Just when we thought it was over...

March_2008_2
Originally uploaded by llopacinski

Just when I thought we were finally finished shoveling we got another snow storm. Yesterday it was sunny & in the mid 40's. Today it's cold, extremely windy, and we've gotten over a foot of snow. Craig closed down the store early and I got off work early too. The roads were bad and of course people seem to have already forgot how to drive on slippery roads - we saw a car almost go off of a bridge, a car make a turn and almost take out the traffic light, and several cars in ditches, and this was just a 14 mile drive!

This photo is the view from my back yard into one of the neighbor's yards. You can see that there's plenty of wet white stuff. If you click on it you can go to my Flickr page and see more of my March Snowstorm pictures. In one you can see, or actually not see, our car. We got home around 1 pm and this photo was taken around 6 pm - so that gives you an idea of how much snow is falling here. It started early this morning, and should finally stop sometime in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

Whiteout

I'm not talking about the story by Greg Rucka that will be a movie later this year. I'm talking about the blinding whiteout snow we had here in souteast Wisconsin today. Everything has now closed down: banks, malls, city hall. Churches have cancelled or postponed their Ash Wednesday services, tons of businesses are closed, every school and day care was closed, even the city's transit system has shut down. There was one county that had the freeway declared impassable In fact, they just said on the radio that three counties have taken their snow plows off the road because the visibility is so bad that it's not even safe for them. Yeah, it's that bad.

Craig couldn't even leave the house to get the comics at UPS - the car was completely stuck. We're going to have to really work on it tomorrow and hopefully we can get it freed up.

I think the last time I saw snow totals, which was around 2 pm, were 12 - 14 inches since last night, and the snow is still coming down. They say it might end around 9 pm tonight. Even my dog seems to be sick of it now and she has the genetics of a winter climate dog. They are saying that this has been a record setting year for snow in the area, and that today's snow is one of the worst 24-hour snowfalls we've seen in decades. Plus it is SO windy that visibility is really poor.

I wish I had my camera here instead of at the store because I'd take some great snow photos. But instead I've just got a cell phone photo. Not great, but it gives you the idea. Keep in mind that most of the snow melted last week. We had a bit of snow last week, and the rest is all just from last night and today. Here's a link to photos from the local newspaper's web site if you want to see more.

It's a nice day -- to rest, to catch up on TiVo, to work on some unfinished projects, to stay at home -- but not to do anything that has to do with the outdoors. My brother-in-law just got a job last month delivering mail for the USPS - he probably won't get home until midnight tonight because he has to help cover the routs of the more senior carriers who called in "sick" today, and it's slow going besides. At least he'll get overtime pay.

I hope that all of you were safe today and did not have to go out at all in this! On the plus side - one news station has been doing some of their snow coverage right near our store and we've seen the outside of the strip mall and our sign on TV!

Snow Day

The Green Bay Packers lost yesterday.

The bank & post office are closed today.

It's snowing now, and supposed to continue all day.

The internet is running VERY slow.

For all these reasons and more, it's been fairly quiet in the store today. We've had some customers, but not as many as I'd like. However, the one good thing is that a slow, snow day gives us time to do some other stuff here at Neptune.

I dusted all of the action figures, shelves, and other surfaces - which I do every week, but usually on Tuesday. Since I had the time today, I did it in advance.

No luck trying to track down a card game, You're Bluffing, for a guy who also hasn't had any luck finding it. I guess it's out of print now, and has been for a while, and my distributor doesn't have any information saying if it will ever be reprinted. Hopefully the guy can track it down somewhere.

We also took down the "top selling graphic novels" display and replaced it with a "featured authors" display. For now we're featuring: Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Brian K. Vaughn. We're not sure yet how often we'll switch these up. Maybe once a month, or every 6 weeks.

Craig is pounding his head against the POS computer, trying to get our system converted from DOS to Windows. It's an unending battle. The programmer fixes one thing and two more seem to get wonky, and our inventory is there, but not all of it is.

I took some new in-store pictures for our web gallery, so Kelly Ann can import them on Saturday. We have to update the pictures every so often, otherwise the merchandise is too out of date and people either see them and think that we don't get new stuff regularly, or they think they'll be able to find something in the picture that we don't have anymore.

Now it's time for lunch - Jimmy Johns subs. They deliver, so we don't have to drive around in the snow - and clean the snow that's fallen so far off of the car. I'm having a #12, -tomatoes, +mustard.

I'll have to come up with some new projects after lunch. Or, if the weather continues to get worse and we don't see people coming in, we might just close and go home.

Enjoy these lovely pictures of our current snow! (click to enlarge)

Odd Day

It's been a strange day in the store today. Almost like a Monday in terms of traffic into the store - a lot of lookers and not a lot of regulars. I think it's because of this "horrible storm" the news is trying to convince us we're going to have. It looks like the western part of the state will get it the worst and then it went more north as it moved east, so I think we will get some rain and possibly some winds, but that's probably it. Just enough to mess up the DirectTV for a bit.

But even though it's been a bit slow in the store today, I do feel like I've gotten some things done. I read most of my list of comics that I was going to read. I added some products to the Neptune Cafe' Press store, I responded to a lot of people who have been discussing POWER in Comics, I did some research into on-line community site hosts, I answered questions for another guy working on opening his own brick and mortar comic book store, I added some new stuff into the computer... lots of little things.

We are getting some final pieces into place for our Welcome Back Hulk Party for next week, so that's fun.

And our Onion News ad rep claims to be working on getting us sneak peak tickets for Transformers - so hopefully that pans out.

We put in an order for some upcoming DVD's to sell in the store - like "300" and "Superman Doomsday Animated."

We waited for a call from the guy who is supposed to help us convert our current inventory and POS systems from DOS to windows - but he never called. So sadly the wait continues on that front.

Yeah - I guess that's about it.

MORE Excitement!

It seems a week can't go by where something nearly disasterous doesn't happen. Last week it was the armed robber across the street. Last night it was our back yard tree. At 7:45 pm we get a call at the store from our neighbor, telling us that part of our back yard tree got torn off in the wind and was blocking our back door and had pulled down power lines. She suggested we get home quick to evaluate the situation before it got too dark for us to see.

We dropped everything and drove home. Upon arriving we see that we still have power, as do our neighbors, but sure enough, a large branch was torn off of the large tree we have in our back yard and it landed on the power lines, pulling the line right down to the ground. It also blocked our back door. There were leaves and small branches all caught up in our Direct TV dish, but the dish was still on. Our back yard light was loose, but didn't get pulled down. But our neighbors were not as lucky. The pole where the power goes from the line into their house was torn off and their electric wires were barely hanging on. We quickly called the electric company and got repair men out to get the power line out of our yard. They did that, but the neighbors line was so badly ripped that the electric company had to disconnect them and won't restore their service until they get someone out to fix the connection to their house. We really lucked out because aside from having some large branches to remove and having to tighten up the back yard light, we didn't have any other damage. However, now we have to seriously consider having the back yard tree removed due to safety.

You should be able to click on the pictures to enlarge them, if you want to see the mess close-up.

Spring Snow Storm

Well, it's nearly mid-April and we're firmly embedded in a snow storm.

Thankfully our area is supposed to get the least of the 5-10 inch snowfall today. But the wind is brutal - it's pretty much snowing sideways. I had to go to the bank to get some $1 bills, and it wasn't bad on the way there, with the wind directly at my back, but the walk back from the bank was BRUTAL - I couldn't even see. It was just wet snow pelting me in the face. YUCK! It has also made for a slower morning here at the store, which makes it even more annoying.

Cap Pics

The beautiful spring weather arrived here a week ahead of schedule (March 21st is the first day of spring). The weather is SO beautiful that people must be enjoying it instead of shopping - the whole mall here is rather quiet. I can't blame them either - I'd be out enjoying it too if I wasn't here working to get ready for Wednesday. But on the plus side, MY part of the Wednesday setup is now finished and I can maybe catch up on some comic book reading.

Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of these funny pictures. You can click to make them larger if you want. The guy (aside from Captain America) is my husband and business partner, Craig. Let me just say I look FINE in that Wasp costume! LOL!! We put these out on our Captain America shrine.

Thanks again to Scott King for Photoshopping for us. He's working on our TV ad today! Be sure to visit his blog--it's in my links to the left.

Bad Weather is Bad for Books

If you were already in our store yesterday you should know this story, but if you weren't it is a sad tale of comic book boxes separated from friends, left alone in the cold and snow.

Wednesday is new book day, it is "money day," it is our busiest day of the week most weeks. Nothing upsets the perfect balance of new book day as much as product not arriving. Yesterday Craig and I wake up at the earlier new book day time and prepare ourselves for the day. Then we drive out to the UPS hub to pick up our boxes, most marked with Diamond's logo. We knew this would be a smaller week already--there were only three boxes coming. Usually we have an average of 5 - 6 boxes to pick up. Craig went into the UPS office to sign the UPS pad and bring the cart with our comics out to our truck and I waited in the truck for him. Usually it takes all of a minute for Craig to go in and come back out with our boxes. Yesterday he was in there over five minutes. The longer I waited the more I KNEW that at least one of our boxes was missing. Finally Craig came out with the cart and only two boxes. He had given the UPS guys our phone number in case it showed up and off we went to the store to put out whatever we'd received in the two boxes we did get.

Once at the store Craig left our Diamond sales rep a message to let him know one box of ours was missing and that the UPS tracking showed it had gotten as far as Buffalo New York. All of our new Diamond products come out of their Plattsburgh NY warehouse, then E. Syracuse NY, next they go to Buffalo where they must catch a flight or large truck because the next time we see them they are in Hodgkins IL, then onto our UPS hub. One of our triad of Diamond boxes got separated from his friends; maybe it got distracted, or cold, or just lost, but his friends continued on the pre-destined path to the comic book racks of Neptune Comics while he stayed in the 10 foot drifts of snow in Buffalo New York.

As we do on new book day, we unboxed the new products, received them, pull items for pre-orders and subscriptions, and put everything else out on the shelves. Once we were finished with the two boxes we could see that about 1/3 of our total shipment was in that sad, lost box. This prep took us about an hour since it was a small week, made smaller by not getting the full shipment. Our Diamond rep still had not called. We sent him an email, still nothing. But, a few minutes later we received an email from Diamond that stated that due to bad weather there would be very few members of the Diamond staff in the Timmonium MD office - which is exactly where the Diamond sales reps work. Apparently there was a bad ice storm out in MD (click here to see a photo of the aftermath) and not only were the roads treacherous, many people lost power. Thankfully Diamond's web site was working and we could track our missing package. It looked like it was back on it's way, and would arrive today, which it in fact did. We did luck out--our big books for the week: Astonishing X-Men, 52 and Justice Society of America did all arrive in the boxes we managed to get on Wednesday.

About 1:30 pm I realized that another Diamond shipment wasn't going to arrive. All of our new products, as I explained earlier, come out of the Diamond NY warehouse. These are marked so that they are held at the hub for us to pick up so that we can get books on the shelves by 11 AM on new book day. We usually also get another shipment from Diamond on new book day - a box of items we are restocking on in the store. This restocking box is sent out of Diamond's Memphis TN warehouse and is delivered by a UPS carrier instead of being held at the hub. I saw the UPS driver pull into our parking lot in front of the store at the usual time. I rang up a customer's purchase and as I turned around to complete the purchase via our credit card processing machine, I see the UPS truck pull away. The driver never came into our store. Once the customer left I went back to Diamond's web site and saw that the bad snow on Tuesday had held up our restocking order as well. Thankfully that one also arrived today and the shelves are finally full once again.

All-in-all we had a pretty good Wednesday considering that it was a small week and we didn't even get our full order that day. Thanks to everyone who already came back today to pick up the comics we didn't get yesterday!

Revenge of the Cold

So far, other than being a little cold, we've been able to survive this bitter cold just fine. But today it wasn't so easy. Last night shortly before we went to bed we heard a wierd noise like a pipe shaking. Craig and I looked at each other, looked around the house, and discovered nothing. Everything seemed fine and we didn't hear anything else. Then around 3 am the dog barked at a noise she heard. At first we heard nothing and Criag fell back asleep. Then I woke up again, hearing something that sounded like a large engine, close by, shaking the house at times, and an occasional small banging sound. Craig didn't hear it. At first I thought I imagined it and tried to fall back asleep, but both Cassie the dog and I knew we were hearing something. About 20 minutes later I finally got up to investigate. I looked out the back window and saw nothing. But when I looked out the front window I discovered the source of the noise. There were men, a couple of work trucks, and work lights focused on the street right across from our house. It looked like they were tearing up the street - which usually means a water-main break. I turned on a faucet and sure enough - bone dry. Today we have no water at home and the city isn't sure when they'll have it fixed. Luckily Craig's parents live in Waukesha and he has a key to their house. We're off now to go shower and brush our teeth at their house. I don't know how the pilgrims did it! Not having water is quite an inconvenience, and it's too cold to pee in the bushes (lol).