"It's Live! Go! Go! Go!"

Look where we're going!

We've had our tickets for so long--over two months, I think--that I keep forgetting to mention it. Plus, I'm only a geek by-proxy, so my excitement over Comic-Con is pretty temperate compared to pure-bred geeks (i.e. my husband and kids). Ever since Comic-Con 2013, when we missed out on meeting David Tenant (the tenth doctor in Doctor Who--my absolute favorite) and the cast from The Big Bang Theory, we were determined that we had to get tickets for this year's event. But anyone who has tried to buy Comic-Con tickets knows it is no easy feat. In fact, this little clip pretty much sums up the process:

Poor Trin had to go through this ordeal to score our tickets, with a few variations. The morning that tickets went on sale, I had to go to work, and Clint had to go to sleep (he had worked graveyard shift that night). Trin had a late-start day, so Clint set her up with all three of our laptops, logging us into the system and having all three of us wait in the virtual "waiting room." At this point, Trin spent about an hour monitoring all three of our screens. Thankfully you no longer have to refresh the page over and over again as depicted above; now, you wait in a virtual line of sorts, never knowing what number you are and hoping that tickets don't sell out before it's your turn. Finally, she heard my laptop bling. My account had made it to the front of the line! She bolted to wake up Clint and, using my account, he purchased all of our tickets. Tickets sold out shortly after he purchased ours, and the other two laptop accounts never made it.

Sort of ironic that the person who cares about Comic-Con the least was the one whose account made it to the front of the line.

What's awesome is we'll never have to go through this process again. Once you buy tickets the first time, you get to pre-register for all future years. It's an unfair, elitist type thing, but when you're on the receiving end of it, you're pretty thankful.

Sadly, I know I'm going to be a lame Comic-Con-er. I have no costume, and I'm ignorant to 90% of the stuff there. But Clint and the kids are going to have a blast, and I'm sure their enthusiasm will be contagious. Clint and Elijah aren't wearing costumes per say, but they are wearing Assassin Creed jackets and a few accessories. Trin is going full-blown cosplay with her TARDIS costume, blue wig, etc. I'm borrowing a little Dalek tank-dress, but again, it's not a costume. It's more "festive" than anything else.

One thing that sucks is we were planning to drive out to San Diego the night before and stay in a hotel room, but everything is either booked, or nearly $300. And I'm talking from San Diego to Oceanside to everything between. So now we have to drive out the day of the event, which means getting up at 5:00 a.m. Still...totally worth it.

In other summer-related news, the plaster finally cured in our pool last week, which means we can finally run the spa!

Night time is hands down my favorite time to use it. Nothing beats relaxing in the spa with some good tunes and a nice, ice cold cider. I was in the spa with Clint and the kids two nights ago when I was struck by how other-wordly they looked beneath the lighting, and had to snap a picture (Trin's hair isn't actually that short, by the way. She's wearing her Comic-Con wig).

Here's another shot, in which I was trying to capture Elijah's giant splash as he cannonballed from the spa into the pool:

I love how the spa is glowing with such a deep, creepy red, like a brick cauldron full of evil mystery juice. The LED lights only flash the red for a fraction of a second (but pause longer on other colors such as blue and purple), so it's hard to capture it on camera.

Here's another picture, with more normal lighting:

I swear it doesn't look this magical during the day. It's actually more...plain, and you can see all the dirt that we still have yet to cover with rock scape. Even with a pool, the desert is a very brown place. But at night...wow...it's become my favorite place to sneak off to. I turn on the lights and music and sit under that gazebo and work on my writing. It's so amazing that what used to be dirt and tumbleweeds is now my "escape."

Speaking of writing, I've finished initial revisions, and I'm at the point where my manuscript is clean enough to start getting feedback from beta readers. Shannon read through the book last week (that was SO awesome), and right now my editor/ twitter friend Steve is doing a read-through to make sure there aren't any big issues before I proceed to other beta-readers. I really want to say more about the process I've gone through this past week, but it will have to wait for a future post.

Comic-Con!!