Wow, what a great week! First, I got to go on vacation. I haven’t been on one of those since the store opened. My mom bought an RV recently, which is what made the whole vacation possible. James & I, our 4 kids, my sister-in-law Jana, her 2 kids, and my mother-in-law Sandra all went. I know that sounds like a lot of people, and it was crowded sometimes, but we all had so much fun! First we went to Mount Rushmore for a couple of days, then to Yellowstone for a couple more. Never believe driving times, by the way, they are always wrong. Plan on at least an extra hour to get wherever you are going.

Next, tonight is the prerelease of M11!! Yay for midnight releases! I’ll post pictures tomorrow. And because of the store rearrangement, we can actually hold the prerelease here! Here are pictures of the prerelease, buy-a-box, and release promo cards:

Sun Titan is the prerelease card, Birds of Paradise is for buy a box, and Ancient Hellkite is the release card. Our prerelease tournament is at midnight tonight, as usual. For that info and more info about our Magic tournaments and the release party, please visit the calendar. See you tonight!

This has nothing to do with the store, but I had to post a couple of pictures of what my husband made. Picture 1 is the cat (Amos, pronounced Ah-mos) playing on his new and amazingly awesome cat house. Picture 2 is the cat sleeping in his aerie tower. James is so cool.

Well, we changed the store one more time, and what a pain that was. It took 3 days of really hard work, but boy was it worth it! When you come into the store now, you walk into a large, open gaming area. We have space for 4 tables easily, and 5 if we really need it. What a relief it is not to be crowded for FNM and to have extra room on D&D nights. Over half the store is play space, and we didn’t lose any shelf space. I love it, and I hope you do too!

We were asked to run a celebrity Booster Draft for Brandon Sanderson at the Space Pirates of CONduit convention this last weekend, and what a blast that was! He is an amazingly open person and stayed to talk after the tournament. He also won the tournament. I am a goober, however, and did not take any pictures. Because I rule like that.

CONduit also contacted us the day before the convention to ask if we’d like to run a booth in the dealer’s room, not an easy thing to do on such short notice. We were game (hehe) to try, however, and had a great time meeting all of the new people. I do have a couple of pictures of our booth, but I never took pictures of anything else. I guess you should just go if you want to see all the cool costumes and really nice people rather than counting on me to take pictures. Really, haven’t you learned of my unrealiability yet?

D&D Encounters is going amazingly well! So well, in fact, that next season (in 4 weeks) we will be running 3 tables. Yesterday we had 15 plus the 2 DMs. This is a bit of a problem on only 2 tables, obviously.

The store, for all of you who are wondering, is doing quite well as well. We anticipate actually paying ourselves in the next few months! How would it be to not work for free? I can’t recall…

In addition, we hit advanced level recently for Magic and can therefore run the Eldrazi Game Day! It’s on May 22nd, so check the calendar for more details. It should be a blast.

Come join us, as always, for board game night every Saturday starting at 6pm. See you there!

Dawn

Wow, the prerelease was amazing! We had 52 people playing, only 5 of whom dropped before morning. Starting at 12am (midnight), the tournament ended at 6:30 the next morning. The sunrise was lovely.

Congratulations to the top three:

1st – Andy Wellisch, who walked away with a gold Ion Deck Box, Dragon Playmat, Sliver premium deck, and 11 boosters.

2nd – Jeremy Hansen, who walked away with a gold Ion Deck Box, Dragon Playmat, and 11 boosters. Jeremy also won one of the bounties and got a clear Eldrazi deck box as well.

3rd – Jerry Jong, who walked away with a clear Eldrazi deck box and 10 boosters.

Grats to everyone else who placed as well. I hope, after you take naps, that you look back on last night as a ton of fun! I’m sure I will after another 12 hours of sleep.

In the meantime, these pictures are, more or less in order: James decorating mana cookies (mountains, to be exact), my daughter, Samantha, decorating mana cookies (islands), the mana cookies, the check-in station, and lots of tournament pictures. Enjoy!

The newest Magic: The Gathering set, Rise of the Eldrazi, releases on 4/23. In the meantime, prerelease goodness will be going on all weekend this week!

I am happy to report that our sealed deck prerelease tournament is completely full! 48 players will be joining us at midnight on the 16th/17th to play all night. For those of you who wanted to play but weren’t able to get a spot: sign up earlier next time. Because of the great turnout, we’re hoping to have room for even more next time.

In addition, the launch party will be the night of April 23rd. Sign in starts at 6:00pm, and the booster draft begins at 6:30pm. $15 entry fee. Sign up before it’s too late!

Lastly, if you still want preorder prices for Fat Packs and booster boxes, please get us your order and your money this week.

In other news, Mystery Express is finally here. We had a few the week of release that sold out pretty quickly, but the restock will be in tomorrow. And for those of you waiting for more Wasgij puzzles from Ravensburger, we will have more sometime this week (they don’t give me enough info about shipping to know exactly when).

See you all soon!

Dawn

The newest Magic set, Rise of the Eldrazi, is releasing in a few weeks! If you’d like to be part of the midnight prerelease tournament, please call or come in to sign up soon. We’re about half full at this point. We also have preorders available for booster boxes, fat packs, and intros. We’re not getting a lot of fat packs again, so if you want one please come in and order soon.

In other Magic news, casual Magic has been moved to Tuesdays due to the unexpected popularity of D&D Encounters. D&D Encounters will continue to run on Wednesday evenings at 6pm for the next 16 weeks, and you should have lots more room.

Spring is upon us! My daughter and I are going to ride in the Tour de Cure this summer for Diabetes research. Go here if you’d like more info or to sponsor us: Please help! We need a lot of money.

Sorry I haven’t posted lately, but I’ve been on hold with Chase Bank pretty much the entire time. If you have any options at all about where your mortgage is, let me give you this advice: DON’T GET A MORTGAGE WITH CHASE BANK. If you want to know why, please read on. If you hate rants, it’s probably best not to read any more. And yes, I know this has nothing to do with games or game stores. I will post another blog today with that info, I promise.

We got a loan with a local bank (Far West), who immediately sold it to Washington Mutual. Fine, whatever, they’re kind of local too, and we could still go into the bank to make the payments, eliminating worry about mailing times, etc. We could even do electronic bill pay through the internet or through our own bank’s site. For 4 years we were fine with them.

Then they got bought by Chase, and the problems started immediately. At first, they were merely annoying: we could no longer go into a local branch to pay our mortgage because “the mortgage section is completely separate”, whatever that means. Electronically paying through our bank’s electronic bill pay didn’t work any longer; our bank had to send a check because Chase doesn’t accept electronic payments. We could no longer pay online either, because their web site doesn’t recognize our mortgage as a real account without also having some sort of checking or savings with their bank too. So now we’re forced to send a check through the mail every single month.

Guess what! When they get around to sending me a monthly bill (which is by no means a given with this company; they routinely don’t send me anything at all), it has a PO Box as an address. If you call the automated system to get an address for payment when you don’t get your monthly statement, they give you a different address. And if you ask to talk to a real person, you get yet a third payment address. Anywhere you send a payment can take anywhere from 1 to 3 1/2 weeks to process, so if you want to truly avoid late payments, you really have to pay nearly a whole month ahead, which is insane.

So I’m paying my mortgage every month when suddenly I get a notice of foreclosure. WTF? They claim I’m NOT paying every month, and when I look at the list of payments, I see they have not credited me for October 2009. Now, this is a problem for me on several different levels. First of all, if they truly thought I was missing a payment, why the {bleep} didn’t they call me or send me something mentioning it? Secondly, who the {bleep} forecloses over one missing payment without giving any opportunity to catch up? Holy cow.

After taking time to calm down, I called Chase to ask where I could send proof of payment. 20 minutes later I finally got to speak to a person and got the fax number. I then called my own (vastly superior) credit union to ask them to fax the proof of payment, which they promptly did. This was February 22nd. I waited a while to hear back from Chase, then called them about a week later. I was told to be patient because investigations take up to 30 days. Whatever. If they want something from me, I don’t get to wait 30 days, I have to send it that day.

I called again on March 15th, which was 4 WEEKS after I sent the original investigation request. Apparently I’m now in a special foreclosure department that closes at 5:00 pm Eastern, 3:00 pm my time. I called at 2:55 pm my time. The person who answered the phone said that I would have to talk to customer service to find out the status of the investigation. He transferred me. The person who answered there said since I was a previous Washington Mutual customer he couldn’t help me. He transferred me. The person who answered there said I had to talk to a special foreclosure department. She tried to transfer me, but came back a few minutes later to tell me she was getting a message that the department closed at 5 pm. This was the original department I had talked to first. It took nearly an hour of holding and talking to get back to this point. Apparently, the first guy wanted to go home more than he wanted to answer a very simple question. Understandably unhappy at this point, I asked to talk to a supervisor. She said one would call me back. Nope.

Next day: I call again. The person who answers tells me an investigation was opened on March 15th, and that it will take 30 days… I ask what about the 4 weeks since they’ve had my information. She said that doesn’t count. Then she told me to stop bothering them and hung up on me. So I called back. Asked for a supervisor. Explained the whole thing again. Got hung up on again. Called back. Crying. Was put on hold without warning and transferred into some random person’s voice mail. Left a message requesting a call back in the hopes it was a supervisor. I still don’t know because I didn’t get called back. Again.

I called again this morning, and the person who answered said that it must have been resolved since I only owe for March. I spent 5 minutes trying to convince her that I should owe for April at this point before she interrupted me and asked when the investigation was opened. I told her I requested it in February but it was only officially opened last week. She said it will take 30 days and stop calling…

Worst. Customer. Service. On. The. Planet.

Guess what? I can’t refinance because my credit report shows 30 days late on my mortgage for the last 5 months.

Chase SUCKS.

Well I’ve been remiss in keeping this sucker up to date. In my defense, I’ve been very…well, actually not very busy. I did learn to knit, though! I have 1/5 of an afghan done for my son.

Oh, oh, and we painted the store! Most of one wall is now a blackboard, and the rest went from drab brown to sunny yellow. I LOVE it! Here are some pictures, but to really appreciate the change you really need to come in and see. One of these pics has Kendel’s head in it. Hi, Kendel’s head!

In game news, have you played Dungeon Lords yet? I love this game. It ranks as a new favorite. Come in and try it out, but only if you’re willing to put a lot of thought into what you’re doing.

That’s it for now, but I promise to get back to writing once a week. (I have more time now since I quit that other job!!!)

Dawn