Atropa Belladonna~ Raven (a.k.a. Nightshade)'s Weblog ~
These are the ARCHIVES of October 2003. For more archives, visit the Archives page. For the current Weblog entries, check the Main page.
Atropa Belladonna| Thurs, Oct 30, 2003 (1:45pm) Bah. I'm depressed today. It's probably one of those hormanal things which go along with pregnancy, so I'm trying not to let it bother me. Probably has a lot to do with low light levels, too - although we've had lots of snow, the days have been cloudy and bleak, and it feels oppressive outside. This iritates me, 'cuz usually I enjoy the beginning of winter. I can finally breathe again! The cold weather cleans out the air and the snow covers the mess of fall leaves, and the world is a good place. But today, that doesn't make any difference. This is stupid - I don't keep a blog just to bemoan my fate, or whine about how my life sucks. I keep it for entertainment's sake. People don't need to hear about another miserable 30-something housewife's boring day with the kids, and how she feels about the day, or the weather. Nor do I find it productive to bitch and whine. So instead, I'm going to try to think of something positive to post. How about this: Raven's list of Shinies - Cool stuff I got for my birthday! - A broccoli salad. Okay, it sounds silly, but I happen to love my Mom's broccoli and raisin salad. It has bacon bits in it, and coleslaw dressing, and she remembers not to put almonds in it - especially for me - so I won't die. And my Mom knows how much I like it, so when she came to watch my kids for an hour or two on my birthday, she made some up and brought it along. My Mom rocks. - A night out with the girls, at an expenive restaurant. I got to pick half a dozen girlfriends, and my favorite restaurant, and Shades watched the kids and footed the bill. It was very cool. - A patch of beaded celtic knotwork, from my friend Heather. It's supposed to go onto a purse or an SCA pouch. I'm not sure if that's exactly what I'll do with it (since I'm not the purse type, and my belt pouch bunches up and wouldn't show it off properly) but I'll think of something. - An earthenware bowl, from Myrna. I have a soft spot for pottery and earthenware, and this bowl happens to be a size and shape we didn't have before - perfect for salads and yummy food like that. - Snow. God gave me fresh clean air for my birthday. For that, I am thankful. - A garage door opener. We lost our second one sometime over the summer and now that it's cold out, I've been missing the ability to park freely in the garage. So Shades picked me up a garage door opener. He's very thoughtful. - A Saigon Throw. This is the Pier 1 Imports item which I'd been ooohing about in some previous blog entry, and Shades got me one for my birthday. It's deep red satin/silk, and beautiful, and soft, and looks amazing draped over a chair, or in front of the fireplace, or at the foot of the bed, or over a half-naked body. - A fixed sink-drawer. The half-drawer under the kitchen sink which holds the scrub brush and scouring pads broke sometime last week, and it's been irritating me. A lot. And my loving husband fixed it, without being asked. I love him. - My favorite Walrus is taking me out to dinner tonight. I suspect that this too will be a cool thing. - I renewed my shades-of-night.com domain for another 5 years. The domain was my birthday present to myself back in...uh.. '97, I think. So when it needed to be renewed (which was every year for a while, since it was too expensive to renew for more than 2 yrs running) I would do that as an ongoing birthday gift. This year, since domain rates are cheap-cheap, I renewed for 5 years. Kay. I'm feeling a little bit better now. I think I'm going to take what little inertia I have, and use it to get dressed, pack up the kids, and get out of the house. I'm not sure where I'll go (the mall, probably, despite my current lack of funds) but I know that depression is worse if you sit at home and do nothing about it. Therefore, dear reader, I will stop boring you with tales of my miserable mood, and I will get off my butt and do something about it. Hopefully my next post will be back to my entertaining norm. Maybe I'll even regale you with tales of evil children locking themselves in the bathroom and drowning the gameboy in the toilet. |
| Tues, Oct 28, 2003 (11:45am) It's snowing! It's snowing! I get snow for my birthday! Yay! Of course, it means I might just have to put up with my loving spouse grumbling, "Bah! It's snowing! No - wait. I deny it! It's not really snow. It's just a stiff rain. Bah again!" and then coming home to curl up in front of the fireplace with a hot chocolate. I don't really care. I like snow. It means the stupid parts of fall are almost over. And besides (to quote Star), "Snow means babies!" ...I've got less than 4 months to go 'til Jase's due-date. |
| Mon, Oct 27, 2003 (5:30pm) (Lazarus' birthday today, btw.) BioWare Day I have, for the last half year or so, been promising one friend or another that I would come visit them at Bioware. Most recently it's been Cori May, and since I miss her for a variety of reasons, I decided to actually really honestly get off my butt this time, and go visit. It was very cool. Bioware exists on the third and fourth floors, above Chapters on Whyte ave. It's an amazing warren of offices and computer-filled corners, and has cables and extension cords everywhere, and gaming posters and cool artwork, and all kinds of neat stuff. I'm very glad I got to see it before they move to their new offices (which I'm told will be soon now, but I'm not sure when). It's got the sort of character of a place which has outgrown its space needs several times, and each time improvised just a little bit more to make things fit. Cori's got a lovely corner office (shared with a co-worker, and a couch). Most other employees have offices shared with one or two co-workers and a variety of computers and gaming paraphenalia. The Q.A. department is a den... it's filled to bursting with computers, geeks, electronic equipment which hums as cooling fans do their best to keep the units cool, and air conditioning units which try to dissipate the heat generated by all that geeky goodness... they've even got improvised air conduits - plastic bag tubes which lead out of the room, down the hall (you have to duck them to get by) and out to other rooms, to shair the air-conditioning load. It was surreal. Cori May gave me a great tour. We stopped by a number of offices so I could say hi to various people I know: Dave Gaider (it was his B-day yesterday BTW), Aidan, Preston, Scott Langevin, Jinx, Iain, and Jay Watamaniuk. Jay happens to be in charge of giving out cool swag to various people and places, and was a sweetie and shared some of the spoils with me: I've got a NeverWinterNights T-shirt, a stainless steel mug, a small poster, and a BioWare touque. I forgot, alas, to look for Marc Audi... but that's probably okay since he'd've had no clue who I was ("Hi Marc - You don't know me, but I snuggle your sister a lot... Uh.. I mean, I'm a friend of your brother Dan. We geek together. Um... yeah."). I know several other people at Bioware, too, but I forget off & on who I all know who works there. I tend to know about 10% of their employees at a given time. I knew one employee back when there were only 11 people (in the days before Baldur's Gate premiered) and I knew 9 when they grew to 100 people. They're in the vicinity of 150 people now, and I know over a dozen employees... tho some of them only work(ed?) there when they need to log a LOT of Q.A. hours because a big project is coming out. It's tough to keep track of, some days. Cori also showed me some of the cooler parts of the office.. like the break room where they've got 24-hour 'Unreal' tournament running, and arcade machines (including Gauntlet!) and a cappuccino machine. They got a cafeteria/lunch room which is regularly stocked with food from various places (they had a buffet-like spread on the table when I came in, and cake for dessert, too) and Cori tells me they also stock a variety of breakfast foods. They were also doing an in-house flu clinic when I was there, which I thought was neat since I've been giving out a lot of flu shots at my workplace, recently. So the two of us went out to Symposium for lunch, and had excellent food. We got to talk gaming and immigration and friends and jobs, and Cori even coped with me talking a bit (maybe a lot?) about kids. She's very cool, Cori is. Must try to get together with her more often. Kay - I've got gamers coming over in a little while, and have been having too much fun today to do much prep. I think I will revel in the geeky afterglow for just another minute or two while I check my email, and then get back to real life. Until we start playing 7th Sea, at least. |
| Sat, Oct 25, 2003 (2:40pm) I'm just a little sad, today. The Concorde has been grounded. I s'pose the people who lived with the thundering boom of SST are quite happy about it (they've been lobbying against these flights for years) but there was always a special place in my heart for the "world's most technologically advanced commercial aircraft, capable of going twice the speed of sound and flying to heights where the blue sky begins to meld into the darkness of space." (Edmonton Journal reference, today). I even tried to go visit it, the day it was at the Edmonton Internation Airport (a few years ago) but couldn't, due to work and stuff. I told myself it didn't matter - the planes would be around for quite some time. I'd see it eventually. Maybe even fly on it, someday. I guess that day will never come, now. But perhaps I can still see it in an aviation museum, eventually... and it'll be a lot less noisy, then. Quoting again from the Edmonton Journal, "The Concorde reached into their [the residents of Queens'] homes, teaching adults to glue their china to cabinet shelves, and into schools, teaching children the letters SST before ABC.So maybe the shattering of my little fantasy isn't too great a price to pay, in order to let those people lead normal lives. But still... it's the end of an era. In other news, I had a very good 'Girl's Night Out' at New Asian Village yestereve... good friends, meandering conversation topics, excellent food, baffled waitresses ("Yes, we'd like another pot of chai. And more Butter Naan, please. No - better make that a double order. Or a triple.") and a few freaked mundanes. Must do that again sometime... like next year, around this time. |
| Thurs, Oct 23, 2003 (7:10pm) Not much to post today. I've been pretty lazy since Monday. I did have a doctor's appointment on Tues afternoon which went well. Better than I expected, actually. Since I'd spent the previous week running on too-little-sleep, too-much-stress, and breathing too-many-allergens, I knew I was in poor shape. But the Doctor said the pregnancy seemed to be progressing well, and the baby was growing as expected. I had lost a little weight, but when I explained that I'd been sick, and then ran a live theater event, the doctor was less concerned. He just told me to make sure I took the next week easy, and recovered. He also checked out the condition of my lungs and asked me how my asthma was doing. I admitted I wasn't doing so well. Ya see, it's fall, and fall sucks in my world: I'm allergic to leaves, grass, dandelions and thistles and clover and quackgrass and... well... if it grows on a lawn or in a field, odds are I'm allergic to it. And as soon as fall hits, those things die and dry up and turn into dusty fragments which blow around in the wind. I can handle it when I'm in top condition. The quest weekend put me as far from "top condition" as I can usually get without ending up in the hospital overnight. After removing the stethescope from his neck, he revised his previous suggestion regarding recovery. He said it wasn't a suggestion anymore: it's Doctor's Orders. I am now under medical advisement to relax and take it easy and not do anything which will stress my body out or interfere with recovery. Otherwise, he says, I will be heading straight for some serious lung problems this fall. Normally that's not too much of an issue - there's a lot of medication I can take to help my lungs function properly. Unfortunately, these medications (prednisone, other corticosteroids, etc.) are not advised for pregnant people, and he'd rather not have to resort to them. On the otherhand, uncontrolled "status asthmaticus" is also bad for fetal development: When you can't get enough oxygen for your own body to function, the baby gets shorted on oxygen too. So, in order to avoid the dilemma which serious lung infections would raise, I am under orders to avoid them at all cost. Rest. Relax. Eat. Sleep. Recover. That's my agenda for the next week or two. But I kinda guessed I'd be in this state by the end of the Quest, so I'd already cleared my schedule of anything but the above. I even cancelled my weekly gaming sessions, booked a massage therapy appointment, and decided I would only go to BP's if I felt like it. After a week of avoiding gamers, though, I think I feel up to it. Maybe I'll even go soon-ish. Or maybe I'll just sit here and play on my computer for a while longer. Dunno. |
| Wed, Oct 22, 2003 (11:35pm) Adventures with Electricity On Monday, my first free day after the Quest, I decided to be domestic and do a bunch of the housework which had been piling up. I cleaned furiously. I ran laundry. I washed dishes. I moved several boxes of books off the stairs where we'd been knocking our shins against them with great regularity. I did some shopping. I cooked yummy supper. I played with my kids. I let Shades have the evening off of child-care duties, and I tucked Kalen and Connor in to bed with all the tenderness of someone who hasn't seen her kids in a week. I even took Star & Eric's kids for the night so they (Star and Eric, not the kids) might get a chance to do some post-quest cleaning in their house. Oh, and once the kids were all asleep, I figured I'd finally clean the fishtank. As anyone with fishtanks knows, they do need regular attention. Not daily attention like some pets (dogs, cats, etc.) or even weekly attention like others (snakes, iguanas, etc.) but now and then you've gotta clean the tanks, do water changes, and make sure everything is running smoothly. I try to do it once a month or so, but usually get around to it something like every 6-8 weeks. What with the Quest happening last month, the tanks were long overdue for some attention. The water level was a good couple inches below what it should have been in my big tank, and the bottom of the smaller tank was looking pretty gungy in addition to its low water level. So instead of going to bed at 11pm like I really should have, I got out my fish-tank maintenace gear, and went at it. The smaller tank wasn't much work. It never is... other than needing more glass-scrubbing because it doesn't have the snails to do it for me. But it's smaller and has less surface area to do. And it's in a nice accessible location in the corner of the room. The big tank is behind the couch. In order to clean it, I have to pull the couch into the middle of the livingroom, open the cupboard doors which are regularly blocked by the couch, and work in the narrow corridor made between couch and cupboard/fishstand. I don't enjoy it much... which is one of the reasons I don't clean the tank as often as I perhaps should. It's also why I like to make sure I fill the tank right p to the top when I'm adding fresh water, so it'll last an extra week or two before the water level drops below a tolerable point. So I did all the usual scrubbing and filter-bag changes, and refilling the water, and then I pushed the couch back in place. All seemed well. But then I heard a noise. It's not the sort of noise I like to hear after working with fishtanks. It was the sound of water, dripping. It started slowly at first, just an odd drip here or there, and then became a steady patter. My sleep-deprived brain had a hard time processing this. It was, after all, past midnight, and I ought to have been in bed by, say... 6pm. At least, I should have if I wanted to make up for the sleep deficit I'd been running during the quest weekend. But somehow I managed to process the fact that this was not right and that I should investigate. I looked at the front of the fishtank, and saw nothing immediately wrong. I looked at the sides.. nothing. I stood on the couch, and looked at the top. ...the filter was dripping, out the back. Odd. That shouldn't be happening, I told myself. I took the filter cover off to see that, yes indeed, the filter was overflowing. Apparently the water was not running through it fast enough or freely enough, so it was filled right to its spilling point. The overflow port (which would normally deal with this excess water by dumping it back into the tank) was partially submerged by the high water level in the tank. So, basically, the filter was overflowing in the wrong direction. I pulled the couch away from the tank, so I could get at it better. I opened the cupboard doors of the fishtank stand, so I could see behind the tank. I could see water, dripping rapidly down. This water was not dripping down from immediately behind the filter, however. It was dripping from the right-hand side of the tank. The tank is, I guess, at a very slight slope, so the water was overflowing from the filter, running along the back of the tank cover, and then dripping over the edge when it pooled at the lower side of the tank. The lower side of the tank is also nearer the plug in the wall, and therefore it's where the powerbar is located. The outlet itself is actually a couple feet away from the tank (usually blocked off by the telephone stand, so the kids can't get at the wall sockets) but the powerbar is directly under the tank. And water was dripping onto it. Right onto it. (insert here a brief pause while my poor sleep-deprived brain processed this information) Water! Electricity! NOT GOOOD! Having come to that brilliant conclusion, I tried to leap into action. Unfortunately, my first action was to reach under the tank with my wet & drippy hands, and grab for the wet powerbar, to remove it from the flow of water. Scant centimeters from the wet powerbar, some other sub-process in my brain kicked in. I remembered, as though through a haze, that I had encountered a problem once before when water overflowed from the fishtank. At that time, I had been awake, and my first thought had been: DON'T ELECTROCUTE SELF! Followed quickly by the decision to use a dry towel to unplug the powerbar from the wall if needed. In that particular situation, it hadn't been needed. The water was overflowing in a different place. But this time.... I hastily looked around for the dry towel. It was draped over the back of the couch, where I had put it, unthinkingly, as part of the prep I always do when cleaning fishtanks. I grabbed it. I moved the telephone stand out of the way. I wrapped the dry towel around my wet hand, grabbed the cord (well enough away from the wall socket, just in case) and yanked it free. I dropped it. I was still alive. This was good. So I looked under the tank again, at the powerbar. The water was still flowing freely onto it, and was in fact now pooling over its surface and along the various plugs stuck into it. I gingerly began pulling those plugs out, one by one, and removed the powerbar from under the fishtank and the flow of water. It was very wet. I dumped it on the counter, and tried to figure out what to do next. Despite the surge of adrenaline, my sleep deprived brain really wasn't up to the task of damage control, so I just found a spare extension cord and ran it to a different wall outlet, and dried off cord for the fishtank's heater, so that I could plug it in and the fishwater would at least stay warm overnight. I could deal with the lack of filter, lights, and anything else in the morning. In the morning, I checked things out. I have, apparently, fried my filter with this little fiasco. The heater (which was working last night, or at least turning on the little power-indicator light) wasn't keeping the tank properly warm. The powerbar makes unpleasant spitting noises when plugged into the wall - I unplugged it again very quickly. I gave up and threw it all into the corner, and decided to be safe and buy a bunch of new equipment today. So, as of today, I have a new heater, a new powerbar, and a new filter. Shade was a sweetie and even fixed the fishtank so this new filter (which fits just a little differently than the previous one) doesn't butt right up against the livingroom wall - a situation which amplifies the vibrations from the filter, and caused our livingroom to have a constant low hum. He fixed it by tipping the fishtank stand forward ever so slightly with a couple braces at the back, by the wall. This has the added advantage of making the 'low' part of the tank right at the front, so if it ever overflows again, hopefully the water will come forward (where I'll see it quickly) rather than backwards (where the electrical stuff lives). But ya know... that's not a theory I want to test in the near future. ----- Oh.. I've also temporarily replaced Angel's blog in my top bar with Myrna's blog... since it seems that Angel's computer (or net connection?) is temporarily down. I'll need to find more space to put things if Angel's blog comes back on line, 'cuz I don't think I'll unlink This Bunny has Teeth anytime soon. |
| Tues, Oct 21, 2003 (7:40pm, with minor edits Wed 10:45) The Quest is over. Yay. I had a lot of fun putting it on. I had a lot of help putting it on. I had a lot of worries putting it on, but for the most part things went smoothly. Now I have some time to relax, eat, sleep, and regain my sanity. I also have a lot of people I need to thank, because without them I don't think my sanity would be easily regained. I handed out a version of the following blurb at the afterparty, but this is the updated & expanded version. I'm posting it here because some of the people who came to the quest couldn't stay for the afterparty, and some people who didn't come to the quest still have been following the saga online and might be interested in it. Here goes: 
...has been a LRPS sponsored SUNFALL production, presented by Raven Brown, Eric Finley, and Davyd Atwood
I'd like to take a moment to thank all the fine actors and production crew who helped make this event happen. Please give them a word of appreciation if you see them. Our volunteers included:
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| Sun, Oct 19, 2003 (9:45am) "Always use the right tool for the job. And when you want a hole in your cranium, the right tool is a drill." It's DungeonQuest weekend. The above quote, spoken completely in context (by Shades, sometime late Friday night) pretty much sums up my weekend. More updates later. |
| Tues, Oct 14, 2003 (11:35am) How I spent my Thanksgiving Holidays. By me. Friday evening we celebrated what I shall call, "Gamer Thanksgiving". We had gamers over, and ate roast beef, and delicious ham, and tasty vegetables, and more garlic mashed potatos than you could shake a stick at. And after dinner, we gathered together and gave thanks by playing D&D 'til the wee hours of the morning. It was a religious experience. (Well, almost.) Saturday I celebrated by lying in bed, sick. Still with that same stupid bug from Thurs/Fri. I got up once Shades put the kids down for naps, and I showered, and I went to work. I had to wear a mask at work so I wouldn't pass my nasty bugs on to other already-sick people at the clinic. Sunday we'd planned to go to Church, but the kids were in miserable shape. They'd been up most of the night with the same bug which kept me up on Friday, running fevers and coughing up lungs. So, we spent Sunday at home, as one big sick happy family. Oh, and I went to work. With a mask on. But I took it off half-way through the evening. Monday I felt much, much better. Plus, the kids's fever broke, and they were merely couhging up lungs left, right, and center (who'd have thought there'd be so many lungs in one small kid?) So I got up with the kids and let Shades sleep in 'til past noon. Then he put the kids down for naps, and I went to bed for a couple hours. Then I got up and went to work. So, that was my long-weekend. Note how DungeonQuest prep did not feature prominently in it? That's 'cuz I did dick-all on the Quest over the weekend. So I'm way behind. Way, way behind. AAaaauuuuuuuugh! |
| Fri, Oct 10, 2003 (6:10am) It's after 6am. I'm awake. This is beacause I am sick. Why do I have to be sick right now? Wasn't I sick just a couple weeks ago?? Why must it hit me like a board to the back of the head while: (a) I am still recovering from my previous bout of icky-sick, (b) I need to work a 3-day weekend coming up, (c) it's Fall, (d) I'm pregnant and fatigued from the extra metabolic load which accompanies this laudable state, (e) I have a QUEST coming up and can't afford to be sick! I suspect that the answer to "Why?" also happens to be: a, b, c, d, and e. Anyway, I can't sleep right now because I'm stuffed up and can't breathe and am shivering and refuse to take another dose of NyQuil to knock me out for another 4 hours. So instead, I m awake, and grumpy, and typing on my computer. And I'm weblogging because my brain isn't thinking in enough of a straight line to type anything Quest related. On that note, insert here an image of Raven running in tight little circles, waving her hands above her head and screaming "AAaaaauuugh!" as she panics under the load of everything which still needs to be done in the next week. Believe me, Shades panicking about upcoming Lego shows or Gen-con demos is mild compared to my panics. I really do wave my hands in the air and scream "AAaaauuugh!" Sometimes I even do the running in circles part for real, too. And I forget things. Three out of ten things on my 'list of things which I must remember to bring for Thursday' I forgot. At least I remembered the thing for one guy who came in from Spruce Grove just to meet me. And I managed to call Tom before he came down to BP's to get the thing which I forgot to bring for him. And the other 2 things which I forgot are not critical. Oooh - and I got to see Anna at BP's before she left for China.. which has nothing to do with the Quest but is very cool and I just remembered it, and it makes me happy. Insert brief pause, here. Aaauughhhh! I just remembered that I forgot the cloak which Anna returned to me!!! It's hanging on the coat rack in the back of BP's!!!!!! My red velvet wedding cloak! Well, I'll call BP's first thing in the morning to make sure it's still there, and I'll put "Pick up cloak!" on my list of things not to forget tomorrow. I have many, many things to get done tomorrow..... But things are getting done. Really they are. Wally came over Thursday evening to help me with chits. My Mac will now speak to the printer again, and AppleWorks will print off revised DungeonQuest versions of Tom's ClarisWorks chits from Tapestry (SeptQuest 2000). And Tom (sweetheart that he is) has volunteered to finish working on a prop which we had been working on together and wasn't coming along as smoothly as anticipated. And Myke came over to watch my kids in the morning so I could work on a costume prototype for some Quest monster(s). And the Legendry is effectively done (must email that out to people). And Lofwyr is alomst done welding a cool prop for me. AND we have REGISTRATIONS!!!! This is a good thing, because I'd hate to put this much work into a game and have no one show up. But all the slots are booked now... not to maximum capacity (most groups are 6 instead of 8 people, and one has only 5)... and due to the kind and understanding nature of the gamers we are working with (an unexpected treat, really) everyone so far has a time slot which will work for them. Many, many thanks to those individuals and parties who rearranged their schedules so groups who "couldn't make it any other time than Sunday, X o'clock" are able to have those sought-after slots. My hot apple cider is ready now. I'm gonna go drink it, take a Tylenol, and see if I can get back to sleep. I sense a long day tomorrow. Best wishes to you, Anna, as you hover in an airplane right now, suspended somewhere in the world between here and China. I'll miss you. Have fun not engaging in anything subversive for the next 6 months!!! |
| Wed, Oct 8, 2003 (6:10pm) Stayed up way too late last night and finished watching Descendants of Darkness - vampiric/immortal/occult anime. Very pretty to watch, but I find I need to keep the language option set to 'English' because the cutesy alien-beings who are meant for comic relief (the 'Gushoshin' twins, in this series) have the most appalingly shrieky voices. I just can't handle that after a day of caring for toddlers. In the English dub, the voices are stupidly exaggerated, but not screechy. Oh, by the way... if anyone is really rich or wins the lottery i nthe next few months, feel free to buy me one of these: A Sony Clie' handheld PEGUX50. It's the sort of PDA with Keyboard that I've been wanting since before I got a Velo. |
| Tues, Oct 7, 2003 (11:50pm) Wow - another day for unexpected Long-Distance phone calls. Gary called me this morning! T'was cool to talk with him about things and stuff and kids and LARP and whatever else it was that we discussed in that hour. So, for anyone reading this who knows him: He is alive and well. He and his wife Lea are eagerly watching the construction of their new house in Florida, so they can move out of her parents' basement with their two kids and actually have some elbow room for a change. Blake (2+?) and Gabriel (1?) are both doing fine, too, and growing like weeds. There's nothing particularly interesting or new to report with me. I'm still busy with DungeonQuest (aka OktoberKwest) and wondeing what on earth posessed me to want to run another one of these bloody events. Accomplishment of the Day: Most of the Legendry for the Quest is written up, and I expect the rest will be done by Thursday. |
| Mon, Oct 6, 2003 (6:40pm) (grin) I got a call from Todd today, which was very pleasant and completely unexpected. We talked about... stuff, and gaming, and life. It was good... and I've got a link to his LiveJournal, now. (Extra grin). I also got a note from RavenBlack earlier today, and since it was marked public, I thought I'd post it: Comments : Your weblog could be the poster-child... er, poster-entity... for not having children. Two out of every three entries essentially say "gah, children are pure destructive evil".Yeah, I suppose kids have rather cramped my style since the days when I would pull all-nighters on the MUSH, drive 50+ hours straight across the country to visit LARP friends, and do weekend-long marathon gaming. I never expected that life would stay the same when we chose to have 'em. In fact, I had a remarkably good idea of how much they would take over my life, and how much time I would spend caring for them and cleaning up after them, and pulling my hair out at their infuriating toddler-antics. But there's one thing I didn't realize when we first decided to have kids.. and that's how much FUN they could be. Yes, despite the fact that my weblog dwells on many of their evil ways, I really enjoy being a Mom. A lot. Waaay more than I ever expected I would. For comparison, here's some of the good aspects of having kids:
And for those days when raising kids feels like a loosing battle, and you wonder how you could have ever thought it worthwhile at all... well, you can always vent on your weblog. Share the pain, ya know.... |
| Fri, Oct 3, 2003 (3:30pm) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuUUUUUUUGGGGGGGG! While I was typing up OktoberQuest Legendry, Connor just climbed up to the kitchen counter and dumped AN ENTIRE BOX of Muisjes out on the counter. I heard a sound akin to that of running water.... and I turned my head to see a flood of tiny blue and white candies cascade over the countertop, down to the floor, pouring in between the counter and the stove, and between the counter and the fridge, and into every nook and cranny they could fit into, and then spreading out in rolling waves cross the kitchen floor. If you don't know what those little candies are, imagine up-ending a bag of rice on your counter... except that these little candies are spherical and have a greater tendancy to roll. Perhaps imagine up-ending a bag of peas instead... they bounce and scatter, and when you try to sweep them up with a broom, you just send them rolling under the stove and down the air register and skittering off into the next room. On the plus side, I have never seen kids so eager to help with the clean-up. |
| Fri, Oct 3, 2003 (1:45pm) Oh my. The Blue Revolutionist is updating his blog more frequently than Angel. What is the world coming to? |
| Fri, Oct 3, 2003 (1:30pm) Been very busy with Dungeon Quest. Looking forward to it, and dreading it at the same time. Last night I dreamt that we were running the quest and a thousand things went wrong, from lighting Eric's house on fire, to messing up all the chits, to having players walking out mid-quest because our game stank and it was too hard and they'd never come back. But that's normal pre-quest jitters. Weekend quests (which this effectively is) take a lot of work, and it's natural to be stressed before it. That means you take it more seriously, and do your best to make sure everything runs smoothly, right? I'd worry if I wasn't worried. Oh... Star also sent me this via email, clipped from one of the newsgroups she's in. It made me smile. Luckily, I don't have a husband like this... Mine has a very good understanding of what my days are like. One afternoon a man came home from work to find total mayhem in his house. His three children were outside, still in their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers strewn all around the front yard. The door of his wife's car was open, as was the front door to the house and there was no sign of the dog. |