Well naturally everything once again has not worked out as planned…. I bought most of the wall bookcases of the South Hill Hastings store a few weeks ago and was told that I could pick them up October 1st. Great! Time to figure out how we would use them and were they would go and maybe do some prepwork and some thought.
Nah, they called last Wednesday and said they were ready to be picked up. They had cleared them off for us and were ready when we were which is a polite way of asking if we were on our way yet or not….
I went up there Thursday morning and talked to the kid working the front counter and he just pointed back to the side wall where they were at and said that he was not allowed to help me due to ‘liability reasons.’ As I had only asked him if they were bolted to the wall or not I was a bit annoyed and explained to him thats not really how ‘liability reasons’ work….
I went to look at the shelves and the assistant manager saw me and asked what was going on and I showed him my paperwork and he said he should have been called when I came in to show me what needed to be done – really nice guy and didnt mention liability reasons a single time…. He opened up the closed cafe area for me to carry stuff through so I wouldnt have to dodge customers. He and the other assistant there who was also incredibly nice switched back and forth being my ‘minder.’ They have to have someone monitor you while you are taking fixures out so you dont accidently take a load of books or movies which makes sense as a dying store is seen as a free for all by some people.
It took me 3 hours of breaking down shelves and loading them in the van to get about 7 fixtures out of there. I took them back to Division and put them up one at a time with Kevin filling them with books from one of our old cases which we then moved and then I put one of the new ones in. It was a few more hours of work but looked great.
I realized that I really liked them so I went back and bought another 6 which I broke down and loaded the next morning. Having figured out how they work, it only took me a bit over an hour to do all those and then back to Division to put them up. Needless to say, I really like them so I went to the Shadle Hastings (the manager there was incredibly nice as well- I really wish we had room for some of their people, they would be a good fit here) and bought another 10 so we could put them in the Northtown mall location. I am having second thoughts now and think that I really need an additional 10 on top of that. I dont think I can have too many at this point. I wish we were close to opening another store as I would just buy another 20 or so…. Its so tempting.
Anyway, the Division store is starting to come together a bit. We have condiderably more room for graphic novels and should be able to display them much better. Our supply section has moved to the center of the shop and we have almost figured out how to use it efficiently. Almost. we will get there. The POP section is set up but the order is a mess as I just had to pull everything off the racks and replace them with cases and put them all back up in about 15 minutes which did nothing for their organization. Hopefully in the next week or so it will be back to tidy.
The Gundam and assorted stuff area is much easier to get through now and make sense of as I replaced all their shelving and made the isles a bit wider. They are still a bit too tight for my liking but much better than they were.
The front glass case in the shop will soon be an additional statue case. I think we have been misusing it for sometime and will fill it with all kinds of eye candy I think starting this week if the shipments show up. Maybe next week.
All this and the Previews orders are due next week for me, this week for you if you would like anything special out of them. I have to find about 16 or so hours in the next week to do the order while trying to get more bookcases from Hastings. For some reason I never seem to catch up with everything. Oh well. enough rambling this week. -Craig!

The new website is up and works!  Its not anywhere near where I want the finished product but it is functional!  Right now the main page seems to default to the weekly column (which you are probably noticing if that is where you are reading this) which is okay and hopefully we will make regular updates from both stores.  The new this week link sends you to a page where you click a link to Diamond Comics which gives you the entire list of comics for the week along with cover art and breakdowns of the story and details on the writers and artists!  I was hoping to just have the entire thing displayed on the NTW page but clicking one more link is quick and painless.
We will be playing with the backgrounds and rough formatting in the next few weeks to make it more pleasant.  At least to me anyway.  One nice thing is that when it updates it will make a notation on our Facebook page which you can click or ignore but you will see when stuff is happening.
We are on the countdown to our new bookcases somewhere around the beginning of October!  I think we will have a big mess for a couple of days while we move our current cases around to make room for the new ones but once its all set up its going to be nice.  I am also going to expand the supply area and put it more in the center of the shop which should make it much accessible and easier to browse.  It will then become a divider between the graphic novels and the growing game section which is the next project on the list.

Since Matt left a year and a half or so ago he has been doing our New This Week lists and updating the website each week in between sips of beer while he lounges naked on a couch made of the crushed dreams of people who brought him in collections and were sure they had just won the comic book lottery.  That has come to an end as of next week.  Not the crushed dreams part, I am sure he will treasure that for an entire lifetime but the continual updating.
Matt has changed positions in his current job moving on up into the realms of management and the timing of our needs don’t jibe with the starting time of his new duties so we are embarking into the never never world of computer stuff.
As my understanding of computer stuff pretty much ends at trying to find where they hide the book marks in my browser I really have no interest in learning HTML or any of that fun stuff and I have decided to try something different and switch the site over to a format that we can tinker with continually without accidentally crashing the whole site and maybe the California power grid too.
Starting next week when you go to our site it will be a bit different—The New This Week link will take you to a complete list of everything that is coming out that week including pictures and descriptions of each book.  You should be able to print out a text version if you wish to create a shopping list.  The column will be set up more like a blog hopefully with semi weekly posts of new products from both comic book locations.  The gaming and event calendar will be on the right of the front page and if you have any interest in whats going on just click it and our Google calendar will enthrall and excite you.
The updates are linked to our Facebook page and should pop up when made.
Anna has built up the framework of the site over the past week and its all based on WordPress so hopefully it wont be too far above my head and I can play with the setup and fine tuning.  Anna has done a great job in getting my three lines of scribbles on a yellow paper turned into a real site and hopefully I wont break it.  We will see. -Craig!

Camping is done for the year! We went up to Lake Roosevelt which is like a nice little oasis in the middle of the desert. The lake was nice and swimmable for the kids and the company was good and the alcohol was nice and we were home Sunday afternoon which is the best of all.

We have run really late the past couple of weeks on the new this week list so I am going to cut this side short so we can get it in the hands of people picking up new books.

We should be back to our regular scheduled ramblings next week.

-Craig!