Regarding Your Recent Foray

My mom has an online bookstore. She decided to rent a booth at the Salt City Steam Fest to sell in-person because she loves Steampunk stuff and because I don't know why. But I'm glad she did. 

Although business was slow, she more than paid for the booth rental, and talked to a lot of people about books. She was the only bookseller at the event, and the Steam Fest publicity people interviewed her for some news show thing or something that I couldn't find (sadly, their marketing and internet presence isn't very good). Bonus: someone who runs another convention in Utah hypothetically asked her to speak on a panel about Steampunk literature (or something) at their next conference! I hope that works out, because that would be really great for her.

Anyway, I had a good time. I love people-watching, and conventions like this are the perfect place for it. Seemingly "normal" people let their secret sides out and it's awesome. It's easy to get excited about random stuff when you're in that atmosphere. I dressed up *le gasp* (in a costume I threw together from stuff around the house), and even got a few compliments on my costume! Strange, since I wasn't really trying. 

I spent all day Friday helping out with the bookstore, then Sam and the baby and I went up for a few hours on Saturday to look around (Sam has never been to a Con before) and see Adrien, who was helping out that day, and who we rarely get to see these days. It was pretty fun.

We got Olive Garden for lunch the first day and Cafe Rio the second. For some reason the Steam Fest didn't sell any of their own food (big mistake, I say), so everyone was really jealous of our lunches. Drew the customers in maybe...

Our neighbors to our left were very friendly jewelers who had come all the way from Los Angeles. They had hip-hoppish Arabian music playing and twinkling lights, and were really nice. Here's a washed-out picture of the guy. He was there with his girlfriend or someone.

There were other really cool costumes. We saw a steampunk Iron Man:

And a guy with homemade hydraulic wings (very cool):

There was also a steampunk C-3PO:

And this crazy costume, which I overheard was a steampunk version of something from Resident Evil, but what do I know (by the way, I did not take these crummy pictures, this one was taken by Fox News, and I cannot believe they didn't get a full-body shot). He was wearing lifts so he was almost 7 feet tall, and had this skinny leather skirt thing on, and then this weird pyramidal...thing that he put on his head. I clearly know exactly who he was supposed to be.

Anyway, so some people fell into the "put a gear on it" category of being into the spirit of the thing, and others obviously did a really good job. I was surprised at how many middle-aged ladies apparently have secret lives as Neo-Victorians. 

I'll leave you with this guy who brought a velocipede:

If you feel so inclined, you can see the bookstore (in part, not everything is listed so she can better control inventory) here: 

shops.half.ebay.com/gaslamp_used_books