By parking, I mean violation.

I got a parking ticket last Saturday. Totally my fault. I knowingly parked in a Bus stop. I was just exhausted and didn’t want to carry anything too far, then got distracted and lost track of time. I forgot about the car and realized I had a ticket when someone came to pick me up to go out. Naturally I moved the car right away and paid the ticket within five days. I think it said I had 21. The cost of said ticket was 55 American Dollars. Pretty expensive. It was my fault though and the fines serve a purpose to remind us not to park where we are not supposed to since there are good reasons we shouldn’t be parking in those places.

Anyway, the Monday after I got the ticket, I came into work for the first work day of the new year. Very exciting. I kid.

I begin to read my daily Metro newspaper and what is on the second page, but an article going over proposals for parking ticket hikes. In this particular article, bus stop fines were specifically mentioned as going up from 55 to 100 American Dollars! This Boston.com article mentions that residential parking fines most likely won’t be affected. Thats nice to know since they are even lower than the bus stop fines at the bargain basement fee of 40 American Dollars.

I really need to get that residential parking sticker I just have not found time to get yet.

All is not lost though. As 2008 has come to a close and 2009 has sparked to life, I have changed over to a new notebook, as I do annually. In this timely and convenient period of change, I have looked upon Amazon.com and ordered a new implement with which to write my name in the yellow snow-like pages of my new notebook.

Behold the Cross Ion Lunar Gray.

Due to arrive in roughly 2-18 weeks. Gotta love Super Saver Shipping!

The Wishlist has more or less been updated for the holiday season. Mostly books and dvds with a couple big ticket items mixed in. I was considering adding a couple computer reference books as well, but I have several amazon.com gift certificates that I need to use soon, so I’ll probably use them for that.

Thanks if anyone actually buys anything off there.

My mother had been telling me that she had gotten me something ‘really cool!’ and that she would be mother of the year.

She was right.

My sister got married on June 1st.

My sister has a husband.

I have a brother-in-law.

These are all hard concepts for me to grasp, even weeks after all was said and done. Lets not even discuss any future possibility of me becoming an uncle. All that aside, it was a surprisingly enjoyable weekend.

It started with Toys R Us having a big pokemon give away from Noon to 4PM on Saturday that I refused miss out on. It took me so long to get to the TRU, though, that I was nearly late for the rehearsal. Luckily, I arrived one minute early. After we had done a quick and dirty rehearsal, most went to a restaurant for a rehearsal dinner thrown by the groom’s parents. I did not attend. I went to the airport instead. I asked Brenna if she would be my guest for the weekend and to my surprise and delight, she acquiesced. While I waited for her flight to come in, I parked in the Cell Phone Lot at the airport. I only recently discovered this lot, but now use it every time I go to the airport. I had gotten a text earlier from her.

“I hope my luggage makes it between planes. I just got into DC due to delays, and had to run to make this one.”

Ruh-Roh. Thats foreboding. And sure enough, her baggage didn’t make it and she had to file a claim so it could be brought to Boston and delivered to our hotel.

We finally got back to the hotel just in time for cocktail hour. Brenna and I sat down to eat in the bar because we had not yet had dinner. We caught up and mingled a bit while we waited for our food. And by mingle I mean we sat at a table at the other end of the bar from the rest of the wedding party and let them come to us. The bar menu had some delicious clam chowder that I pretty much inhaled. Once we finished dinner and the cocktail hour ended for our party, we headed back to the hotel room and called it a night. Or at least I did. Brenna insisted on waiting up for the front desk to call us to let her know that her luggage had come. She eventually fell asleep after it was obvious we weren’t getting a call.

The next was the day of the actual wedding. The front desk didn’t have Brenna’s suitcase until almost 11 that morning. While we waited around for stuff to happen, we ordered some room service because it was clear we wouldn’t be eating again until much later in the evening. We got more chowder and I had an awesome grilled cheese. It was a good way to kick off the day, if you ask me, even if it was midmorning by that point. After eating, we got dressed up and headed to the lobby where we met more of the family and proceeded to the Gazebo outside where the pictures would take place.

The pictures seemed like the longest part of the day. Pictures were taken of just about everybody in endless combinations of family members, future family members and friends of the family. Brenna was kind enough to help me take some pictures during this and that is mostly prevalent in the gallery for the occasion.
Most of the time spanning from the pictures to the signing of the Ketubah are a blurr. A Ketubah is a Jewish marriage contract that is signed by the couple and several witnesses. The ceremony itself was pretty decent. I didn’t fall or trip in the middle of the aisle as I walked down so that was a plus. I had to stand next to the chuppah (a canopy that the couple stand under along with the rabbi. it symbolizes the home the couple will make together.) so I had snuck Brenna out earlier to my cousins so she wouldn’t be awkwardly sitting by herself. I couldn’t see her in the audience. As it turned out she was sitting behind some older woman with hair that reached at least six inches above the topmost part of her scalp.

After the ceremony, I waited outside for Brenna and saw more people in the span of five minutes than I even thought I knew. Once we found each other, we headed to the function hall. At the start of the reception and after the whole wedding party was introduced, Elysa and Rafi entered and immediately went into dance to a Queen song that I’m embarassed to say escapes me at the moment. It was fun to watch, particularly knowing how much work they had put into getting it right. Once the hora was finished we all sat down to eat. The rest of the night continued with some good conversation and dancing. The open bar was a plus, but I was getting more ice than anything else. Brenna seemed to make a good impression with the family and vice versa.

All said and done, it was a really nice weekend.

As I mentioned before, the gallery can be viewed here.

Congratualtions to my sister, Elysa, and my brother-in-law, Rafi!

Almost forgot, I also posted the gallery up here.

I’ve been back for over a week now, but I am still trying to recover.

As is standard, my room is in shambles due to the sudden influx of new stuff. There are quite a few items I’d like to do video reviews on, but I can’t seem to get my room clean enough to shoot video nor find the time to clean it and shoot.

It seemed like a much shorter convention than normal. I chalked that up to the two solid days of travel to and from Cincinnati. It probably didn’t help that we stopped at nearly every Target, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us we could find on the way. Thats half the fun though.

I normally don’t go to more than two or so panels each year, but this year I ended up going to what seemed like all of them. I even went to the Board Wars Faction Feud game. The Allspark team was short a member, so I filled in. Basically this is a team based trivia game done in front of a large panel audience. All trivia questions are multiple choice. Each team cycles through each member answering questions. After a question is asked and answered the member of the team in the front of that team’s line goes to the end and waits for his turn again. The face-off between the teams when a question is asked is similar to Family Feud. Whoever strikes the buzzer first has the opportunity to answer the question.

I thought I would be really good at this because I knew so much about Transformers, but I was sorely mistaken. Most the questions were taken from comic book continuity, which is far from my strong point. I’m actually far more knowledgable about the toys than anything else. Needless to say, I am now re-reading the entire original run of Marvel Comics’ Transformers. It was fun though, and the first team we played was BigBot.com. This is amusing in that everyone used to be a member of that board, but once people started posting fan fiction in the main forum, posts kept getting deleted, followed by complaints and banning. Eventually two new boards were born, Dewtropolis and The Allspark, the team I was playing for. Keep in mind that happened at the end of ’99 and noone’s looked back since. We had no idea the board even existed still. That victory was pretty sweet, then we faced the Transformers Wiki team. That did not go nearly so well.

Some of the other panels I got to attend included the Hasbro Future Product Panel, the Hasbro Designer Panel, Cartoon Network Transformers Animated Sneak Peak Panel, Transformers Collectors’ Club comic panel, the Voice actors’ panel and the MSTF (Transformers fan version of MST3K). The Cartoon Network panel was cool because we got to see a different upcoming episode both times it was held.

Obviously a lot of time was spent in the dealer room. The selection gets a bit more disappointing year after year. Dealers only seem willing to bring original Generation 1 figures and not much of the vintage Japanese stuff or even much of the Armada/Energon/Cybertron stuff.

The new Transformers Animated products aren’t out yet and will not be until June 22nd or so. Hasbro had Cincinnati become a test market, though, because of the convention. This caused lots of dealers to go out and buy every Animated toy they could find to scalp at higher prices in the dealer room. We would not have any of that. We went on a toy run of our own. After two Wal-marts and a Toys R Us, progressively getting further and further away from Cincinnati, we finally found a Wal-Mart that had everything in stock. GalenRaff, one of our number, was actually on the Wal-Mart phone in the electronics department at the previous store speaking to an associate at this store trying to determine if they had any figures in stock. We quickly found some of the larger figures on the shelves, but saw no smaller figures. After a bit of searching, an associate was found that actually went in back to check their stock. Unheard of, I know. He came back out with a shopping cart of cases full of figures and left to look for more. As we tore the contents of the cart apart, a manager saw us and made the associate come back out and take back the cart with whatever we weren’t taking. I ended up getting the entire first wave except for Prowl because I wanted something to still look forward to when the figures came out en masse.

Spectre, Cheets and Jeremy were all at the convention. They were staying in room 2005. That number has significance in Transformer lore, in that the beginning narration to the original animated movie began as “It is the year 2005. The treacherous Decepticons have taken over the Autobots home planet of Cybertron…”. So whenever someone referred to the room, they would say “It is the room 2005.” Its one of those things you have to be a fan to appreciate. Anytime, I was within sight of Spectre, Jeremy or Cheets, they would yell out in unison “CUH-RAAAAAZY”. It was particularly funny as some of us were waiting for an elevator and the doors opened with Spectre and Jeremy inside. They yelled it out and the doors quickly closed as they went up to their floor. So random.

It was a very nerdly weekend that I so rarely get to enjoy. I had fun, wish it was longer though. Maybe next year, I’ll go a couple days early and try out the customizing classes on Wednesday and Thursday. Its something I’ve always wanted to go experience.

The next year should prove to be a good time to be a Transformers fan. 2009 will be the 25th anniversary of Transformers and from what Hasbro is saying, good things are on the way. Its going to be a celebration of all eras and not just Generation 1. Nearly all of the upcoming product looks amazing and is going to make for a fun anniversary.

For those truly curious, I have posted my toy haul after the jump.

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After being the butt of many a joke over at the Powet Forums, it seems that Pepsi Prime has finally arrived at his destination.

What Zac doesn’t know is that the bottles of Pepsi that Prime’s trailer was made to hold, aren’t available in the United States. The bottles of Pepsi in Japan are actually a different size than those sold here.