This past weekend was the Toronto ComiCON Fan Appreciation show on Saturday and Sunday at the Metro Convention Centre, Pete and I were there with All New Comics and four tables of our stuff. It was also a chance for Kaylin, Char, and I to have a little mini-vacation in downtown Toronto.

Friday night I took the train down to Toronto and spent some time building the new All New Comics. Here’s a live sample of the work in progress. I’m still going to Tab-Ify the navigation, and tighten the cart area on the top, but I’m pretty happy with this overall.

I met up with Liam and we went out for a couple of drinks, caught up on the whirlwind that is his life (moving from TSN.ca to CBC.ca), and then headed back to his place for some Xboxing.

Saturday I headed to the show, helped Pete and Gus set up, and then started selling comics for the show! We did pretty good Saturday, and I did a couple of trips around the show floor. The highlight of the show for me was when Mike Grell (the writer/artist of Green Arrow in the 90’s) came over and bought a copy of his book “The Longbow Hunters” off of us.

Char and Kaylin came down to Toronto on Saturday afternoon and checked into our hotel, or as Kaylin called it, our “hometel”. Our hotel room had a kitchenette, king sized bed, and pull out couch, as well as a 32″ LCD TV (which Kaylin loved. See for Kaylin “vacation” means “I get to watch all the TV I want”). Saturday night we went over to Larry and Liz’s place for dinner, and had a great time visiting.

Sunday morning we had breakfast with our friends Dave and Joanne (and their daughter Lia), then Char, Kaylin and I went over to the show where we found Kaylin a super-keen Spider-Man stuffed animal (which is so awesome I can’t even tell you). Kaylin then knocked over the entire bottom row of comics on the dealer behind us. It was hilariously cute and innocent, even if it was potentially financially devastating. Luckily no comics were harmed in the knockage of comics. The girls went to the science center with Char’s sister Sharon, while I sold more comics. I got a great sketch of Batgirl (with blonde hair and brown eyes) from Agnes Garbowska for Kaylin’s room. She’s now got a great Batgirl and a terrific Saturn girl which will go on her wall when I get around to painting her room big-girl colours (maybe next weekend?). I also picked up a couple of art books for myself. Then I helped Pete and Gus pack up the stuff, and headed over to our hotel room. Sunday night we went down to the Beaches for dinner at Licks, and then dropped auntie Sharon back off at home.

On Monday we went to the Toronto Zoo, and spent most of our time in the African area (Orangatans, Gorillas, Elephants, and the bats), I got some awesome pictures of fish, and some really great pictures of gorillas which I’ll post on my flickr account soon.

After that it was heading back home. The drive was quick and uneventful (even for near rush hour in Toronto), and our little house gnome slept the whole way back.

Since returning I’ve been working on my shelving units (pictures tomorrow), and today I totally cleaned out the garage, including spraying it down to get rid of all the MDF residue.

I’m about to do my taxes and see how much cashish the government stole from me last year. My guess: A lot.

Funny side story, I use the Askimet Comment Spam system which manages to keep all comment spam off my site without the use of a Capatcha or anything. You never see these spam, but I check them out occasionally.

The comment spam bots that spam websites have gotten more sophisticated over the years, instead of just hundreds of links to “big breasted beauties” or “enlarge your poll” (which by the way will probably ensure that the spam bots harvest the HELL out of this page), I get gems like this.

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article tans! | Radical Hive, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

The only thing that these posts have in common is a link to some link-farm site. I love how the link farmers think that I’ll probably approve such an inane comment. I mean, it’s TOTALLY useless, not germaine to any conversation, and would be deleted even if it weren’t obvious link bait. Why not make a generic positive comment like “Wow, this was really interesting. You pose questions that I’ve never thought of before in this post and have really made me reconsider my opinion.”. See that’s link farm GOLD right there! Generic enough that the average bear would just gloss right on by it.