Thursday, November 25, 1999

by the Wunderland Toast Society

The big news in our community this week is that Rob just got married! The wedding was held at the beautiful Kent Manor Inn out by the bay, and it was a delightful occasion, marked with exquisite food and great live music.

Rob is one of several Toasters who moved out west in the mass migration to Boulder that occurred a couple of years ago, when Magnet melted down. He got together with Aileen out there, but her family lives in our neck of the woods, which is why the wedding was held out here. This meant the rest of the Boulder office was in town as well, and it was great seeing them all again... and finally getting to meet Aileen.

All in all, it was a wonderful wedding... the only snafu I know of is that Hurricane Lenny had just finished flattening their honeymoon destination, forcing them to quickly devise a Plan B. Here's hoping that went off as well as the wedding, and best wishes to them both for many happy years together!

For quite a while now, we've been trying to devise a good fan reward/recognition program, something that would allow us to harness the energy and enthusiasm of our fanbase, and to use that power for Good (never for Evil). And although we still haven't figured it all out, we've decided to go ahead and launch the program, and figure the rest of it out as we go along.

After months of debate, we've settled on calling this loosely-knit team the Mad Lab Rabbits. Alison worked up a great looking mascot character, and we've started a page with initial information on the program, with a survey you can fill out if you're interested in joining up, through which you can give us your opinions and ideas.

One thing we've already been getting requests for (which we already had in the works) is a very compact piece of propaganda, which our Rabbits can keep handy to give away whenever someone is curious about getting their own Fluxx deck or Icehouse set. To this end, we've designed a new Micro-Catalog. It's the size of a business card, and hopefully we'll have them available by this time next week.

Other than that, the main thing on our minds this week has been the impending holiday shopping season. This will be a crucial time for our business, one which we've been preparing for in various ways for quite some time. Even so, we still found ourselves with many little improvements we've been planning to do still unfinished just a few days before the official start of the holiday shopping season. So, we've been hastily adding some buttons to the Shopping Cart pages, clarifying the options for shipping, finally getting that privacy statement written, and otherwise doing a bit of polishing up here and there. And now the store is really looking sharp, and we're just about ready to handle the hopefully-massive holiday rush that, judging by the recent increase in orders, is already starting. Here we go!