Attaining EBay-ness

So I've been cleaning out the Archive Room downstairs. The Archive Room is where I've been stashing game product and comics that I've purchased, written, or otherwise acquired over the years. The end result was a rather ponderous pile of boxes that I could rarely organize, much less sort through, ranging from duplicate author copies to small-press games to early incarnations of classics.

As a result, I've been on a multi-year quest to ease up on some of the load and reduce the clutter. Some of the material went through Fantasium Comics (formerly Spy Comics), my local comic provider. But when fellow gamer Ann Trent started up as Ebay Mistress for the mighty Stan!, I turned to her to unload some of the older and odder stuff.

The result is here at the Stannexmart, where you can find both Stan!'s stuff and my own. She's just starting with my material, and most of what is currently up is old World of Darkness stuff. There will be more to come as she moves through the small mountain of boxes I sent her.

Now, if I can only find a good home for 90 longboxes of unsorted, unbagged comics, I would have the room cleared out.

More later

Maui

So. Vacation.

The Lovely Bride and I celebrated our 30th anniversary by fleeing Seattle for the (pleasantly) warmer and (reasonably) sunnier climes of Hawai'i.  And it was fun.

There's a lot more where this came from.

I'd show you all the photos, but to be honest, they are pretty much shots taken from our resort overlooking the ocean, with Lanai and Molokai in the distance. Here's a shot of the beautiful sea. Here's another one. Here's one with a rainbow. Here's a sunset. Oh, and see that dot? That's a whale.

We have been to Hawai'i before, and on previous occasions have rented a car, which spent the bulk of the time parked at the resort while we overdosed on sushi. So this time, no car rental, no traditional drive around the island and sudden realization that things get dark fast after that beautiful sunset. We flew out of Honolulu on a 9-person Cessna Caravan that had a ceiling of about 5000 feet (I know that because we were level with the top of Molokai), and came in on a landing field on western Maui, about four football fields long. We ensconced ourselves at the Napili Kai, an older resort (meaning it was closer to the waterline) and used taxis, buses, and long walks to get around.

What we did do for the bulk of the week was eat and snorkel. I have become a fan since discovering that you can get prescription snorkel masks (Thank you, Snorkel Bob's), and both Napili Bay and Kapalua Bay to the north were good snorkeling sites. A lot of fish, a goodly number of sea turtles (green and hawksbill - the former I usually found swimming, and they would immediately grass on the larger hawksbills by taking the tourists right to them). A school of tiny cuttlefish, handing head down in the waves, unfurling their tentacles to threaten interlopers. The agenda was breakfast, snorkel, lunch, snorkel, recover, sunset, dinner, sleep. Not a bad little schedule.

The local restaurant, the Sea House, was great for dinner, a little in the weeds for lunch. We also discovered a good joint, Merrimans, which was about 50 yards from where we were staying, which was the equivalent of learning that your hotel room overlooks Canlis. We had a wonderful anniversary dinner there, and then spawn-camped their patio for happy hour. Since we were on the west side of Maui, we had the islands of Lanai and Molokai in the distance, and whales in between. Humpbacks, in this case (We did get down to Lahaina for a whale watching trip, but to be honest we did well on the patio - better beer as well).

In short, it was a complete and total zoning out, which is pretty much what I wanted out of the deal. And it was a good way of celebrating thirty years.

More later,