Jim Goings

This year’s Penny Arcade Expo was my first.  In a word, it is EPIC.  I knew that it would be great, but it far surpassed my expectations.

What started out as a trip for just me and my friend Kevin turned into a mega-trip of 10 people.  As most of us were on a budget, we decided to share two hotel rooms.  The only ones we could find were about six miles from the convention center, but right on an express bus route. 

Thursday – The Day Before PAX
Kevin, Val, and I drove up on Thursday morning so we could tour around Seattle for a day.  We went to the Seattle Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum.

The Science fiction part of the museum was awesome, including some amazing collections of movie memorabilia.  Unfortunately they don’t allow pictures inside the museum, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s worth a visit.

The Experience Music Project (the majority of the same complex) was also most excellent.  Aside from the great exhibits, they had lots of places where you could learn, play, and otherwise interact with musical instruments.  We even got to into a sound booth and play real instruments together as a band.  We sucked… but it was fun!

When we were done, we used the Garmin Nuvi GPS that Val had to find a german pub.  Bingo… one just a couple of miles away!

In the evening, Adam, Justin, Mike, and Judy arrived.

Friday – PAX Day One
Day one started fairly early with us arriving in line a little after 8am.  We waited in a huge line of several thousand people.  This being PAX and not some other crappy convention meant that there was geeky entertainment while we waited in line.  Internet videos, text message trivia games, gameboys, magic the gathering, and countless other things were happening.  It was pretty much the best time I’ve ever had waiting in line.

We were finally let into the Expo hall at 10 am.  Upon entering, I was smacked with an explosion of awesome.  One minute there are seven of us, jaws on the floor, and the next we all fell victim to “Oooh!  Shiny!” and departed in many directions.  I think we managed to stay together in the expo hall for about 45 seconds.

Blizzard was there in full force with Warcraft Cataclysm, Starcraft II, and Diablo III playable demos.  I only played Diablo III and it was awesome.  It probably won’t be for sale until 2010, but it was fun even in it’s current state of development.

There were a lot of costumed folks running around and I stopped to take pics of a few of my favorites.

Megan, Kelly, and Kyle arrived Friday evening and we all went back to the hotel fairly late Friday night, too tired to stick around for the MC Frontalot concert.  We wanted to be well rested for our Ultimate Dungeon Delve in the morning.

Saturday - PAX Day Two
Most of us arrived a little after 8am.  We went to the queue room, grabbed our concert bracelets and departed to discuss last minute plans for our Ultimate Dungeon Delve attempt at 10:30am.  We won the delve after about four hours of nervous gameplay!  The full details are on Dragon Avenue.

After our major win, we hung around the expo a bit, played a few games, and eventually basked in the glow of our awesome accomplishment.  We went to dinner at the pub in the Red Lion Hotel.   We ate good food and did some more basking in our own glow.

Afterward, we returned to PAX and went to the concerts.  Wil Wheaton opened the event with an excellent dedication to Jonathan Coulton (JoCo) and an introduction to Paul and Storm, the opening act.  I had never heard to them, but they were awesome!

After Paul and Storm melted our faces off, JoCo took the stage and proceed to do the same.  He even brought up Paul and Storm for most of his set as backup singers.  My favorite highlight of the JoCo set was when he changed the lyrics of “My Monkey” to “Wil Wheaton”!

He did three encores, including Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond and Birdhouse for my Soul by They Might Be Giants!

Sunday - PAX Day Three
We were wiped at this point as the concerts lasted until 2:30am!  We hit the pillows around 3:20am and woke up at 7:30am for more PAX fun!  Our first stop was the Star Wars: The Old Republic demo which was decent, but not as awesome as I was hoping.  The presenters were too marketing-like and should have been developers (geeks like us).  Nonetheless, the game looks great!

One highlight was meeting Sandeep Parikh (The Guild, Legend of Neil) and Tony Janning (The Legend of Neil).  I got autographed DVDs and pictures to add to my Home Theater decorations.

Adam and I attended the Wil Wheaton Awesome Hour and it was indeed awesome.  Afterward, we headed home completely drained of energy, but filled with awesome.

I went rafting this past Saturday with Steve and Christian.  It’s been years since I’ve been, but it was awesome!  As always, All Adventures Rafting was excellent!  We had a great time!

Here we are at the top of Husum Falls.  I’m the only one in the boat actually paddling with any shred of power.  Of course, I have lots of experience paddling.  Yeah, I pretty much just tooted my own horn.

Hunkered down in the “crash” position, we’re take the plunge!

We’re going under!

We have achieved submarine status!

Steve almost fell out!  Luckily our guide had quick reflexes and grabbed him before he did!

We’re alive!

The word “landscaping” makes me think of something artfully done by a skilled professional.  Perhaps a better word for what we did in our front yard is “yard makeover”.  We pruned the trees and covered the gnarled roots with weed barrier fabric and bark dust.  We also created some bordered areas and used weed barrier and bark dust there as well.  The biggest part of the job was choosing plants and digging holes for them.  The area in front of the house is pretty much clay, but we filled in the area around the plants with dirt and new soil.  Hopefully the plants will survive.  I have my doubts.

Whether the plants live or die, the front yard looks much better!  I need to add some seed and fertilizer to the lawn, but otherwise I think it’s in good shape.

We planted a few varieties of plants.  The ones flanking in the top of the photo are Pieris Japonica (Purity Pieris).  The one in the middle top is a Winter Daphne.  The other three are varieties of Hellebore.  They are all flowering evergreens, so they should look great all year.  You can see all of the plants close up on Flickr.

We were going to plant a couple of plants here next to the big tree as the lawn doesn’t grow well here due to the massive roots.  However, I dug right through the Comast cable.  Luckily, we don’t use Comcast, so it wasn’t a problem!  I decided to stop digging anyway so I didn’t cut through the Verizon FIOS line.  Well, I still managed to screw up and drove a stake through the FIOS fiber, killing our phone, Internet, and TV.  I called Verizon immediately and told them what happened.  They laughed (and probably pointed), but were very kind and sent out a tech the very next morning.  He installed a new fiber line on top of the lawn marked with yellow caution tape.  We were back up and running in no time!   They are supposed to send a seperate crew out to bury a new line.  They never said how much this would cost me (if anything)… I hope they tell me beforehand.  I’m half-expecting some ridiculous charge on my next bill.

My three oldest girls are sick today.  They came back from a sleepover and starting throwing up.  They can’t even keep a little water down.  Poor things.  They’ll probably hate me when their older for taking pics of them when they were sick, but why not remember moments when mommy and daddy waited on you hand and foot all day?

Hannah resting in the living room

Miriam resting in the living room

Simone in our bed after a shower to clean up after an accident.  My poor baby. She’s still so cute though!

In the showdown of all showdowns, we took on our back yard and kicked it’s butt!   I hired Mark to come over and help us.   First up was a trip to the dump where we unloaded a van full of crap we had sitting around in the yard.  Then, Mark ran the rototiller most of the day while I trimmed the trees – all 4 of them.  Mark ended up tilling about half of the yard which is awesome.  We placed some edging and moved some of the rocks into the border areas.  Of course, the rocks were from the other half of the yard where we dug them up a few weeks ago.  They were all muddy, so we spend about 2 hours washing rocks.  Yes, we washed rocks.  The results are great, but we have a long way to go.

Mark finishing up the tilling.  Now we have a mostly level yard ready for sod!

We covered the tilled earth with plastic to prevent anything from growing.  In a few weeks we’ll plant sod.

I cut down the tree what was growing in the middle of the two pine trees shown here.  I also pruned the weird tree you can just see on the far right.

If you look towards the house, you can see a huge pile of limbs and leaves from the maple tree sitting in front of the window.  The foreground shows some of the trimmings from the other trees.