and Tim). But, seeing as how I wanted to put the trip’s miles on something other than my Toyota Camry Solara, it seemed like a good investment to shell out the $280 for the week’s rental instead.

It was my intention to leave for AX by 4:30 am. My reasoning behind this was largely due to the fact that they typically start pre-registration early afternoons on the day before, and getting there in time to decompress from the long drive was a good idea. I had slept the night before, but it was only for six hours, and as it turned out, I did not actually get underway until after 5 in the morning on Wednesday. After a stop at the Safeway’s by Todd’s father’s house, dawn broke before we even left the city’s limits and sped down US-101 towards Pacheco Pass. The Cruiser is a four-banger, so it putters up and down the hills with a full load in the same audible fashion that my old red Toyota Tercel did back in the nineties. We made pretty good time, making it to Coalinga in roughly two and half hours, pulling in to the Chevron station there at 8am. After we filled up on gas, we headed to the Denny’s, had breakfast and then I handed the keys to Jody to drive some of the way so I could write a little bit on the laptop about the journey. I got online via my cell phone and chatted with a few friends online.

The total time of the trip was about seven hours; we parked the PT Cruiser at a little after Noon, checked in to the Anaheim Hilton and then relaxed for a little bit. Dave, Timmy, and I walked down to the hotel lobby and stood in line for registration around 2pm, and did not realize that for not having paid beforehand, we were consigned to a little-known, oft-visited place called line limbo, wherein all lines around you move but you remain absolutely still for over an hour. Dave and I were incredibly frustrated with the event, and vowed that next year, we would prepay no matter what. It just seemed to us that all the excuses just amounted to the fact that they dropped the ball on organizing registration for the second year in a row. We did not leave the line until almost 7pm, having spent five hours waiting for our badges.

We met up with Thomas and Alma, friends of mine from San Francisco, and then took the hotel tram to the Disneyland shopping area, known as Downtown Disney, to go to the theater and watch Terminator 3. T3 ended up being a disappointing film, but I won’t bore you with a review. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was already late, and it was time for sleep. After all, tomorrow morning is Day One, and I’ve got an appointment with an exhibit hall…

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Journal entry in progress… enjoy some pics.

Welcome to Chudville, Population: You!
Evil Jody!
Our Room (View One)
Our Room (View Two)
Registration

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A little more than twenty-six hours before the gang and I set out for Anime Expo this year. I’ve got the car rental to pick up at noon, the hotel reservation is booked, which I’ll confirm tomorrow, and all I need now is to pack my bag and get all my shit together. For some reason, this year, I feel a bit more relaxed than I have in previous years, probably because with a car rental I’m not too worried about getting my car serviced or cleaned. I’m still looking forward to the drive down this year, because it’s the best part of the trip every year. And leaving before dawn always means we’ll get there in time for pre-registration and then taking a nap before the chaos of the weekend begins.

I can hardly wait!

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