So after a few days of reflection, I think this past weekend was actually a pretty decent one. It didn't start out that way, and it ended on an off note, but a lot of the stuff in the chewy middle was a ton of fun.
On Saturday after spending a fun morning and early afternoon with Kaylin and Char, I headed off to London for Ryan's birthday. The skies opened and all of the heavens flooded the earth, and at one point I'm pretty sure I saw an ark float down the street…but the rain let up just enough that I could get to my car and drive off. By the time I reached the highway (2 minutes away) the rain had entirely let up. By some freakish weather weirdness, our house got poured on for another 3 hours, definately the strangest localized weather phenomenon I've seen in a while.
Meanwhile I booted down the 401, confident that my two hour trek to London would be filled with Podcasty goodness, and plenty of iPod iTunes from my iTrip. Of course my iCar doesn't have iAir, so it was bound to be a steamy drive. Although I don't have conventional “air conditioning”, I do have 2 120 AC, two windows down, driving 120 on the 401.
Things were a little heavy for a Saturday (I really can't believe how many people have places to be on Saturday's in this city), but not too bad…until I got to Milton. Just about at the Escarpment, things slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped. I sat in traffic, listening to the news radio which told me sweet FA, and did nothing except sweat, drink my coffee, and sip on some water for an hour as emergency vehicles passed by me. Slowly, traffic was allowed through one lane and we discovered that two cars had collided perpendicularly, while another had flipped into the ditch, and another had somehow managed to get rear-ended (though only one of the non-ditch cars appeared to have front end damage). We booted along for literally 5 more kilometers until we stopped dead again. This time a tractor-trailer had jackknifed and took up all 3 lanes.
At this point I was thinking that either a: God hates me, or b: God is trying to tell me something. Then the coffee, two bottles of water, and the half litre of water I had drank at home before leaving hit…and it wasn't good as my bladder felt fair to bursting. We were eventually led off the highway and sent on a back road of hell tour (although I managed to find a Tim Hortons to relieve myself at first).
After going through a horrendous line of cars to get off the back roads, I managed to get back onto the 401 and booted down the highway and due to a very strong tail wind, and with some finangling of the jet stream, I was able to make the Milton to London trip in record time.
Still, by the time I got to Ryan's, it was 6:40. It had been very nearly four and a half hours to do a two hour drive.
The party was fun though, I got to see my buddy, his wife, my goddaughter, and their three month old baby girl, not to mention my buddy Rich and wife Kara's new two week old little girl.
After dinner Ryan and I went to check out his new house which was pretty fun, it's in a great location, and I can't wait to see what he does with this one (I'm still amazed at what he's done to his current place…and though I've said it a thousand times, the stairs look frigging AMAZING!). We dropped off a package at one of my All New Comics customers' place (that's the kind of service you get from me boys, if I'm in town, I'll drop your package off personally to make sure it doesn't get destroyed by Canada Post), and I popped by my mom and dad's place before filling up the gas tank, grabbing an energy drink, and hitting the road to make it back to the 'Jax by 2am.
Sunday we had a nice leisurely breakfast, and then took the Kegger over to the Imagination model homes to get some design inspiration for our own house. One of the places had a gorgeous laundry room with these great tiles on the floor. While looking around at things, Kaylin decided to stand up and take a couple more steps (oh yeah, she's a walker now). She lost her balance a little bit and bumped her head on the floor, which lead to a 5 minute scream fest. Char got her calmed down with a combination of “You're okay's” and some very clever distraction “Is that a flower?”.
We went over to the Baskin Robbins were Kaylin had her first frozen yogurt (which she really enjoyed), before heading back home.
We ended the weekend with a nice meal, and our very tired little girl fell asleep without her regular bath ritual.
After that I managed to get the latest All New Comics ads pulled off, cranked off some stuff for Black Swan Press (still coming soon), and updated ANC with the weeks' new comics.
I'm really impressed by the amount of business we're doing lately. Just this week alone we've got another 12 orders, which makes two weeks in a row with a dozen orders or more. The ads on Newsarama and Google are definately paying for themselves, and the word is really getting out there about All New Comics.