Health and safety

I did something against my better judgement and volunteered for something at work. I promised to take charge of the upcoming forming and directing of the health and safety committee. It's something I feel very passionate about, so I said to our HR manager I would love to help - and suddenly I found myself in charge. Today I spent a long time figuring out what exactly are the regulations and what we need to do to fulfill them - it is very interesting, and I hope it's not going to be too much to handle.

Hockey and cosplay and babies

No cheering tonight...

Our hockey team is in the playoffs for the first time in years, and you can feel the tension in the air when their game is on. If there's goal - or a win - the whole city erupts, it's really fun, almost sounds like a new year's eve when you can hear noise and cheering and fireworks all around. Not tonight though, alas, they lost.

Oh well, I've still had a good day (and not that I care about hockey anyway, but it's nice if the home team wins). Spent the morning talking to Chu, her computer hasn't recovered from a BSD it suffered but work laptop was put in place and we got our weekly dose of five hours on the phone. While Dragon was out hunting for insulation foam for his sword, I was working on Auron's pants - the outfit is starting to come together nicely.

And weather, the lovely weather is back - last week it seemed that the rain would never end, depressing pouring down rain from dusk till dawn... even the Vancouverites started complaining. We even went to the beach yesterday with Timo and Sirpa and the kids who were visiting... Ella's little three month old brother is quite cute: very happy and loves to smile, doesn't make any fuss - but babies don't do much, I much rather hang out with Ella who can now almost say my name (she says "Minna" - hey, that's close enough for me). And she's such a girly girl - she was so happy to eat the pink cream puff with pink creme filling I had bought for her, or at least she was happy to eat the filling and even though she was using a spoon half of it went onto her hands and face and the table cloth. And when we asked if she was enjoying it, the solemn girl didn't have time to answer, but gave us a serious nod.

Sanskrit and sewing and stuff

I bought a serger. I was going to go and get a demo on what kind of features to look for in sergers so I could buy one second hand cheap, but ended up walking out with one. I've come to know the lady who works in my local sewing machine shop - I bought my sewing machine from her, and I keep going in to buy thread and chat... and she demoed me some of their models... The cheapest one - that was on sale for half price - was actually just slightly more expensive than a used one would have been, so I ended up buying it on the spot. And it's lovely. It makes a comforting humming sound while serging and oh sweet lord it's fast...

I really had to tear myself away from mah new baby to run to my first Sanskrit class with Padma. Sanskrit is a fascinating language and by the end of this eight week course I should be able to read and write it in devanagari (the writing system). Use of language and culture are intertwined so heavily that to truly understand a culture one has to understand the language, and the other way around - in case of Sanskrit the culture is the human mind, as the language developed around philosophy and religion, as well as poetry, drama, scientific and technical texts. There are many words in Sanskrit that don't exist in English (or Finnish, or possibly any other language) that describe states of being and qualities of the mind... in many ways I consider the Sanskrit to be like background study for my yoga sutra studies.

From my sutra studies I have learned a completely different way of viewing myself and my mind... I feel that I am now so much better at dealing with the unsettling thoughts that creep in, so far there hasn't been a thought that haven't been able to analyze and understand after some meditation on it. It's pretty incredible - thoughts that would have previously crippled me for days or even months, I can now purify out of my mind in hours if I set my mind on it.

One's mind has the power both to paralyze or to completely set free... and in the end, it's your choice.

Active Sunday

I went to yoga today (I can hear some gasping in the audience already). I haven't really done much asana yoga lately, but I started one of Jesse's 8-week courses again today. And I feel pretty strong and confident, and I've started to feel the lack of yoga in my body when sitting in the office... I don't feel that physical right now so I'm not sure if I'll go back to my four practice days a week anytime soon, but I think it's important to do some.

I also had a really nice chat with Sue and Kari afterwards, which cleared some of my thoughts about what I want to do this year. So many things on my plate, and I really need to concentrate on what I want to become, what I want and need to do for myself. Combination of free time, fun and hobbies and responsibilities, and trying not to burn out. And looks like I need to drop something I really wanted to do, but I don't think is going to be the right thing for me right now.

And talking of free time, we've had time to spend time with friends this weekend, new and old, go shopping and start work on new cosplays. Yesterday we went to buy fabric for Dragon's Auron costume, and today I started work on it... spent about five hours working on the trimming of the coat. I swear, this perfectionism will be my death one of these days, but at least it'll be a glorious one. (That's a joke, mom...)

Beautiful karma

I'm a bad blogger... there you have it. I've said it, I can move on.

I've been busy helping Padma with her computer again, this time to set up her access to her web site. So I've spent three evenings evaluating and trying out some tools, and ended up with Microsoft's Expression Web... I had problems with saving files and FrontPage extensions, but I had resigned to emailing the customer support and getting the computer back to Padma so she could at least get the urgent updates done.

She floats in and I show her how to do it, and she does it - and lo and behold, her way of doing it doesn't cause any errors at all! There's me, trying to do it all fancy through the interface - she goes directly to the source files, and no problem. Her karma is just beautiful.

...thousand words

No big things happening, small life, small events. I'm enjoying my photographic challenge, and it really does seem like those little posts that I could have made here end up being photos with few sentences attached... so I hope you're following that Flickr stream.

Meeting friends, getting swamped with hobbies and trying to decide what it is exactly that I want to do with my free time. Having fun, enjoying myself, feeling relatively healthy... I'm even going to to back to asana yoga this week.

Thoughts about my ego

It's funny watching my ego run rampant.

How it got so excited about all the attention me and my costuming skills got last weekend. This week it has been humming happily listening to more praise from people that saw us... Today when I got my first commission request for another Jiraiya costume it was running laps honking it's horn, shouting "Cosplay no Jutsu... SUCCESS!!!" and making cartwheels.

And it's great feeling being able to enjoy the good feeling it gives me, but also being able to detach myself from it... because it's all fleeting and temporary, it'll probably be gone next week and I'm back to my everyday not so glitzy life. That I am not defined by other people and what they think of me. That I am me, myself and I, and I'm not limited by what my ego wants me to be.

And no, I didn't take the commission. I don't have the time, and I don't need the peanut-money that it would bring me... bur I'm really happy to help people, for free, and give them advice.

Con and the Dragon

Since kolibri made such an excellent post on her Con experience, I thought I would jot down my own notes, too.

As kolbiri mentioned, we selected Bob Marley as the Patron Saint of our trip. And after getting into the train I promised to make an effort to follow the guidance of the great regggae-muffin.

And thanks to the blessing of Marley-sama, the Con was just what the doctor ordered: a few days away from stress, everyday grind and mundane people (not that there is anything wrong with them, but us freaks need other freaks now and then).

But I digress. After getting across US border with abnormally little effort, we arrived in Seattle, checked into our hotel and fell asleep pretty much immediately.

So in the morning it was time to get to our costumes and into the Con...

UNDER THE STARS OF HEAVEN THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE SUCCESSOR!! THE TRAGEDY CONTINUES!!

On Friday I was cosplaying Kenshiro. Now Kenshiro is the hero of Hokuto no Ken, perhaps the most popular Anime of all time in Japan, but woefully unknown in the West due to its extremely violent nature and appallingly bad localization. This was far more a tribute to my childhood hero than attempt to attract tons of photographers and Anime fans. I might not quite have the physique of Kenshiro, but he was the reason I started lifting weights all those years ago, and I wanted to do my hero proud. I really enjoyed our photoshoot with Al (a Hokuto fan himself) and then had my first proper chance to go around the con, look at the artwork, chat to people and attend panels.

I did not pose for that many photos on Friday but you know, even though only a grand total of 9 people recognized my costume, I did not mind: those 9 people were ecstatic -us Kenshiro fans are a rare, dying breed, and any sign of other fans makes us happy beyond belief. HOKUTO SHINKEN IS INVINCIBLE!

ERO-SENNIN

Saturday was a complete reverse of Friday. I was cosplaying as Jiraiya from Naruto, and boy was he popular! I was hugged, cheered, grabbed, and asked to pose for literally hundreds of photos, even though I spent a lot of time in panels and cheering the karaoke competitors. I was stopped every ten steps and posed so much my calves started to ache (its the damn kabuki step that Jiraiya does). Far more importantly, it was so great to see how happy people were to see my Jiraiya cosplay.

Even during the events where I have been the Guest of Honor I have not been stopped so much and photographed so often. I never realized Jiraiya was so enormously popular both amongst the male and female Anime fans. True, the costume had a lot to do with it (and I am very proud of what we achieved) but even so... I never would have expected that the old perv would be so well-loved. People seemed to like the Toad Scroll I made more than anything else -a lesson to be learned about the props.

On top of it all, six of the smallest, cutest children I've ever seen, aged around 5 or 6 each came to talk to me spontaneously, wanted to pose in pictures with me, or talk to me about Naruto (which I do think is kinda little bit too adult for such small children). Considering that Jiraiya throws Naruto (the kid star of the series) down a cliff to certain doom almost as soon as they meet, I found it bizarre that children all gravitated towards Jiraiya and trusted me implicitly just because I was wearing Jiraiya's costume. Perhaps it is the fluffy white hair? Or the fact that in the series Jiraiya is the closest to a father figure Naruto has. It was really touching. I spent maybe an hour talking to 5-year old kid who had entered the chibi competition at the Con -just like all the rest of the kids he really liked Jiraiya.

Costume-making-wise, I learned valuable lessons, too. The headband I was wearing caused me more pain than all my kickboxing matches combined: I was literally going to throw up out of sheer pain. Then it dawned to me to put some padding between my forehead and the affectionately-named "Max" headband. Lo and behold, the pain was gone. Note to all you aspiring cosplayers, pad anything that puts pressure on your head!

WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE...

Kolibri asked what I liked most about the Con, and I had to think for quite a while: I loved to observe all the creativity and love the cosplayers had poured into their costumes. I have made games professionally for 12 years now, and I can honestly say that it is the creativity of the fans like this that gets me off my bed in the morning.

In addition to his, I loved chatting with all the Anime fans, attending the panels and debating the finer points of censorship, raiding the dealers room, checking out the artist alley or cheering when the otherwise god-awful Final Fantasy Anime series played the Victory Music theme after every battle. :) I find it relaxing being around people who like same things as I do. Our world is so judgmental and cruel towards those who break the norm that we have to wear masks all our lives so we would not be scorned by the society. Funnily enough, when I am wearing REAL masks to show off my love for fantasy and fable, I can be more true to myself than I am in my everyday life.

Post-con

After getting over my post-con blues yesterday - though not entirely my post-con exhaustion - I thought I'd list couple of things about the weekend and Sakura-con.

• The official patron saint of the trip was Bob Marley. I was saved by a Rastafarian cab driver on Thursday when my taxi didn't show up, and he was playing Bob Marley and I found that it was next to impossible to stress while listening to reggae in the middle of the worst Easter traffic jam wondering if I'd catch the train. So I adapted that way of thinking for the rest of the trip, singing "No woman no cry" in the shower on Friday morning when I was panicking about everything - I swear it helps. Unfortunately on the down-side, having Bob looking over your shoulder meant that sometimes were were forced to chill and wait in queues for long periods... but at least everything went ok.


• Border crossing by train was the easiest ever. We slided past the huge queue of cars, and we didn't even have to get up from our seats - the officials came in, looked at our passports, made a joke and that was it. We were absolutely stunned, they didn't even ask how long we were going to stay.


• The train was a winner's choice anyway, so comfortable and nice. And people were so happy to see the train, they kept waving at us. Except the man who took down his pants, mooned and slapped his cheeks... but that made me laugh too.


• Having a hotel across the street from the convention center was amazingly handy. We continued the tradition of room service breakfasts - when you need to get up at 7am to be ready for your photoshoot, the last thing you want to do is get ready even earlier so that you could go downstairs for breakfast.


• I was blessed for the first time in my life, I think, in the opening ceremonies. By a Shinto priest, too. There was a blessing ceremony in the start of the opening ceremony that included chanting by the priest, and us bowing our heads and in the end clapping our hands. And so the con was blessed, and us too - and since we had a wonderful and safe con maybe it did work. It was interesting to see though how the church-going American folks instinctively knew how to behave: the first time we had to bow the priest didn't say anything but everyone knew anyway and we were left looking like the heathens we are. Later on luckily the priest did say "bow your head" and "please straighten" which helped... I did my own loving-kindness metta meditation while bowing my head - strictly speaking it's Buddhist but the sentiment is the same with any prayer. There were three kami-samas that were respected, first one I can't remember but the other two were the one for arts and entertainment and the last one was Seattle's own kami-sama.


• On Friday I lost the count of how many photos people wanted to take of me around ten - but the real figure was probably around 20-30. On Saturday we hit that within first hour or so, and the actual figure that day was probably around 200.


• Saturday was also the first time my husband was the more popular one! We joked that while I was his attractive feature (i.e. I wasn't the main attraction but a nice bonus in his photos), he was my lovely item (i.e. the thing that made me interesting and lovely). Like I suspected he was mobbed for photos everywhere he went and we got lot of photos taken together - but this continued even when I wasn't there, whereas I was left relatively in peace when I was alone. I'm so proud of him!


• For the first time I was meeting people that knew me by my net alias kolibri (that I use on most boards), instead of my real name. Kinda weird. We met up with some people from Cosplay.com, most notably the lovely Panda-chan and her husband who are also the kind of 30-something anomalies in the cosplay "circles". We also met up with lovely saxophonist Hector who we knew from Anime Evolution last year, who played anime tunes again much to crowd's delight.


• We also met the wonderful Dr. Antonia Levi (who shall be casually known as Toni from now on), a professor of Japanese Culture who we met last year at Anime Evolution. We listened to a panel she did about Howl's Moving Castle and I had tea with her afterwards. She actually lives in BC now so we promised to get together later on... she's lovely.


• I was buying erotic manga and anime at MediaBlasters' booth in the dealers' room on Sunday when the guy behind the counter spotted my Rammstein hoodie - I ended up getting a nice discount on my manga and DVDs. He was upset that Rammstein had to cancel their tour to America in the wake of 9/11 and he never had the chance to see them live although he had bought a ticket and all.


• Bus is a winner's choice too. We had to take the bus back because there's only one train each direction a day, but it was peaceful and easy, and border was nearly empty on Sunday evening. Coming back to Canada is never a problem - the only question they asked was where we live, and Vancouver was the right thing to say for them to just wave us through.


• I spent the Monday going though the photos, selecting and editing them, and then uploading... Then going through forums to post the links, look at other people's photos, re-connect with people we met, reading and sending PMs and by the end of it it felt like just another con day. Yet it was over and I was feeling a little blue in the evening... my ego gets very attached to people, places, events and things and putting them behind is sad.

Off we go

And so it's time to get on to the train and depart for fun and games and lots of good clean fun. Probably won't be updating until Monday, but check out Flickr, I'll try to get at least few photos up every day.

Mother of all checklists

Sakura-con take-with list

• Haori
• Top
• Obi
• Pants
• Shoes
• Wig
• Push-up bra & gel boobies
• Hollywood fashion tape
• Bindi
• Briefcase
• Sake set + apple juice
• Playing cards
• Chocolate coins
• Make-up (foundation, powder, lipstick, eyeliner)

• Haori
• Jukata + pants
• Belt
• Fishnet shirt
• Fishnet socks
• Geta
• Wig (Shammy)
• Headgear (Max)
• Hand protectors
• Frog wallet
• Toad scroll
• Back bag
• Make-up (white + red paint, eyeliner)

• Top
• Shirt
• Tie
• Bum skirt
• Corset pantyhose
• Spandex (yeah, baby)
• Socks
• Cape
• Boots
• Tie pin
• Reference picture for make-up + hair
• Make-up (pale foundation, powder, lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow)

• Jeans
• Denim vest
• Belt
• Shoulder guard
• Boots
• Boxing wrap
• Leather bracelet
• Tank-top
• Make-up (eyeliner)

• Comb & hairbrush (for hair & wigs)
• Gel & hairspray
• Superglue
• Pins, pins, pins
• Wig caps
• Hair bands (big & small)
• Sewing kit
• Nail file
• Band-aids/blister band-aids
• Travel size pack of tissues
• Chapstick
• Throat lozenges
• Moist towelettes
• Pencil sharpener
• Painkillers
• Clear/red nail polish
• Nail polish remover
• Masking tape
• Scissors
• Iron
• Hand lotion
• Safety pins
• Make-up remover
• Hand mirror

• Passport
• Train tickets
• Seattle map
• Hotel reservation conformation
• Photoshoot conformation + instructions
• Cameras + batteries + chargers + cable
• Laptop + cables + empty CDs
• iPod + cable + microphone
• Extra towels
• Shampoo & conditioner
• Pen/paper/post-it notes
• Non-perishable high calorie food
• chocolate
• crisps
• protein bars
• water

Preparations

Sorry for being a little quiet... Despite the fact that everything is "ready", it's not, really, and we're spending most of our free time still getting ready for next weekend's Sakura-con. I've spent several days trying to organize a photoshoot time for the little narutards - I'll tell you this much: trying to herd teenage ninjas into any kind of decision is like trying to catch eels from a bucket with chopsticks. Especially when they all go into stealth mode when things are being agreed on, but appear in a puff of smoke to complain when there's already an agreement. But I got there in the end, and they seem like good kids. And in case you missed it, here are our finished costumes - me as Tsunade, and my handsome husband as Jiraiya.

I've been looking for someone like you...

I spoke these words yesterday, to Marie, my fabulous new hairdresser. My colour is now nice dark brown again, and she told me off for using a drug store brand that fades my colour. Marie is great, she's got spunk and imaginations, and knows what suits me.

This week has been pretty busy, I've been teaching quite a lot (was subbing for Kiki tonight) and I'm really loving it. It's great, I'm still feeling a bit apprehensive before the class, but once I get going it's just the best thing. And in cosplay news: I've actually finished both of my costumes, whopping four days before the con. I'm actually really happy with both of them, I've had my dress rehearsals and I feel comfortable in them.

Now all I need is enough sleep.