hazelchaz | You know the day destroys the night. Night divides the day. Tried to run, tried to hide.

Photos online: Remodeling Maria's Old Room part 1: Starting to Paint (08-Jun-2007); Lynn

LASFS/Aftermetings part 278: Coral Cafe (07-Jun-2007) et seq.; LASFS part 280: Election Night (14-Jun-2007) et seq.; Potluck People: Hugger House Party (16-Jun-2007); and Cosplay Ice Skating in Anaheim (17-Jun-2007). Click on

library_lynn to see the LASFS pictures.

We did a little work down at the house, then went to the party Saturday night. Sunday was the ice skating thing. There were ten of us -- and Jason had reserved the rink for us for an hour. We certainly could have absorbed about as many additional fans that wanted to show up. There were three people that came all the way out to Anaheim (from homes as far away as Ventura County), didn't think there was enough fun to be had with such a small group (so they didn't want to join in and make that group slightly bigger), sat around for ten minutes talking about hockey or whatever, and then went off to find something they liked better. Of course, if they'd brought costumes, they could have nearly doubled the costumed presence on the ice... Anyhow, they didn't participate, so I didn't take their pictures.

We had given Jason our contributions -- we all chipped in $10 each, and he made up the difference from a bonus he'd received at work. I got a pair of ice skates, then remembered I can't possibly skate and shoot at the same time. I took the skates back off before Lynn and I headed into the rink area.

library_lynn got out on the ice, went down the length of one side of the rink and fell and hit her head. She sat with me on the sidelines (actually, in a penalty box) while I took pictures. I just used the default settings -- I haven't learned all of the secrets of my new camera to fiddle with the exposure settings to compensate for shooting on ice, so the exposures are a bit off of on most of them.

After the skating time, we went down to Denny's at Katella and State College (the one next to the star-shaped carl's Jr.) I had a chance to put my "Bistro Economics" cards into service. They worked just fine. I got a jump on splitting the bill by hanging onto the menu and finding out what everybody ordered. Look up the dollar amounts on the chart, add them up on the back of the card. I didn't write small enough and had to finish the sums in my little notebook, but that's not much of a hardship.

There was only a little bit of fussing that I had to do when the bill came (mostly because in two or three places I'd found the wrong dollar amount in the menu), and the actual cashing-out went very quickly. Having the little notebook with me turned out to be very handy because only two people paid cash. So I'd write their name on a single sheet of paper, their total, and put their credit card with that, and then brought all the slips up to the front for the cashier to ring them up.

At lunch I'd mentioned that I'll be at Anime Expo -- we'll have a hospitality room, if all goes well it'll be on the same floor as the Hyatt's front desk and not far from it either -- and someone asked why I started up

animelosangeles in the first place. I told them about the McGuire Conversational Theory of Conventions, I told them about con suites, and I said that I wanted to have a convention that did some things a little differently from the other, big conventions. We don't have to make our convention be a 5% scale model of Anime Expo; if you want Anime Expo, you can go to the real thing.