This would suck, a lot, because chances of getting in would be roughly 1 in 10. I'm on the waiting list for the dealer's room for this con (once you're in there, you're in), so hopefully either there will still be a portion of tables that are FCFS in the artist alley in the future, or I will pop off the wait list for the dealer's room soon. This con makes up about 20% of my income. Not sure what I will do if I can't get in in 2013, other than to assume that it's not going to happen and start doing what I need to do to fly to large conventions on the east and west coasts, and bring in more income. I've doing almost everything worth doing in TX right now.
I've got two more events back-to-back in a couple of weeks, and then a bit of a break in April through mid-May in which I may do some stormchasing with a friend when I'm not doing business stuff.
Over the next couple of days I'm going to do some weeding in the beds front and back, and start planting stuff. Last freeze date down here is St Patrick's day, but the 10 day forecast says it's not going to freeze between now and then, so I'll get a bit of a head start. Going to try corn, beans, and zucchini in the the back (spaghetti squash was a no-go last year), along with more carrots (much success last year) and beets. The beets are puzzling to me - I planted a patch, and only the ones along one edge actually grew beyond seedling size. But, you can plant them in the fall and overwinter them, like carrots, and I just ate some for the first time tonight. Wow those were good! Just boiled them and buttered them.
My other winter crop besides carrots (not mature yet) and beets was sugar snap peas, which I'm happily munching on every time I'm out in the back yard. I've even got a couple of mutants, which are making extra-large wavy pods. I ate one to make sure it was good, and the rest of those I'm leaving on the vine to go to seed (bigger pods = more to eat). The snap peas are the one crop I can reliably get seeds out of; I'm on my second generation. I left carrots to bolt last year, and only two of them did. I've read that carrots tend to lose their genetic identities fairly quickly without a lot of mixing, so I'm curious as to what this limited second generation will produce.
The rest of the back garden is going to be parsley, cilantro, dill, and whatever else I can squeeze in. Giving up on tomatoes and peppers in the back - too much sun / heat. Might work in a mild year, but not another summer like the last one. The basil did great in the front flowerbed up against the house (house faces east), so I'll try my pepper plants there too and see what happens. I got two or three bluebonnets to come up in the front yard from seed. They're not blooming yet. Should be a spectacular year for wildflowers what with all the rain we've had, as long as it's not 100 degrees with no rain every day in April (that happened in '06).
