I sort of was going to talk about this two weeks ago but went off on a tangent about the vagaries of the cosmos and our notions of the calendar, which felt more interesting. Probably still is. But anyhow, Dawn and I are easing into 2018, slowly and cautiously. I mean it doesn’t help that we’ve been sick (along with half the rest of the nation, it seems) but we haven’t exactly been sprinting from the starter gun. I don’t mean in terms of the story, of course, we’re back on our weekly schedule with that for the time being. But there’s all the other stuff. Gotta put together our sales tax report by the end of this month. Had to send in paperwork and money for Long Beach Comic Expo. Still have to send in paperwork and money for WonderCon — we’re confirmed, but I need to get the table invoice paid and our BOE 410-D form in. If you don’t know what BOE 410-D form is, consider yourself lucky. Okay I exaggerate. In truth I’ve found doing convention business in the state of California to be fairly painless. The state was perfectly willing to grant us a free permanent seller’s permit even way back when we were starting out and has been very patient and helpful when I do my yearly call to the BOE (that’s Board of Equalization) because I forgot how to do the yearly return again. Again I exaggerate somewhat since last year I finally remembered enough to submit it on my own, so this year it’s about time to see if I can repeat the feat. Now that we’ve started recording our convention sales totals through Square’s register app, whether they be cash or charge, it also saves me the trouble of hunting through and checking tallies on various order books. I keep feeling like I’m forgetting some crucial deadline or failing on a follow-through I ought to be checking up on, but we just got in our POD order of Issue #12 floppies well in time for the start of the convention season. Long Beach is in less than a month so I should check and see if they’ve got the maps up yet, but no huge need for lead time there. WonderCon I really ought to check on again in terms of the deadlines for the program books, etc. but as of a couple weeks ago nothing was there yet, so I can’t feel too bad. The hotel stay is all taken care of. So even as I might feel at times adrift and unglued, as it were, the empirical evidence suggests adulting (for this given value of adulting) is indeed still happening. Good enough.