all about Fan Expo 2010 in Toronto!

It was held in a bigger venue this year and was just as packed. Surprise, surprise. We learned our lesson from last year and had advance tickets but still – gasp! – had to stand in line to get in. Oh well. It didn’t take long for things to get exciting. The highlight of the day was first up!

I went there with one intention — meet Felicia Day, actress and alumni of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, developer of the hilarious web series The Guild, major reason I’m proud to be a girl gamer and star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. She’s an internet star.

What do you expect or say when you meet a celebrity? My husband asked me what I thought I’d say to her. I had no idea. Really I just wanted to shake her hand and see if she was as nice and authentic as everyone says.

Walking in the door, being tossed into an ocean, waves of people bumping up against us, we went against the flow determinedly making our way to the celebrity signature area.

OMG there she was. At a signing table with Amy Okuda, another of the actresses from The Guild. I could see her!

What do I do?! My legs became lead. I didn’t want to move.

Reality kicked back in shortly as the stars in my eyes faded and all those other fans lined up to see her came into focus – about a foot in front of me.

They all had some version of  ”What does she think she doing cutting in line?!” face on, but we’re Canadian so they didn’t do anything about my interruption and I politely asked my way to the end of the line. Are you in line to see Felicia Day? Are you? You too? Um, ok. How about you? Oh, maybe that’s the end… yes WAY over there.

We settled in at the end of a line that would surely be at least a two hour wait. Imagining that there was no way the kids would stay put with so much fun ahead of them, we started devising a plan to meet up later when… this little girl in a red official looking vest – not unlike Little Red Riding Hood, I mean she had the pigtails even! – came up and asked us who were waiting to meet. I gleefully told her, and she said that she thought we might be able to skip the line.

Skip the line?! Yea, she said, Felicia didn’t want kids who were here to see her waiting around and bored to tears, so she had given specific instructions for any children to be taken straight to the front of her line.

Seriously???!!!

Not only was I going to meet her, but I was not going to have to wait. AT ALL. Little Red Riding Hood said she’d double check and come back.

And that’s when I knew the universe loved me.

Why? Because I had spent a solid month, every single second of my free time, making costumes for the kids to wear to Fan Expo. Yes, they’ll double as Halloween costumes and then after that around the house for fun. But it’s really for Fan Expo that the kids get the biggest kick out of being dressed up. Anyone in costume or cos-play walks around like a celebrity. People stop you all day long to ask for your picture and it’s a whole day of feeling special and pretending to be your character.

This year we did particularly well – my two were Zuko and Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, not the movie. And one of the boys from the family we went with dressed up as Aang, going so far as getting his mom to shave his head!!! Together, the three of them looked incredible together – adorable, accurate and kick-ass, with the pretty much the personalities to match each of their chosen characters.

Back to the craziest moment ever…

Little Red came back and told us to follow her. And so we did, refusing to look back at the I’m sure bewildered faces of the rest of people in line. We were escorted up to the front, waited while Felicia finished chatting with one lady and then there we were. She and Amy signed a poster – she ooohed and awwwed over the kids costumes – and then came around from the back of the table to take a picture with all of us. Voila!

She really is super nice.

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What was I thinking? Oh yeah, I’ll help out some. Get extra cash. I’m insane.

Home now and about to go to sleep before my twelfth shift in a row.

Then two gorgeous Halo Reach filled days ahead after that. I hope the weather this weekend is terrible.

What was I thinking? My back is worth more, my sanity means more.

But I’ve seen things. Learned things. No, this was probably not the greatest brain wave. And yet is that my head I feel swelling simply because I’ve survived? You bet.

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Then list your family and friends birthdays on your chapters indigo profile and get a 25% off printable in-store coupon!

Really!

Here’s how for all my fellow Canadian book-lovers!

1. make an online account at www.chapters.indigo.ca/ if you don’t already have one
2. find the my account link in the upper right-hand side and click it. now you’re at your very own Account Centre
3. of the bubble boxes in the middle, find the lowest one on the left titled Preferences
4. in that box, you’ll see the link Birthday Reminders… Click there
5. you have to give them Recipient’s Name/Birthday/Relation to you/Age and Gender as the email with the coupon is tailored with suggestions to the appropriate age-group.

For a mid September birthday mine arrived at the beginning of the month was good until Sept 30.

Yeap, already used it!

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Upgrade Your Life is a techie how-to book absolutely stuffed with more solutions to organizing our modern lifestyle than one person actually has room to fit into our modern lifestyle.

The fun of the book for me was to register, consider and sift all of author Gina Trapani’s little hacks to find the ones that could potentially revolutionize my life. There was a lot of sifting, but it definitely worked.

Before going further, I should justify why I feel this book fits the criteria of the Women’s Unbound Reading Challenge.

(This blog post is SO late. I finished the challenge and wrote this months ago, but it sat lonely in my drafts file, only rediscovered yesterday. Hurray for broken stuff that helps me find unpublished posts! lol)

Participants are encouraged to read nonfiction and fiction books related to the rather broad idea of ‘women’s studies.’  The definition according to Merriam-Webster: the multidisciplinary study of the social status and societal contributions of women and the relationship between power and gender.

This book transcends them all. It’s not about women’s issues, but placing this book in a woman’s hands is giving her the tools to solve many problems.

Women are underrepresented in the enormous field of technology and computer science that is changing the fundamental shape of society. I don’t think women can afford a hands-off “that’s the guys” territory approach to computers and how we use them in daily life. Now, don’t let me lead you the wrong way. This book will not teach how to hack into your local school and change your grades. But it will teach confidence. How? Because it will help you feel like you have a more active hand in your life. It will help you realize that you have good ideas and provide you ways to bring those ideas to fruition. And a little independence will go a long way.

Upgrade Your Life is written by a woman, about a topic and a field that is heavily male-oriented for the moment and provides the tools for any woman in any field to feel empowered to make her own choices and not just pay for the brake work because the mechanic says so, so to speak. I believe it’s an excellent candidate for this reading challenge.

So, back to the book…

I heard about it because I listen to Gina every week on a podcast called TWIG, This Week in Google. Never miss an episode, it’s one of the little highlights of my week. Along with tech guru Leo LaPorte and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, the three discuss all that is going on in the world of Google. The good, the bad and the ugly. They chew over tech news, what’s happening or about to happen,, cell phones, cell phones and more cell phones and eventually get to this extraordinarily interesting conversation about where we are as a society and where we’re headed. Not unlike a really cool sociology professor I had once.

Gina is the “Tip of the Week” contributor and I mention that not because it’s the biggest part she plays in the trio, but rather because of how indicative it is of who she is. Having founded Lifehacker “tips and downloads for getting things done” years ago – if you’ve never been there, click the link now, it’s a must read – she offers little keystrokes, shortcuts and an ocean of creative problem solving to make using Google products even easier.

Long time readers of my blog know by now that I’ve been a Google convert, using their web services for years now. The move from using Outlook to Gmail for email alone totally flipped my life on a head. I railed at what I did not understand, but once the epiphany came, I can’t get enough. Total fan-girl here.

My interest in technology spins off of my partial obsession with organization and how I can use it for my own better ends. When you’re the kind of girl who takes whole weekends as a teenager to move furniture and reorganize, you’re also the kind of girl that gets a kick out of the fact that Google is just so darn good at integrating their many amazing services and making your life handy dandy. See, it’s not just me anymore to keep track of. Now it’s my job and a husband’s home business and kids and swimming lessons and all of the social activity that comes from our growing family.

And I don’t just want to scrape by. If I had a motto in life or something that people remembered me for, it would be that I lived and loved well and with grace. Believe me, I don’t always meet that bar, but anything that can help me be less anxious, more settled and confident and bring enjoyment into my life… well, those things are always welcome. And so many of Gina’s little and not so little hacks have done that for me.

Not to mention that I find her an eternally positive person. Her enthusiasm for what she does and sincerity in offering it to us absolutely oozes out of everything. A successful woman known for her smile rather than her rants. That’s a woman living gracefully, living well.

As a sample, I’ll offer one of my favourite hacks, number 90:

I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as my web browser for years and never knew that this was possible. (Though since the writing of this post, I’ve switched to using Google Chrome as my browser, but that’s another post and this is still a GREAT Tip.) Check it out…

You can create bookmark “groups.” Say you check the same four webpages every morning or as soon as you get home from work. Instead of painstakingly opening each one, you can with one click open them all at once. Brilliant!

Here’s how – open all the tabs you want to group together, go to Bookmarks, click Bookmark All Tabs. A window will pop up that allows you to name them as a set, do so and you are done! I used this hack to make three groups of pages that I use in conjunction quite alot. They’ve been so handy-dandy.

1. Social Butterfly: my Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook
2. Photo Sharing: my Flickr, Picasa, Picnik, befunky
3. Recipe Search: Epi, BBC, Foodnetwork, Food Blog Search, All recipes, Big Oven

Other hacks taught me the importance of tagging my flickr photos, the magic button key command that is Alt+Enter, how very much I needed an To-Do organizer though I did not in the end using her main example (Simplenote rules!), how to freshen up our filing cupboard so I can find stuff, what a wonderful thing keeping my inbox clean is, how to search my gmail for anything under the sun, and how to get slightly lower priority email like goodreads and freecycle mail to skip my inbox and go to its own folder saving me a mountain of time.

Turns out that there was quite a bit that I was already doing well. Confidence booster to be sure! I save my bookmarks in Delicious and can access them anywhere, I use Gmail, as a family we share our Google calendars so no one is left in the dark, I’ve sorted and named and dated each individual one of our digital photos for years, and I’ve consolidated all my email accounts into gmail for so long that I forget that I’ve ever used anything else.

Wanna-be hacker that’s me!

p.s. Gina was named among Fast Company magazine Top Women in Tech for 2010. Go see what she and other women are doing online, in tech and games.

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We love brownies.

Who am I kidding?! I love brownies!

And I’ve been using the same recipe that my brother dug up out of a now unknown and probably lost family cookbook. It’s quick and easy, uses cocoa that I always have on hand, but the result frankly hasn’t been interesting lately. So the search for a new brownie recipe began.

Delightful Google results led me to a contest once known as “browniebabe of the month” hosted by the food blog Once Upon a Cakestand. The results were all from 2007, but the way it worked was that she asked for submissions and garnered three months worth of brownie recipes, dubbing one winner as The Brownie Babe each month.

I’ve linked my hand-picked favourites - after a read through - below for your viewing and tasting pleasure.

There is a brownie for me in there somewhere.

Hopefully, for you too!

Supernatural Brownies

Lemon Mousse Brownies

Outrageous brownies with Salted Butter Caramels

Mocha & White Chocolate Chip Brownies

Outrageous Brownies

Chocolate Crunch Brownies

Peanut Butter Topped Chocolate Brownies

“Turtle” Brownies

Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownie

Brrrrrr-ownies

Peanut Butter Brownies

Nuggets o’ Gold Brownies

Peanut-Layered Brownies

p.s. Do tell all the moist warm gooey details once you try one!

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