Atropa Belladonna~ Raven (a.k.a. Nightshade)'s Weblog ~
These are the ARCHIVES of May 2006. For more archives, visit the Archives page. For the current Weblog entries, check the Main page.
Atropa Belladonna| Wed, May 31, 2006 (1:40pm) Free to a Good Home James and I have decided to test the strength of our marriage by doing some home renovations. (Well, no - Not really. We're hiring someone to do them for us. And it has less to do with our love for eachother, than for our desire not to kill the children. We are going nuts with trying to get Kale and Jase to sleep in the same room, and moving either of them in with Connor is not an option at present. So, we need another bedroom, in the basement.) I managed to get a carpenter who is willing to do the work in June, so we have only a short while to prepare our basement for transistion into a construction zone. Which means, we need to get rid of some stuff. The following items are looking for a new place to live:
If interested, drop me an email, or Quick-Comment. Thanks! |
| Tues, May 30, 2006 (10:10am) So, I caught myself thinking: Frak. I need to update my weblog again, and I can't think of anything to write. Why do I even keep the bloody thing? And that got me thinking: Yeah, good question - why DO I keep a weblog? It's partly so friends/family abroad can keep up with my life, but more so I can talk about cool things that happen. I remember when I regularly said stuff like, "I'm blogging this!" when something cool/amusing/unusal happened. Now? Not so much. So, it that because less cool stuff is happening in my life? A little, I guess... things are pretty busy right now. But I'm still having fun and still encounter things that I could write about. But now, I don't want to. It''s too much work. Any time I sit down at the computer, I draw a blank. Writer's block, perhaps? Looking back over my last few entries, I don't see anything creative at all. Just boring "What I did Today" kind of posts. Not inspired. So, that will now change. Let's re-write last Thursday's entry to look more like this: - - - A Weekend at The Cabin When most famiies talk about 'going to the cabin' for the weekend, people picture a nice scenic log-style house, facing out over a lovely lake, and idyllic children playing the sorts of games which keep them occupied so Mom or Dad can go fishing, or read a good book. Not so with our family trips to the cabin... We have a medieval style cabin, decorated with fake half-timbering to give it a more 'period' look. Our relaxing weekend involved putting up insulation, moisture barrier, and sheets of OSB. We had a horse join us for breakfast. Perhaps it came for the company, or perhaps it was more interested in the Salt Lick which was lying in the front lane. There's no lake for the kids to play by, so we took them to explore the wooden castle, instead. We went for idlyllic walks through Viking lands. We watched a fantastic kite fly in the sky, while Connor danced and pointed, shouting, "I see Dragon! I see Dragon!!" Yeah... not your average "weekend at the cabin' experience. But then, we aren't your average family. |
| Thurs, May 25, 2006 (6:45pm) Going to the cabin on the weekend was a lot of fun. We headed out early Sunday morning after checking the weather report, and getting a call from Mom (at the site) saying that the weather was indeed looking up. We arrived shortly after noon, enjoyed lovely weather for the whole day, slept overnight (I use the term loosely, as Jase was not 'sleeping' for most of the night), and woke up to more fabulous weather. We got quite a bit of work done, and packed up to leave around 3pm Monday. The kids fell asleep in the van on the way home, and Shades and I enjoyed the trip together. The week since then has been spent recovering from the fun weekend, and catching up on sleep. |
| Sat, May 20, 2006 (12:45pm) (sigh) We were going to take the kids to the cabin this weekend, but just got a call from my Mom (who is already at the site) saying the weather is terrible, and advising us not to come out. Or at least, not to bring the kids out. So now we get to decide if we want to send one of us (Shades) out to the cabin to get work done, and leave one parent (that'd be me) at home with 3 kids. Or do we want to try taking the whole family anyways and spending it indoors, avoiding the rain? Or do we want to wait 'til tomorrow and see if the weather improves - which would still give us one day at the cabin - but we'd miss seeing my sister. Sigh again. One good thing, though: We bought a trampoline yesterday. So the kids aren't too disappointed with the news that we might not be going to the cabin as planned. They're having plenty of fun here. And, um, so am I. I love having a trampoline again, even if it makes me realize how out of shape I am. I don't really care, though - it brings back a lot of great memories to be bouncing on a trampoline at midnight, and collapsing exhausted on it with a good friend, feeling the evening breeze blow over, under, and around us. Mmm.... |
| Sat, May 13, 2006 (10:00pm) First: Happy Birthday to a certain resident of Humbolt, Sask. - - - Yet again I have been delinquent in updating my weblog because I have been having too much fun. In the last week I have: Played in the yard with the kids (inlcuding in our freshly re-filled sandbox), taken the kids walking in the rain, and en I purchased some trick locks online, some quest props at the mall, and too much fabric at Fabricland. I sewed costumes with Myrialynn (for Jeff), built a corset with Jeff (for Myke), and discovered that, yes, I still fit into the same costuming I made for my LARP thief character over a decade ago. I hung out at BPs, chatted with girlfriends, and got to meet a very cool young girl and her adorable baby for the first time. Then the next day, I attended her birthday party at Starlin's place. We ate cake, surfed the 'Net for Kanji and Sanskrit and Punjabi words and translations, did henna tattoos, juggled 2 babies on tube feeds, laughed at silly things, and stayed up past 2 am enjoying eachother's company. I got to watch fabulous babes dance half naked to really good music. Best of all, I got to learn cool things about my friends that I hadn't known before. We've got some amazing girls in our group. Today, I went on a Dungeon Crawl (Yay for Sunfall LARPing!) The dungeon was very well done, and extremely challenging. 4 of our party made it out of the dungeon. I, alas, did not... nor did the person who went back in to rescue me (sorry, Jeff). Tomorrow is the second half of the adventure, and we will find out what happens to us as prisonners in Brokmore. I am looking forward to that, too - partly because Myke's costuming is going to be fantastic, and partly because I'll get to see the other groups who ran the dungeon at different times. Some of them have some great characters & costumes, too! Now, I am tired, and I have multitudinous meatballs to make. |
| Thurs, May 4, 2006 (10:00pm) My favorite RedNecked Rabbit phoned yesterday, with unexpected and cool news: I'm mentioned in this week's MacLean's Magazine! Well, okay - they don't really mention me. They just talk about my blood. But it's my blood, and it gets mentioned in a National magazine! What am I talking about? Why is my blood in a magazine? Well, you know I have a webpage on various LARP related things, right? On one of my pages, I have several recipes for fake blood. Stage blood, basically. And one of those recipes gets mentioned in Maclean's Magazine, in an article about medical phobias! I think that's very cool. Yay me! And yay Bunny for pointing it out! Trauma update: Feeling a lot better. I still need Tylenol (especially at night, because when I'm lying down is when the swelling on my face is the worst) but now I'm taking only a third of what I was on just a couple days ago. The lovely coloring above my eyes is completely gone on the left, and almost gone on the right. The color beneath the right is gonna be with me a while, but the ghastly green aura is fading, nicely. My eyes look like my own eyes, again. Yay me. I think I'm ready to go back to work tomorrow. Which is good, because I work tomorrow. And the pics: Day 10 and Day 11. |
| Tues, May 2, 2006 (5:35pm) You can tell I'm feeling better, because I've had other things to do besides update my weblog. This is not to say I haven't been spending a lot of time on the computer. I spent most of Monday with my eyes glued to the monitor and my finger on the mouse, battling GenCon's registration system with a constant barrage of 'refresh screen' and 'add to cart' requests. I came out the end of it with tickets to one of the most sought-after events at GenCon: True Dungeon. They staggered the ticket sales just to give more people a chance to get tickets (and reduce the load on their server) and the event still sold out in less than a day. But me, and my friends, and my wee horde of tokens.... we are set! Trauma update: Bah. Who has time to talk about trauma? There are forums to be read, and dungeon-delving strategies to be planned! Still... here's Day 7, Day 8, and Day 9. |
