This weekend was somewhat interesting.  I’m in between running errands and recording for the audio version of Dragons’ Truth, so I don’t have a huge amount of time to post about it, but wanted to get something up.

I guess I could start with Friday; I received the last of my packages, and now I have near-studio-quality audio recording gear for doing audio versions of my books plus a MiniDV camera for doing internet videos.  I spent a lot of time shopping and researching and comparing things, and considering I got the camera itself for $150 (the price of the oh-so-popular Flip camera, but I get a much better picture quality and a much more versatile camera) and a pretty good deal on the audio gear, I think I did good.  I won’t be shooting in HD, and I don’t have a proper sound studio, but I’m going to be posting to the internet, so I should be okay for now.  Technique is what matters, here.

Saturday, since I needed to go to Pine to pick up a filing cabinet (hooray for family! Even considering the cost of gas, we saved over $100 vs. buying the same thing used), and Mandy had never been, I took Mandy to Arcosanti.  Further confirming that I married the right woman, her immediate reaction was “can we move here?”  I indicated that if we could find the $80k+ to get out of our debts, no problem, we can move there ASAP.  After browsing around the public areas, and after the tour (I believe I may have been a better tour guide than the apparent-first-timer we got), we headed the rest of the way up and around to Pine.  Picked up the filing cabinet (& all the art I’d had up there semi-on-display but not selling), stopped for supper in Payson, and came back home.

Church Sunday morning.  Grocery shopping.  A nap.  More nap.  Then when we were in the middle of watching a middling movie (Joy Ride), Heath walked in, having just bought Settlers of Catan.  Heath, Sean, Mandy and I - none of whom had ever played Catan in any form - all proceeded to play out the “basic” game.  It’s interesting.  It’s just another one of the way too many good games out there for which I generally have neither time nor companions to play.

Alright, that’s enough time on this, I’ve got some recording to try to do.

So, as I mentioned the other day, I designed a flyer to advertise modernevil.com - This weekend, Mandy and I selected a paper color (goldenrod, not too yellow, not too bright, eye-catching but also differentiated from the fluorescent yellow and orange flyers everyone else is posting), found some cheap copies (2c/copy at the UPS store at Dunlap & Central in Phoenix, if you pre-pay for 1k), and spent several hours cutting the little tear-off strips at the bottom of 250 pages.  In the unlikely event that every strip gets torn off every flyer and all those strips convert to new readers, that’s 3,000 new readers.  If some of them actually buy books - hooray!

Of course, that’s all dependent upon finding 250 places to post the flyers.  (I’ll ignore for a moment the hundreds or thousands of people who will walk by each posted flyer without even seeing it, the dozens who will see it but not be interested, and the few who will be interested but lose the tiny strip of goldenrod paper they shoved in their pocket.  First it has to be somewhere, and only then can it become ineffective!)

Yesterday, after stopping by the bank and Discount Tire (to pay for the tires I ordered - I get to go back Thursday afternoon and wait for them to actually get put on (ooh - I won’t really have internet access there to distract me, maybe if I take my laptop (or a pad of paper) I can get some work done!)), I started driving around a few places to see if they’d let me post the flyers.  And to stop in to any independent book stores I saw, to see if they’d carry my books.

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