This day’s plans have been sort of dissolving from the get-go. I checked email (or at lest Twitter) this morning and in the course of doing so experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure on my netboo from which I have not yet been able to recover. This would be vastly more upsetting if I didn’t have a pretty up-to-date Dropbox backup and a reasonable amount of confidence that I haven’t lost anything irreplaceable. Let’s hear it for off-site storage. o.O Now I’m blogging from Ted’s Asus tablet, which I am totally unfamiiar with and keep making tyops, but at least Ive got net while the baby naps. :)
The part where we brought books to Title Wave in exchange for tiny amounts of cash worked pretty well. More cash would have been nice, but, well, realistically these books have been in storage for six years and a few quid is nicer than nothing. Their new policy meant we didn’t get to bring all of the books in, but we only ended up with about half a box we couldn’t trade in, so that mostly worked.
We also brought a large amount of 2nd Edition D&D stuf to the comic shop, where, if we’re lucky, they’ll give us tiny amounts of cash for it and at least take the rest away. Right now we’re quite big on Just Take It Away.
Sadly, the part where we met family for lunch fell apart entirely. Turnagain Pass was, I suspect, very bad, and my cousin was still an hour outside of Anchorage (which her sister in Portland called the Bear’s Tooth to tell us, because we had no other way to get hold of each other: ah, isn’t living in the future grand? :)) at the point Young Indiana was turning into a I-need-a-nap pumpkin, the knock-on effects of which more or less obliterate dinner plans beause of late lunches and rescheduled meet-ups with family. OTOH, said family may be taking the literally thousands of comics back to Kenai with them, where they can be enjoyed by all the nieces and nephews and various and sundry, which is a much more pleasing fate than donating or dumping them. Ted got into comics as a kid because somebody gave them a giant drawer full to read, and he’d love to pass it on down the line. So would I, for that matter. :)
Also last night we failed to meet up with other friend for dinner, which is basically making us say we really need to get down to Anchorge for just a purely social visit. We have terribly faint hope of coming over nezt summer, since here will be over-the-pole flights, but we may have to sell a kidney or two to afford it so possibly not. :)
Oh! and I forgot the Total Fail from B&N this morning.
So we went over to see if Barne & Noble in nchorage would like me to sign stock. I went and got a copy of WAYFINDER and went to theinfo des and aid “this is me, want me to sign books?” and the kid behind the desk looked panicked and called somebody else and said I wanted to set u a signing (“No,” I said, “I’m just offering to sign stock.”) and after a minute got off the phone and said I’d have to talk to their community relations manager, and he tried to give me her email address because she wasn’t in. “No,” I said, “I’m only in town for a few minutes, really, and I know she doent answer that email as I’ve tried contacting her through it a number of times.” The kid looked flustered and I said forget it, because really, if they have to get a PR person to okay signing books, that’s just sort of way beyond worth it for me.
(But if you’re wondering why there wasn’t a signing at the Anchorage B&N, that’s why: we’ve been tryin for months to get one set up, and no one would respond. When we got the Facebook event page set up for the one in Fairbanks, an Anchorage B&N employee said “I wish that was at my store!”, and throughher we actually managed to get a response from the community relations person, which was “We need 1-2 months advance notice to set up an event like that.” At that point we were like “….”)
Anyway, so it’s been sort of a strange day, and it appears that this trip to Anchorage is really not about the socializing. Ah well! :)