Frinklin and I stopped by King's Books on our way home from the Emerald City ComiCon to visit the Small Press Wayzgoose, which was quite fun.

There was paper-making going on outside and Kings was packed with people admiring the works of numerous talented Washington paper-smiths.

I purchased an incidental relation, a very cool handmade book about an almost unseen piece of furniture. I told the book-maker, Jenny Craig of Notta Pixie Press that it reminded me of Edward Gorey's book The Curious Sofa, in which various people perform "pornographic" acts around a stationary chiase. She informed me that she based it purposefully on that style, which you can see a sample of here.

I also had the opportunity to make my very own Beautiful Angle poster, and meet Lance and Tom in person. The guys said they were up late last night creating a new "Parking in Paradise" poster that is very cool. Hopefully it will be up at their website for purchase shortly.

A few shots from the afternoon, taken on the camera phone.

Handmade paper drying

Notta Pixie Press Table

Jenny Craig of Notta Pixie Press

My very own Beautiful Angle poster

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Bed Races? Inspired by Frida Kahlo?!

Oh, I'm so there.

April 27th - Mark your calendars.

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If you haven't yet, make sure you visit the new Tacoma-centric site FeedTacoma.

Organized by several Tacoma bloggers (and especially Kevin Freitas), it's self described as "A community resource by people who live and love Tacoma." And it really is.

Check out the main page, the discussion board, photos, and the events about town.

Lastly, the "About" page includes links to several Tacoma bloggers - bothhands to be added soon!

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Today we stopped at the open house for a gorgeous, 3-story Victorian house a couple of blocks away from our own house. The enormously high ceilings, flowing rooms, and seemingly endless amount of space were slightly depressing, but inspired a bout of cleaning that was greatly needed.

If you've got an extra $500K to spend, it certainly looks worth it (Most disturbing was the bathroom - almost as large as our master bedroom)!

I spent several hours cleaning up the book explosion from January that had overtaken the office after the ALA Convention. Instead of being smart and putting all of my catalogs (oh, so many catalogs) and hundreds of books in boxes immediately, I had left them in the flimsy, free bags that the vendors supply everyone with, and they had started to overflow and give way at the bottom, causing gradual lava flows of books and magazine-like products over the entire space. I would have taken pictures, but the state the room was in was just too embarrassing. Weirdly enough, our next-door neighbors have a perfectly elevated view from their kitchen through our office closet (?!) window. I'm sure they think we're huge slobs.

Now the books are boxed, and the majority have moved upstairs with the rest of our books that don't fit on our minimal bookshelf space. Our next house has got to have a library in it. In addition, the books from the Bob's Hogs Conference have also been sorted through, and I have four boxes of books to donate to charity.

What I'm really excited about is that I finally got registered on BookCrossing today. With the number of free books that I get from publishers and the number of books I have that I no longer need, I have more than enough to unleash upon the unsuspecting Tacoma public. I had no idea that you could even order Release Kits to put on your books to tag them as BookCrossing titles to make sure that people notice them and pick them up. Cool!

My first book release will be an advanced reader copy of Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. It looks like the book release supplies should be coming from Sand Point, ID, so hopefully I'll get to set it free this week.

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I feel like I'm so behind when it comes to learning about the city I live in. I've been seeing these posters here and there around Tacoma, but it took me weeks to finally figure out where I could get one.

Apparently I missed the holiday show in December, but will be on the lookout for future events.

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I have become addicted to the blackwater cafe.

I'm not exactly why it took me so long to go there, but now that I've walked through the front door, it's going to take a crowbar to get me out.

The coffee is delicious, it's not served scaldingly hot like some places, and there are books aplenty to read on the shelves in the back.

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