First of all, when we turned in our translation yesterday, our boss sent us this link to a few of the Fruits Basket scrapbook contest entries. Ours is on the bottom! The rest of them are pretty amazing, too!

Second of all, ( it's time to get back to the AX report! )

Today I'm thankful for line buddies, awesome Trigun panels, shiny new fanny packs, Hi-Chew!, and having a ride to Han and Leia's wedding reception.

Another short work day! Yay! We'll probably be needing it, because yesterday we got the latest volume of Negima! in the mail. After this week, it kind of makes us wish we had something to work on that wasn't sooooooo haaaaarrrrd, but we're still excited. Especially! because, as we always do when we get a new volume of Negima!, we immediately flipped to the back to see how long the lexicon is and *gasp!* it's only four pages this time (as opposed to the usual five)! Of course, two and a half of those pages are all one entry for the same thing, and the longer the entry, the harder it is to translate, generally, but that other page and a half will be a breeze!

But today we have other crazy things to work on, so first we wanted to get our AX reporting done for the day.

( On to day two! )

Today I'm thankful for finishing work early again, personalized autographs (if we'd known he would do that, we would have been more proactive about asking friends if they wanted us to get anything signed for them), alphanumeric cinnamon cookies, meeting aspiring lettering artists, and knowing what to do next for work.

We finished the first draft of the new series we're working on today, and the script is longer than our longest Gakuen Alice translation. That's crazy.

But anyway, ( we were about to go to Toshiyuki Morikawa's panel. )

Today I'm thankful for reminders that people like us (everybody needs them sometimes), finally having Kraft singles again (I can't believe we forgot to get them the second time in a row), awesome animation documentaries, people with happiness(aka candy)-distributing games (especially when said candy is not laced with drugs or poison), and our friend being right there and willing to give us a ride to Mom's place from the church yesterday.

I guess it's time to start the AX reporting, huh? We decided we'd see about getting pictures uploaded on Sunday, but we're not sure if anything will be going on belatedly for Mom's birthday, so I guess we'll see.

Anyway, ( let's see... where did this all start...? )

In other news, we're debating amongst ourselves whether or not to give Sarah the toffee we bought her. We originally got it as a thank you gift for feeding our cats, and then we saw she did the bare minimum and we were like, "What? That deserves no toffee!" But she did go out of her way to feed our cats at all, and it's thanks to her that they're both still alive right now. We did have a bunch of chocolate on the counter while we were gone, and we told her in our instructions to feel free to eat it, and I also discovered that she and Mom are having a diet race, so she might not want any extra candy... Maybe we should just ask her if she wants it. Hmm...

Today I'm thankful for meeting up with old friends, getting back to a relatively normal schedule, making it safely past the brush fire, having lots of leftover chocolate, and all the guests of honor who came to AX this year.

We're back, we're alive, the cats are alive. We have a ton of stuff to report about and we did in fact take a bunch of pictures, but we're still in vacation mode and posting is sooooooo muuuuuuuch efforrrrrrrrt that I'll not be starting on that until tomorrow.

For now, we have shiny new (Kingdom Hearts) t-shirts.

Today I'm thankful for another awesome AX, the cats being alive and not in need of medical attention, shiny new t-shirts, getting a ride home from the train station, and having our annual passports to Disneyland renewed.

I keep forgetting to mention that Astro Nerd Boy has posted an interview with us about Negima! on his blog. If you're interested, check it out!

We leave in... hopefully two hours, but we're not communicating with our ride as much as we ought to be. He at least knows the train leaves at two. We're all packed and almost all ready to go! We're not bringing as many costumes as usual this time, which is a little sad, but also happy because we have more room in our luggage for things like, oh, food and stuff. We're not feeling rich enough to live off of hotel food, and we're not so good at wandering around towns looking for restaurants and stuff. Plus, bringing food has a definite advantage in that once it's gone, it can be replaced with shiny merchandise!

We're still playing with our shiny new camera. It takes video! I took a short video introducing our living room, which I might post at some point, except that our living room is kind of a mess, so I might decide not to let everyone see it. I'm always surprised at how my voice sounds in recordings.

Anyway, we're going, we're excited... we're actually more excited to stay in our fancy hotel room than to go to the convention itself, but that's just because we're not there yet. We might be taking a bunch more pictures this year than ever before, which is another reason it might be a good idea to leave some costumes at home--less time spent in the hotel room changing, more time spent at the convention center looking at cosplayers.

Today I'm thankful for having a ride to the train station, having someone to take care of our kitties, having a digital camera that can record videos (it even does stop motion! that's like claymation! ... *shudders* ...), having shiny DN Angel stickers to put on our camera so we can find it in case we end up posing for a picture and someone else has everybody's camera and they might all look the same, and being able to pack light.

We decided to end work early today, due to lack of ability to focus. It's kind of a shame, actually, because despite all the stuff we were doing throughout the day, we probably could have gotten a regular day's amount of work done. But it's not nearly enough of a shame to get us to work anyway.

We started the day early, because we had to take Oreo in for his "comprehensive exam" (and booster shot, while we were at it), and Banfield drop-offs are always between seven and eight-thirty. I'm sure they have a reason for that, but we don't know it, so all we can do is be mildly annoyed at having to wake up early. But we got over it. Anyway, we decided the easiest way to get Oreo into the carrier would be to ambush him before we did anything else. After his last vet appointment, doing just about anything that was even slightly unusual would cause Oreo to wonder if we were getting ready to take him away, and send him hiding under the bed. So as soon as he finished eating his breakfast, we grabbed him and shoved him in the cage! ...and proceeded to feel very guilty as we got ready and waited for Mom to pick us up.

He was a lot noisier at the vet's this time. Usually once we get into the pet store, he's calmed down (or at least quieted down out of fear of strange places), but not today. Apparently that attitude continued, and even though he was calm and collected and nice when we took him in for everything else, today he was hissing and scratching, the nurse tells us. No biting though; he's a good kitty. Though thinking about it, maybe he was grumpy because he really need to use the litter box. Maybe next time we'll wait a little longer before we ambush him. Fortunately, next time isn't for another six months. Yay healthy kitty!

After we dropped Oreo off at the vet, we spent a good deal of time searching for stickers. We had bought little star stickers to use to mark our calendar with deadlines, but then we didn't have any deadlines, so the stickers were neglected. Apparently they didn't like being neglected and decided to run away, because we couldn't find them anywhere. We wanted to use them for our letter to Natsuki Takaya that we sent off to TokyoPop today. Sadly, we had to send it sans stickers, but hopefully she'll like it anyway.

Then we put laundry in the washing machine, and then we got to work, at about our normal starting work time! A little earlier, even! Wao! And we had such good timing that when we got up stairs after taking our clothes out of the drier, the phone was ringing. It was the vet's office, letting us know we could pick up Oreo! Yay homecoming kitty! Of course, now I'm all kinds of paranoid about vaccine side effects, but Oreo seems to be doing fine, if still a little unhappy.

But with all that going on we have completely lost our ability to concentrate, and thus our work day has come to an end. And we leave for Anime Expo tomorrow!

In a complete change of subject, we got our Gakuen Alice DVDs yesterday! The day before they're officially on sale! So we decided to take advantage of having them before the rest of the world (only probably not), and watched a couple of episodes. We'd seen the episodes before, but it was fun to watch them again. Takahiro Sakurai as Misaki-sensei kind of weirded me out, because he usually has his "cool, collected guy" voice, and his "goofy main character" voice, but Misaki-sensei's voice was a combination of the two and it was quite strange. And of course Akira Ishida is perfect for Narumi. The anime does a really good job translating the manga into motion, and they even stick Higuchi-sensei in with the background characters! (We didn't notice that the first time, because we hadn't read the manga yet.)

Today I'm thankful for shiny Gakuen Alice DVDs, not having to take Oreo back to the vet for a long time as long as he stays healthy, not having to wake up early tomorrow, Mom being kind enough to drive us to the vet's office, and getting to go to Anime Expo!

Wow, AX is in like two days. Well, kind of two and a half. It doesn't matter when it starts exactly--we're leaving on Wednesday. And that's kind of crazy.

Anyway, despite wanting to do nothing more than just play 358/2 Days all day, we were actually Responsible! First, we cleaned our kitchen. Sort of. We weren't like, super thorough, but we cleaned it. Why? Because next, we had to report our broken faucet. It was working well enough for us to be able to use it just fine, but since we're going out of town, we wanted to make sure the person taking care of our kitties wouldn't have any problems with it. Then we got a little work done, and then I called Han to remind him we were going to go to Costco as Phase 1 of Operation: Disneyland Annual Passport Renewal, and while we waited for him to show up, we even wrote a column! We were totally planning to slack on that until tomorrow. That reminds me, we still need to send it in. Eheh.

See, we have a sort of complicated plan we have devised in order to make sure the Twins don't go bankrupt in the process of renewing their very important annual passports. First, we go to Costco to buy the pass, because, while we still have to pay the regular price of the pass, we also get a $50 gift card at no extra cost. We then use that gift card, along with our Birthday Fun Cards (TM), to get another pass for now just $81. Hence the trip to Costco.

While we were there, we addressed another problem that needed solving. At Anime Expo last year, we made friends with a guy from Japan who was very very kind and bought Saiyuki: The Musical for us, because you can only get it from Animate, and they don't ship outside Japan (as far as we know...). Unfortunately, he can't make it to AX this year, because the company he works for has forbidden travel to the States for fear of the swine flu. So he told us we just need to have his share of fun for him. I figured that involved taking pictures, but our camera died at Anime Detour. It was very sad, too, because baranoneko's friend was the best Xemnas cosplayer we've ever seen (he looks just like him (this coming after just spending a long time fighting Xemnas recently), and he knew how to pose; it was awesome), and our camera was unresponsive as we were trying to get his picture.

So we were already a little concerned about that when, in the course of our promising to get our friend an autograph, he said, "And I'm looking forward to all the pictures you'll take!" And we were like, "D'oh."

But! we were at Costco with our photographer friend. So we got the voucher for the annual passport, and then we said, "We're also thinking about getting a camera." And almost immediately, we have a super awesome digital camera for (relatively) not very much money. He made sure to show us how it worked and all the features before he left after dropping us off, and it is Fancy. We're going to use it to take a picture of us with our Fruits Basket plushies to include in our letter to Natsuki Takaya.

I guess I should add a disclaimer that just because we have a fancy new camera doesn't mean we'll be posting pictures. We really ought to, though, so maybe we will.

Today I'm thankful for Operation: Disneyland Annual Passport Renewal, having a fancy new digital camera, being able to pay tithing yesterday, having a working faucet now (the maintenance guy left just as Han called to let us know he was here), and being able to take pictures for our poor friend who can't go to AX.

Celeste's housewarming party was... actually not as fun as the bridal shower, but it was still really nice. And there were peanut butter M&Ms, which are totally the best kind. I actually didn't mention what we got for Celeste and her husband. When we were at Target, we wandered into the home decor section, and they had a ton of really cute bathroom themes. What caught my eyes was a wastebasket shaped like a duck, scrubbing its head with a soapy brush, and it was soooooooo cute. And when you opened the lid (the top of the duck's head), it quacked! We liked it a lot, and Mom said it doesn't matter if the bathroom decor matches the rest of the house (so we didn't have to worry about that), so we got it for them! Celeste seemed really excited when she opened it, and she went around showing it to everybody (we left a little early, so we had her open the gift discreetly so we could see her reaction). Her husband said it was "tight." I think that's good.

Also, Celeste is trying out for American Idol on Tuesday!

( Speaking of dreams... )

Today I'm thankful for peanut butter M&Ms, getting to take home all the leftover chocolate from Relief Society, crazy plans that actually seem like a feasible way of accomplishing dreams (though I wonder if it might be faster to just go to Disney and say, "Hey, could you use some translators?"; we'll see how all our conventions go), adorable duck-shaped wastebaskets, and having plans to activate Operation: Disneyland Annual Passport Renewal tomorrow.