| Pony Wars....only the best game ever!!!!!!1111!eleven!!!!one!!1! |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|11:53 am] |
So.....Saturday was an extremely.....interesting day and I just have to share the "awesomeness" that was Pony Wars.
Let's see. How to begin? Well, Arianna is quite active in several online communities. And there's this guy Dennis that she knows from online who's been wanting her to try out some gaming with him sometime. There's some sort of connection to a DragonCon friend of hers, where Ari recognized him from a costume pic from DragonCon. But I don't really remember the details.
I've been getting Arianna to play a bunch of new games lately, boardgames/cardgames and so she finally was comfortable enough to give wargaming a try. She agreed to give it a try with me, the "experienced" gamer, in tow. Unfortunately, this guy, Dennis was very skimpy on details of what to expect. He kept mentioning something about Ponies and we actually found something online about a wargame called Pony Wars. So figured it was going to be that, though that alone sounded rather weird. Still, we'd come to discover far far more weirdness.
Dennis teaches Biology at the U of M and lives close to campus with several roommates. They are in a pretty typical college living area with drunk parties going on all around and run down/cluttered houses. Our first impression was the refridgerator sitting on the front lawn with the drawers and such all pulled out and scattered around it.... "Um....what the hell did I get myself into?" I asked myself, but kept heading in.
He had told us 6 of his friends would be joining us, but when we got there (and we were late) he was the only one there. He had also told Ari that it would be "potluck" though when we arrived he said he just meant us to bring munchy type of snack food for the gaming (we'd brought a cheese/broccoli casserole) and there was no other food there. Then he randomly offered us each an ice cream maker (he had three). Then he asked if we could bake some chocolate chip cookies while he cleared up some space for the game. Then he realized that he left a bunch of stuff he needed for the game at his office, only I was parked behind him. So Arianna had to go with him while i was volunteered to bake the cookies using his custom recipe with the vanilla from Venezula or something that he went on about for a few minutes (it really was fantastic vanilla, but that's beside the point). Oh and his best friend Christy came around then to start making spanicopita (sp?) only she forgot the cheese and was substituting butter instead ("butter's the same thing as cheese, right?"). While Ari and Dennis were gone i got to hear about her lesbian lover that she met online while i tried mixing up these whole wheat chocolate chip cookies literally using my hands since he had now blender or tools for mixing it up and using chocolate chips the size of quarters (almost as much chocolate as dough in the recipe it seemed). Then they got back from the office, only to realize that he had no gaming dice and Ari had forgotten to bring hers. So she had to leave to get them leaving me again. Meanwhile, I burn the first batch of cookies because i didn't know how to tell when a whole wheat cookie was finished and Dennis kept running off and couldn't tell me. When she got back. Dennis remembered he needed ice for the chai tea ice cream he was making so they left yet again and I made small talk with Christy while she was constantly on her Blackberry....
Ok, are you getting the full effect of all this chaotic brain dump? Trying to convey just how weird/chaotic/messed up the experience was. And we haven't even gotten to the game yet!
Why don't we jump to the game then? So.....Pony Wars! No not whatever that was Ari and I had found online. This was going to be something wholely different. In fact, this was going to be something we were creating!?! Dennis didn't have a game that he wanted to play so much as a game concept he wanted to design a game around. Or rather have a bunch of people design with him. That concept was My Little Ponies as a wargame ala Battletech (and yes that is the example he quoted when discussing what he wanted the game to be like. anybody that has a clue about battletech will know that ain't going to happen just throwing shit together on the fly). And no, he wasn't wanting something free form. He was wanting concrete rules that went down to using movement points for the ponies to turn and not just for them to walk/run (very Battletech).
He wanted us to create a point-buy system of army creation including abilities attacks, etc. Dice rolling mechanics for everything. All the different types of terrain including concertina wire, pits, shallow and deep waters, healing grasslands, concealment forests, etc.
And he had absolutely nothing to start with except for a bunch of blank poster board and a shit ton of My Little Ponies. Yes, they were all his. He's been collecting them for years trying to create this game. :-/
So, while he draws out a grid on the poster board he wants us to all go through his MLPs and pick out the ones we want for our armies and to groom them (he even breaks out a brush with hair gel and a flattening iron to help with that, and no, i am not making this up). Also, he wanted us to be coming up with the abilities/attacks/terrain.
Did i mention that I was the only tabletop gamer there? Christy wasn't really a gamer at all, she was just there to play with the MLPs it seemed. And Ari has no clue when it comes to wargames. Hell, i haven't even played Battletech in 15-20 years or even Warhammer 40k in nearly a decade.
Oh there was another guy there too, though i don't remember his name. His contribution ended up mostly being jokes about the fetish of pony play and somehow he got convinced that Ari is into that and I'm her stallion. He too wasn't really a gamer.
So, what else could go wrong? An argument broke out between Christy and Dennis because he'd asked her to draw terrain and she wasn't doing it the way he wanted her to even though he didn't tell her anything about what he wanted it to look like. Yeah, he seriously didn't like her whimsical lollipop forest and wanted her to use the gaming cartographers representation of trees on the posterboard instead.
Oh and he really wanted us to customize our ponies with the paint markers he had....only he freaked out when Ari got bored enough to try that. She committed the sin of doing it to one of the one ponies!?! Oh no!!!! Those are special somehow. I still don't know how. But he freaked out about it and when on about the loss. I had to point out that they only cost him 25 cents at garage sales and his rebuttal was that the two he got today cost 50 cents! I said "Fine, here, i'll give you a dollar for the two they want to paint up." I didn't actually pull out a dollar, but it shut him up about it.
At some point a roommate came in and showed us all how the infamous negative level of the original Super Mario Brothers game on their original NES system. Don't really know where that came from.
Eventually Dennis came up with some chargen rules, only they weren't clear and he really just had random shit written down with MP and PP values on them and nothing about what was to be purchased or how many points we had for our armies. Oh and the default abilities of walk, run, turn, bite, body kick, head kick (yeah, because those had to be separate) cost to be part of each pony even though they were included by default. Basically, none of it made any sense at all to me. And yet he told me to create my army first and everybody else would follow my lead including him.
Its around that point that I just had to go out for some drinks! Drove over to Busters to get some beer and harder stuff for later (because there's no way i'd be sharing the harder stuff with these people). When Ari and I got back we found the food that we'd all been waiting to eat was nearly all gone. So, it seemed like no dinner for me. I let Ari have the little bit of casserole left and i wasn't going to try the spanicopita made with butter (not even real butter, but the smart start crap) instead of cheese. I did get a few cookies, but wasn't too fond of the whole wheat monstrosities.
Throughout the whole night, Arianna and I had been trying to get everybody to try out Dominion instead of this doomed game, and we finally did so around midnight (a little over 6 hours after we'd gotten there).
That actually went fantastic and everybody had a good time with it once we got them to play. But hell! That night wasn't worth it. We only played the one game because i was far too tired for another.
Oh and then the cops were cracking down on the parties going down on the same street (keggers going on to either side of Dennis's house). As we walked out to my car, a cop stop to harrass Dennis about the music one of his roommates were playing loudly. Also, we got volunteered to drive Christy back to her apartment (it was on our way so not that big a deal, but still). We dropped her off, then she had to wave us down because she thought she'd left her phone only to find it once we'd stopped for her.
I get Arianna back to her place....for her to suddenly remember that she'd forgotten her dice and the ice cream maker Dennis gave her! And despite the late hour and the cops harrassing everybody around Dennis's street we had to go back and get them right then. So back we went and finally called it a night after that.
It was a seriously messed up experience. I had no problems with Dennis and he was pretty cool when we got him away from the MLPs, but come on man! WTF is up with Pony Wars and who the hell invites people over to create a game all at once without actually telling them that's what would be happening and without most of them being gamers at all!?! And My Little Fucking Ponies!?! Insanity I tell you. Just Insanity.... |
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| Why I'll never be a Baptist... |
[Aug. 17th, 2009|02:19 pm] |
If you know me, you know my family are all Southern Baptists. They go to a great big church that is often called "Six Flags over Jesue". Now, I have no problem with religion and find it quite interesting to learn of what people's beliefs are. But sometimes.....sometimes, the views my family believes just feel so wrong to me.
Today's example of this was brought to my attention by my mother (as usual). My parents went to some sort of marriage seminar over the weekend at their church. I had been hearing commercials for it repeatedly for a few weeks on the radio. I even briefly considered mentioning it to a friend who's been having difficulties. But I'm definitely glad I didn't after hearing about the seminar.
It was centered around a bible versus that says the man should love his wife and the woman should respect her husband. From that they went the whole Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus route....only to an extreme. God apparently didn't make men and women equal. He made them different. Meaning women are supposed to be kept at home cooking, cleaning, popping out babies while the men are supposed to only want respect and not care about love while they go out and earn the money.
And that shit seriously pisses me the HELL off, all the more so because the women in my family nod right along to such drivel when they are at the church. Outside of the church both my sisters are strong, capable women. My older sister has her doctorate of education and is a vice principal while still taking care of her baby girl and trying for another. My younger sister does the same job I do only far better and has two kids of her own that she is the sole parent of. She's made it through a divorce and the death of her ex-husband while keeping those two kids safe and happy and not even skipping a beat at work. If that isn't strength, I don't know what is.
But they both still nod along when the preacher starts talking about a woman's place being at home and how their husbands should be making all the decisions while they always obey those decisions.
Bleh....I can't even talk about that any more. It seriously disgusts me that much.
Getting back to how the seminar was teaching that men and women aren't equal....I personally think that all stereotypes are bullshit. As a whole men and women aren't anything that can be defined by a stereotype. I know plenty of women that can't cook a can of soup right, while I am a guy that loves to cook and does fairly well at it. Its a skill that I as an individual have cultivated, while they have not. It has nothing whatsoever to do with me being a man or them being women.
Rather than the BS of defining roles based on the stereotypes of sex as this seminar taught, the best relationships have people on an equal footing where each person is contributing and sharing in responsibility. My friends John and Maddie are a great example of this. You should see the way they work in tandem to take care of their two babies. Its wonderful. Not only do they share the caregiving tasks when they are together, but they also manage quite well when one is at work and the other is home. And no, that's not just when the man is at work, but when Maddie has to work long hours at the hospital on the weekends, John takes care of the babies without any problems at all (well no more problems than taking care of babies ever is, lol). They both maintain their jobs. They both take care of the babies. They both maintain hobbies/interests/friends outside the home. And they still make time for each other. They are equally share the responsibility and the fun.
And that is exactly how the best relationships work. Sure there will be some tasks that one person will be able to do better than the other, but that can't be defined by any sort of stereotype. It has to be looked at based on the individuals.
Happy things:
District 9.
I really don't know what I was expecting going into this movie. I had barely caught snippets of the previews for it and just saw it as some sort of future with aliens or robots or something (i hadn't even seen well enough to know it was aliens) were being segregated into a special district. And that was it.
So, what I got was unexplected and better for it. It's a social commentary on the inhumanity of humans, which it portrays quite well. It draws you into to caring for this normal guy with his normal family life (may have been better to show more of that) and then shows you everything falling apart when....well, when the unexpected happens. I'm not going to give spoilers here.
And even after you start seeing changes in his personality, there are multiple examples of where his instincts fall back to the selfish human reactions.
But they also showed the expected human experimentation with aliens and their technology, but forced you to really see the inhumanity of something that is actually pretty cliche in sci-fi movies.
Oh and who doesn't like watching the bad guys vanish into a mist of blood and guts when they get zapped by the alien weaponry? i mean come on. That was just cool! ;) |
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| I hate Apple |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|09:49 am] |
Simple enough there. I will never buy an Apple product again. I don't care how cool or slick it looks. I don't even care if it can cure cancer. There customer service is worse than worthless. It's down right painful.
Yesterday I was having a problem with my iPhone. It was still functional in that it was receiving emails, texts, and phone calls just fine. I know this because it makes the sounds of each of those when it happens. However, I couldn't see any of them or pickup because the screen had gone completely dead.
So, I take it to AT&T. They tell me they could send it off to be repaired and I should have it in a week or so. Or I could take it to the Apple store and they should be able to replace it that day.
OF course I'm going to take the latter choice. My iPhone is my only telephone and a week without it would not be acceptable. So, I drove over to the Apple store.
The guy at the front desk takes a look at it. Connects it to a laptop there and sees that it is still functional and tells me I'll be a substitute at the Genius Bar. Go back there and wait for my name to be called. He doesn't tell me anything about how long a wait it will be.
Well, an hour into waiting, some random sales person brings a stool over that I could sit on. And of course, neither he nor anybody else could tell me when they would be able to help me. It was always "You're not on the board because you're a substitute. We'll get to you when we can."
Another hour later, by which time my back was killing me from trying to sit on a stool with no back, they finally called my name. I explain the issue and the genius doesn't even connect it to anything. He shines a little light at the top and bottom. And explains that there is some water damage (which i don't understand at all, but whatever) and so the warranty has been voided.
Ok, I kind of expected the warranty to be voided. I can be fairly rough on my gadgets. That didn't bother me all that much even when he explained the replacement would cost $199. What did bother me was when I asked if they would be able to get contacts and notes off of the phone. All he said was that I could take it home and try to retrieve them myself, but then I would have to make an appointment to come back and get it replaced....in a few days when they had an opening (oh and the store would be closing for 3 weeks shortly due to renovations).
I argued that it was still functional and he could see that if he would just plug it in. So why couldn't he pull any data off of it? He just said the same thing again and the other geniuses chimed in agreement. They could replace the phone, but there would be no data recovery.
By this time I was just disgusted and frustrated with their completely lack of assistance. I had some data on there that I desparately wanted to get off the phone, but damn them if I could go several days without the use of a phone. They had me stuck and I just had to take it.
And that lack of caring for the customer is why I'll never buy an Apple product again. No matter what it is.
To top it all off, the replacement phone is already showing signs of problems. The wi-fi would only connect to my home network if i was standing right in from of my router where my old phone could connect anywhere in the house and although I left it plugged in overnight it didn't appear to charge properly. It was drained down to half battery in the hour from when I woke up until I left for work.
Happy Things:
A weekend spent with friends. Spent Friday night with a few of my friends. They cooked up some rather choice steaks, with a fruit salad, a cheesy broccoli casserole, and some raspberry rugalach for dessert (I seriously need to show them what homemade rugalach tastes like...). I even got them to try out the Zombies! game which they all seemed to enjoy. Then we saw Julie & Julia, which was good because I love cooking so much.
Saturday, I saw them again out at Shelby Farms for a little running while the dogs played.
That night, I got to see my best friend, if only briefly. Her son had fouled up their laptop with a kick or two of his foot. It was late for the kids though. So, I simply met her to get the laptop and took it home to repair it. Had it up and running in no time and got to see her again Sunday to return it. Its always great to see a smile on a friend's face. :)
And the rest of the day I went home and baked some bread (btw, don't try using whole wheat flour to make focaccia bread even if you are out of all-purpose flour). |
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| Casablanca |
[Jul. 27th, 2009|01:52 pm] |
Casablanca is one of my favorite movies of all time. I'm not sure I could put my finger on exactly what it is about the movie I love so much. It has something to do with the way that it portrays such a complete city without distracting the audience from the storyline at all. What do I mean by that? Well, in most movies the story focuses on the main characters. There certainly are minor characters or people doing things in the background, but you don't get a sense of them being real people with histories and their own things going on. They appear for a moment and are quickly forgotten.
Spoiler Alert: If you have yet to see this superb film you are a loser and deserve to have it spoiled. :-P But still, I will be talking about details in the movie. So you've been warned.
In Casablanca, every character has a story and it shows through no matter how minor their part. That sounds like it could distract from the plotline if they are throughing a bunch of different stories at you at once. But it doesn't, instead they all serve to build upon and further the main plot. One excellent example is the pick-pocket, you never even know his name, but each time he appears with his characteristic "Be careful. There are vutures, vultures everywhere." as he steals an unsuspecting dupe's wallet you get a sense of his wicked sense of humor. Not only that, but he furthers the plot each time. In the first scene, the police are rounding up the "usual suspects" and his conversation with a british couple informs the audience of the death of two german couriers that is a major point in plot. The scene only takes a minute or two, but it still has a lot of sub-story and gets across a major plot point.
Another case is the more indepth subplot of Sasha, the girl that is madly in love with Rick at the beginning of the movie even though he hardly gives her the time of day. This subplot shows how deadened Rick's emotions have become after being betrayed by Ilsa when she abanadoned him in Paris. Something that really illustrates this is when Sasha is trying to ask Rick if he'll go out with her that night. He says "I never plan that far ahead." which mirrors oh so closely to what Ilsa had told him before right before she left him. He had asked after getting married when they reached...well whereever the train was going, or perhaps even by the train conductor. She said that was "too far away to plan" because she had already found out Victor was alive and was planning to leave Rick.
But that wasn't all there was too that plotline either. There was the bartender's infatuation with her that had him willing to do anything (accept risk getting fired for giving her another drink) and yet she completely ignore all his advances. Then she tried to get back at Rick by dating a German soldier. And then she was crying tears when Victor had the band play the French national anthem and she realized she what she was doing by dating the German. Each of these different scenes were only a small fraction of the movie, a couple of them only seconds long. And yet they conveyed so much story behind them! Sasha was such a minor character and hardly interacted with the main players. Yet she had a full background and even dramatic emotional growth during the movie.
I could go on about each and every character in the movie. They all had their story to tell and they all got their chance to tell it while furthering the primary plotline. That is what I call an excellent story!
Last Friday, I went to see Casablanca at the Orpheum. Despite how much I love this movie I had never seen it on the big screen. That's seriously bad considering they show it every summer at the Orpheum. So, I'm definitely glad I could finally correct that!
I was rather surprised by just how packed the place was for it. I know I love the movie, but especially with how many of my friends have not seen it or only watched it once I was beginning to think it wasn't as popular as I felt it should be. But I was happy to be corrected on that. The place was absolutely packed! the line was so long that they even had to delay the start of it by 15-20 minutes to allow everybody to find seating.
The audience was quite diversified, with young teenage couples out on a date night, to college girls dressed in shorts in t-shirts, to whole families with young kids, to older people in their 50s-60s dressed in suits, and everything inbetween (though I guess it did lean more towards the older crowd). It was great to see such a varied crowd coming to see it. :)
They actually had a costume contest for it ahead of the presentation of the movie. Sadly there were only four contestants and two of them seemed to just be generic 40's costumes. Well, generic isn't quite appropriate. They were fantastic 40's apparell costumes, they just weren't particularly Casablanca themed. The other two were a young guy with a huge mop of hair dressed up as Rick (I guess) and a woman dressed up as Ferari (sp?) the owner of the Blue Parot in the movie. Both costumes were excellent, but the woman was a dead ringer for Ferari, while the guy's hair was too much of a mop and didn't fit any character at all in the movie.
Anyway, when watching it this time I was really focused on just what could have been running through Rick's head for him to let Ilsa fly away with Victor Lazlo. The story is that Rick and Ilsa fell in love right before the Germans occupied Paris. Unfortunately for Rick, Ilsa was already married to Victor Lazlo, the hero of the french resistance! Right before Rick and Ilsa met, she had been told that Victor was dead. Being without her husband for so long and now thinking him dead, Ilsa turned to Rick who she soon fell in love with.
Its not really clear just what Ilsa feelings for Lazlo were. The movie focuses on her love of Rick, but it does drop hints about her relationship with Victor Lazlo. She was a lonely girl that got sucked up into the heroic image of him and soon fell in love and eventually married. The movie never shows there was any problems in their relationship though, and yet she is pulled oh so much when she again sees Rick. Which begs the question of who she truly loves, or does she love both of them, just in different ways?
In the end, she can't decide for herself and tells Rick to make the decision for all three of them. Probably not the best of decisions on her part. She was trusting somebody else, somebody that had spent years feeling bitterness towards her, to make a decision on what would make her happy.
So....just why does Rick choose to send her off with Victor? Was it because he could see how much Victor loved Ilsa and couldn't stand the thought of causing another that kind of pain for his own gain? Was it because Rick loved the cause of the French resistance so much that he couldn't suffer the loss of their hero if Victor was left behind in Casablanca? Was it because he no longer wanted Ilsa even though he now knew she had loved him the whole time? Was it just that he thought it was the right thing to do because she was married? Was it because he was actually gay and just wanted run off with the Inspector Renault (a person i once knew tried to ruin the movie for me once by trying to convince me that's what the ending meant)?
I really don't know the answer, but I enjoy watching the movie again and again trying to figure it out. :)
I seriously do love this movie!
Happy Things:
My AC started working again. That's definitely a happy thing. I have no clue why, but I came home to it being out Friday night and suffered through it not cooling the house at all Saturday. But come Sunday morning it was quite cool in the house again.
Still need to get off my lazy ass and call somebody about the upstairs AC though. But all in good time. Right now I'm just happy that its working for the rest of the house. :) |
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| General Update |
[Jul. 23rd, 2009|09:17 pm] |
Eh, I was going to write a post trying to analyze why I suddenly have so many prospective dates, but it just seemed self indulgent. Basically it was spawned by getting a friend request/private message from a friend of a friend on facebook (and no its not a spammer, they have fewer friends than I do and have seen them post normal chit chat on my friend's page before). How exactly do you respond to getting something like that where they simply say "I'm a friend of so-and-so, You look cute and happy with a beer in your hand"?
Anyway, what else is going on? I hung out with some friends last night. Was out way to late doing it, but it was good to just hang out and watch a couple of movies (some 90's movie with Robert Downy Jr. in it that I can never remember the name of and Iron Man). Always enjoy spending time with friends. :)
I'm going out tomorrow night too. Going to finally get around to seeing Casablanca in the theater. The Orpheum shows it pretty much every summer in their Summer Classic Movies series, but i've never been, which is pretty sad seeing as how its one of my favorite movies of all time! What's sadder though is the number of people I know who have never seen it! Its a freaking classic!!! (I'm looking at you Jerm)
Also this weekend, I'm hoping to get together with Jerm and Krissi Saturday to watch Donnie Darko. They've been telling me forever that its a great movie, but I have yet to watch it. I took some quiz on facebook, which said I was like a character from it. So i figured I had to watch it now.
Oh and Sunday, I'm doing the Dungeon Delve at the game store with John and Jeremy Y. That will hopefully be a lot better experience than the first one I went to. John will be in control of the monsters while Jeremy and I will be part of a 5 battle cleric assault force! My gnomish cleric of the raven queen is going to kick some teddybear ass!!! :-P
Happy Things:
I was at the book store the other day and realized that the third book in a series that I love had come out. That was a very pleasant surprise. Its Dark Haven by Gail Z. Martin.
The first book was a little weak in the plot, but this woman's characterization were fantastic. They really saved the book for me. She point little details into the interactions with each other that not only gave each character more depth, but it gave them realism that could be related to interactions between people in the modern world.
The second book was when she really hit her stride though. The story become much less generic and trite. And she still maintained the focus on the character realism. It was excellent.
Now I'm hoping this third book will be better still! |
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| Different Points in Life |
[Jul. 20th, 2009|09:10 am] |
I've been struggling with what to write about.
I could write about the continued drama within my family regarding my sister. Her ex-husband recently died in a motorcycle accident, yet that was certainly not the end of the drama...
I could write about the drama with the Meetup groups with the organizer quitting everything for a day or two, early morning emails of hurt feelings from people seeing friends outside of the groups, and can't forget the straight up lies...
I could even write about the mess of my dating life with complicated relationships around every corner....
But what I really have to ask myself is who am I writing this blog for....
Part of it is simply for myself. To make myself think out loud and spell out to myself exactly what I am thinking. Far too often I don't let myself think on a great many things. It's led me to make at least one very, very bad mistake...
Another part of it is to keep a few friends up to date on things when I don't get to see them as much as I once did.
It's that last part that I'd like to look at now. There are plenty of things that have caused me to see them less...wounds can be healed though I'll never forget, I'm no longer with the woman that would throw a fit anytime I tried to spend with them. However, there is one thing that still holds me back.
We are so obviously at different points in our lives. To some degree, we've always been at different points. They in committed relationships and then marriages while I was not even dating. And now, they have moved on to the wonderful point of parenthood! I love seeing them and even spending time with their new babies. However, I've moved into a period of chaotic dating that doesn't lend itself to their very busy schedules....
Still, I try to keep in touch with them via the medium of the internet (chat, email, facebook) and I still see them for the occasional gaming (this coming Sunday I'll be trying another Dungeon Delve at the game store with John and Jeremy Y, should be fun).
And then there's this blog. I could try and stay in touch through this as I mentioned earlier. But how much can I tell them without boring them with the details or giving TMI, hehe. I mean do married people with children really want to hear about the girl wanting me to dominate her in the bedroom, or the married woman who's husband says he doesn't care what she does while they are "separated" (a separation that leaves her doing all the cleaning and all other "womanly" tasks with him just not being expected to show her affection), or the girl who is friend to my ex and yet shows interest.....hmmmm, I could go on, but it seems I'm focusing more on one subject....Or would they really care about how my family is slowly deteriorating over my sister's new boyfriend which leads some of them to believe she was having an affair and that her ex was justified in his outrageous behavior. Oh, and who really wants to hear how about Dana's Insecurities and Tanja's behavior that has been tearing the Meetup groups apart?
Well ok, some of that would be quite interesting, especially when you're sitting on the sidelines. But at which points does it become TMI or otherwise a poor choice to discuss. This post itself is an example of how wordy I get when I;m writing. I can never tell when to shut up and always try to explain everything in such detail to make sure its not misconstrued, though I'm quite positive that there will be misinterpretations no matter how detailed I get.
Eh, I guess we'll see what I will write whenever it is I write it.
Happy Things:
DragonCon! It looks like I am going to DragonCon this year. Woohoo. A few of my friends are going as well. They already had a full room with 6 people staying in it. So, I'll be staying in my own hotel room, which is something of a good idea anyway. The con is in September and all the main hotels have been booked for months. So I will be staying at a hotel 2 miles from the convention center. But that's not too bad, its closer than a lot of the overflow hotels.
I know a bunch of the podcasters I listen to are going to be there and I am definitely looking forward to meeting them. There are also other things I'm looking forward to like the Zombie Prom. I'll have to come up with a good costume for that one! I'll also likely dress up in my musketeer outfit to join in with the medieval gowns of two of my friends.We'll have to see if I want to dress up in any other outfits. That afterall is part of the fun of going to such a big con. |
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| Returning to the blog? |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|04:18 pm] |
So..... I've been considering re-starting my blog. I really don't know why, I just feel the need to start writing things down again and why not share my thoughts with the world?
I've got a ton of stuff going on lately, though some would be quite difficult for me to write about. We'll see how things go. It could just be that I only got around two hours sleep last night and just wanted something to fill up the time.
For a general update, it seems like my ex has caused a huge amount of drama among the Meetup groups, to the point that the organizer cancelled all of them as well as her Facebook profile. But a couple days later she came back and so I guess it will continue on. I haven't been going to many Meetups anyway, just because it had become too clicky and no longer fun. So this is just another excuse to avoid it for a bit.
Works been going ok. I've recently done some PMP training at my office which was fairly crappy considering the way they mixed in training on a new set of project procedures they are planning to start in a few months. Procedures that don't coincide with the PMP stuff exactly. It really served only to confuse the PMP information. What's worse is that the evaluation test they want us to take before the will pay for genuine PMP training includes about 20% of questions on the company's procedures which aren't documented anywhere for us to reference and they are in much more detail than what they presented in the class. What fun!
Still, I think I will do ok with it and it will open up the chance for promotion further down the road if I do end up getting the PMP certification. That's a pretty big thing since when i originally got hired I was told there would likely never be any real advancement in position. The elevator industry is a very static industry with little job movement. Though there's recently been a huge push for project management which has been creating some new jobs lately.
Also, some friends are trying to convince me to go to DragonCon with them this year, which I'm sure would be a ton of fun. The only thing that holds me back is the cost. I'd have to get my own room (at one a non-convention hotel since they're all booked months in advanced) because theirs is already overfilled which would be a big expense. But still I am considering it because I've wanted to go there for years.
Anyway, that's enough for now. We'll see if I post later.... |
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| Final Post |
[Jan. 5th, 2009|12:26 pm] |
It's been quite a while since I've made any posts here. And it's going to be even longer before I do so again, because I've decided to just quit it all together. The vast majority of my posts are just me bitching about shit and who really wants to listen to that crap?
A few times I have thought about making other kinds of post (like for Thanksgiving I was thinking I would make a post about what I am thankful for most, my friends, but then I somehow turned it into complaining about what I wished I could be thankful for).
I just have too much inclination towards complaining and I'm trying to move away from that. It doesn't do any good if I'm not willing to do something about it (and ranting to the ether via livejournal isn't doing "something").
So, that's it.
Thank you to anybody that might have been reading. Pretty sure it was just a couple of my friends anyway and it would be better to tell them such things face to face anyhow. I always enjoy talking to them. :) |
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| A disappointing wedding… |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|06:02 am] |
When I say "wedding" what do you envision? A church decorated with flowers, a bride in a beautiful wedding gown, groom in a well appointed suit, a preist/preacher/otherwised ordained individual speaking of solemn vows and the union of two individuals into one. Perhaps your vision continues on into a formal reception afterwards with dinner being served or at the very least a few toasts being made to the new couple. And then on into the couple running off among a hail of rice or bubbles to get in their chosen vehicle and head off to the honeymoon….
Ok, that may not exactly be your vision when I say "wedding" but it is kind of what I envision.
Some of small part of that was to be found at the wedding Tanja and I went to, but not much.
Yes they were in a church decorated with flowers. It was a small church but had great architecture. It was all exposed wood and glass windows. The wood was all beautifully stained and the exposed structural beams were artistically designed to add to the ambience of the main room. The whole church consisted of an open bell tower out front (which they rang to start the ceremony), one main congregational room and two smaller rooms (on one each side) that had glass doors separating them from the main room. Wonderful...
On the negative side, the place was absolutely freezing (even wearing a full suit I was cold, so you can imagine what Tanja was like in her dress). They only had folding chairs to sit in and not enough for everybody somehow because people were standing in the back. And how about those gravel roads leaving up to it and the only parking being a field? A little bit hard to walk around on when somebody is wearing heels such as Tanja. Oh and they had a bell....lovely way to start the ceremony, but not so lovely when kids are playing with it throughout the reception afterwards!
And yes, the bride did have a lovely dress a little bit too much adornment for my own tastes, but still quite nice. The bridesmaids even have pleasant looking dresses (which is notoriously not the case). The groom and groomsmen were wearing suits.....though the vests and ties of camouflage certainly didn't fit in with my vision of wedding dress (the ring bearer's suit was completely of camouflage). Likewise the guests didn't seem to quite fit with my vision of a wedding with many of them wearing jeans and maybe a golf shirt.
How about that ordained minister? Well...let me say that it was his first time doing a wedding....and is seriously showed. His speech was disjointed. He constantly had to look down at the cards he had things written down on with the false starts and repeats that can accompany that. Not to mention the general order of everything. He started out with the "I do's" (which nobody in the audience could actually hear), before moving to the lighting of the unity candle (which was lit by the couple a minute or two before he said the words associated with it), and then to the part about asking if anybody had any objections to the wedding (isn't it kind of too late after they already said I do?). Not to mention him getting completely flustered to the point that he said so to the entire audience. And all this when the entire ceremony took less than 15 minutes from the doors opening for the bride, even though a couple of songs were sung in the middle of it. It just came across as extremely short, though maybe that is just me.
After the wedding, there really wasn't any more ceremony, people just got up and headed over to the side room that had the tables with random snack foods to pick up and eat wherever you wanted to. I forgot to mention the minister finish the ceremony by telling everybody to go get some food. The food itself seemed like an odd assortment, Italian meatballs, small chicken salad sandwiches (small as in the same size as the meatballs), small ham and cheese sandwiches, brie cheese with caramelized walnuts on top, salmon steak, bowls of crackers (no cheese or spread to put on them), and assorted fruit that almost nobody touched. The only thing to drink was a fruit punch that was pretty good, but it lacked much punch (for that the groom and some of his friends went over to a buddy's pick-up and were drinking a few cold beers out the back).
The tables were simple card tables setup outside in the dirt and gravel making it difficult to get to for any of the women in heels. Balloons were tied to the backs of chairs and were constantly hitting people as the wind continuously blew. Oh and while most of the guests were outside partaking of the food outside, the bride and groom were inside cutting the cake without anybody announcing it so guests could share in the experience.
The tossing of the bouquet and the garter were likewise unannounced with only the 7 bridesmaids participating in the bouquet toss (7 sounded a bit much, but then again two additional bridesmaids had backed out at the end) and only 3 of the 5 groomsmen participated in the garter toss (the other two had either already left or were too drunk off their beer to come back for that).
There was never any toasts done to the new couple, and they didn't even once go outside to where the tables for the reception were. Half the guests had already left from boredom by the time they decided to do the tossing of "rice". They didn't actually use rice. Instead they gave people the option of either bubbles (which I remember was a beautiful effect at Jerm and Krissi's wedding and I love the idea) or….bird seed? Yes, that was the other choice and the one most people chose.
So, those of us still there and within eyesight of the bride to know this was about to happened (again, no announcement) gathered by the entrance and tossed or blew as they walked by, and after they got past all of us and the bell tower….they just stopped. They weren't getting in the car to go off to the honeymoon or even to the after party. They just stopped and meandered there for another 10 minutes or so before heading back inside. My memory could be wrong, but I believe it wasn't until after that that they had the first dance and the father/daughter, mother/son dances.
By that point we had talked to lots of people about the after party that we were invited to and not a single person said they were going to it. Not even all of the wedding party were going apparently as we talked to a few of the bridesmaids and they basically said "hell no" to the party at the Moose Lodge.
There were also some little things that detracted from the whole thing. The flower girl not being watched and sitting down in an ant hill. Other unwatched children playing with the huge bell out front. One of the bridesmaids getting her hand stepped on by the bride's mother. The groom still having the laundry tag hanging off his shirt from it getting dry cleaned for the occasion (he was drunk and letting it fall out of his pants anyway).
So, all in all it was a disappointing turnout, particularly after Tanja had worked it up in her mind that we were going to be struggling to fit in with the rich crowd she expected to find.
We looked absolutely fabulous though. So that is something and we made sure to get somebody to take a picture of us together (we didn't care enough about the rest of the wedding to bother with any other photos).
Since we weren't going to the Moose Lodge, we got invited by some couple that Tanja knew there to go hang out, because they hadn't seen her in a while and she hadn't even called them at all. But neither of us was feeling up to it and honestly we really couldn't afford to go out with them when it's all said and done. But they got upset when we said I was too tired for it as an excuse not to go. Oh well, they'll live.
So, we headed back to Tanja's apartment and on the way we decided to go see a movie as something fairly cheap and still good for going out because we didn't want to waste the effort we had gone through (mostly of Tanja getting a new haircut with two color highlights, plus her make-up professionally done, and even getting a special up-do for the hair too).
After watching a bunch of trailers (we've seriously lost track of what movies are out these days), we finally chose to go see "The Duchess". But before we got our tickets, we had to witness the near brawl that broke out at the ticket counter….
When we got to the movie theater, there was a single line with 4 couples in it. As we stepped up, a second teller opened up, but not going to be rude we just joined the single line rather than starting a new one. But one of couples that had been standing there decided that just wasn't good enough. The guy started a new line of his own after the front couple had gone forward to the new teller. Then when that couple was finished, this guy started walking forward, and so did the woman in the couple that had been in front of him the entire time even before we walked up. Not only did they walk up at the same time but they almost immediately started shoving at each other to get to the counter first! It was ridiculous. But neither one of them was going to back down an inch.
They were yelling at each other and the manager quickly had to come out to try to settle things, but they ignored him completely. The guy in particular was just yelling over whatever both the woman and the manager was trying to say. At one point the guy even shove the woman's head against the ticket counter window!?!
I'm sorry but that shit doesn't fly with me. I may be a pacifist, and in some ways a coward, but that nearly sent me over the edge and I didn't even know the woman. It was only Tanja pulling on my coat sleeve that stopped me from taking more than a step forward. What was really bad was that the woman's husband wasn't doing or saying one damn thing. Even after that it still took him a minute before he tried to step forward and then only to try to pull her away from the guy and not really saying anything to him. It was total bullshit.
Eventually a cop showed up, but by that time the other teller had opened up and the husband and pulled his wife over to get tickets at the other window. I still don't understand it, but the cop's uniform badge said he was airport security so I don't know why he was out in Cordova armed and acting like he was in charge. He ended up not doing a damn thing to the guy, though he did follow him into the theater.
After that bit of excitement, Tanja and I got our own tickets and headed to our own movie, purposefully avoid the angry couple as we saw them go into the same movie as the other couple (later when we were leaving our own movie, we saw the other couple leaving happily, but there was no sign of the angry guy and his girl).
Anyway, like I said, we saw "The Duchess". I'll go ahead and say it was a good movie. It was a bit tough to watch though. The story is about a woman who is married to the Duke of Devonshire by her mother (her mother lying to her and saying that the Duke was madly in love with her despite it being obvious that he was on signing the marriage contract with the stipulation that Georgiana would give him a male heir). She quickly figured out that she was nothing to him except for property that was only fit to give him a son. She could say nothing to him when he would have affairs and cared not for anything she had to say. She did however gain a reputation among the politicos and the fashionistas of society and gained pleasure from that and her three daughters (the first having been from a dalliance of her husband prior to their marriage).
Eventually, she made one true friend, a woman who had been exiled by her own husband and was no longer allowed to see her own three sons. The one way to get them back was to betray the one woman who had be-friended her. She had an affair with the Duke and took over the Duchesses place in the home.
Following that, the Duchess breaks down and has an affair of her own with a man that she loved before the marriage. The Duke would have none of that, she was still his property and if she continued to do that, he would keep her from ever seeing her children again and would make sure that her lover would never work anywhere again (the lover had hopes of being Prime Minister and the Duke was one of if not the absolute leader of the main political party at the time).
So, in the end, she was forced to give up her pride, her dignity, her love, in order to be with her children. As the other woman had said, there can never be a limit to what a mother will do for her children.
Like I said it was a hard movie to watch. There was no happy ending, only the harsh truth.
It was a compelling story. All the actors and actresses were quite believable in their roles and all the scenery/costumes appear accurate. I absolutely loved the outfits the Duchess wore (I had mentioned that she had a reputation with the fashionistas of society)!
Happy Things:
This coming weekend, Tanja will be meeting my parents for the first time. She was supposed to meet them a couple months ago at my nephew's birthday party, but we ran 15 minutes late and my parents had to leave before we got there.
There have been other times that she could have met them certainly, such as the weekly family night my parents have or the times that I've borrowed her truck to help them out with stuff…but it just never worked out.
But this is definitely going to happen, and I for one am looking forward to it. :) |
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| Something pleasant…anything pleasant? |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|12:31 pm] |
Ok, so I was planning to talk all about the travesty that was the wedding Tanja and I went to on Saturday, or maybe the movie we went to see and the woman that got her face shoved into the ticket counter window….but the newest bit of news, my sister having to call the cops on her ex-husband yesterday and me being the only family member not told about it, has put me into a bad mood for some reason.
So, I seriously need to talk about something pleasant instead. Well, what perfect timing…Tanja just emailed me something that does make me smile. It's looking like we aren't going to be able to go see her parents for Christmas/New Years like we were talking about doing. Her parents just have some things going on that its not my place to talk about.
But we still want this to be a special holiday for the two of us together as its our first Christmas together (hell, we've already bought a crystal heart Christmas ournament to celebrate it being our first one together). And everybody knows that my own family is fucked up. So although it will probably piss them off, I'd rather not have this one with them.
Anyway, what Tanja just emailed me was a link to a log cabin we could rent out in the mountains of east TN. It looks very nice with a heart shaped Jacuzzi tub for two, big screen tv, pool table, wonderful views, hiking trails, etc. It'll be within easy driving distance, but still far enough away from everything.
It sounds wonderful, and the thought of spending the time alone with Tanja puts a serious smile on my face.
Happy Things:
Sundays….they are just repeatedly filled with fun over and over again. |
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| Conversations |
[Oct. 4th, 2008|08:38 am] |
The American Heritage dictionary defines conversation as “The spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions, and feelings; talk.”
So, I guess what I had yesterday weren’t really conversations since they weren’t spoken, they were just over chat, but in this day and age who really cares about that? Anyway, yesterday, I had two very distinct conversations that really got me thinking.
I was first going to write this post all about respect because of the content of the first conversation, but I got even more rambly than usual when I tried that and then I had the second conversation with somebody else that also got me thinking. That being said, the first conversation wasn’t about respect at all. It was about two different things: 1) My friend finally had had enough and went off on me about how I’ve been neglecting my kittens so much and 2) She went off on me for not being registered to vote and not wanting to be.
Now, I could have dismissed this as her just having a bad day, but no. Every single thing she had to say was true. I really had been neglecting the kittens that I love. And the really bad thing is that my friends had been trying to tell me that, but I was too dense to see it. It took the kittens acting out and tearing through the carpeting for me to come to the realization that giving them all the food and water they could need was NOT taking care of them. When I figured that out I immediately decided I needed make amends.
But I fucked up an approached the subject the wrong way with Tanja. Somehow, she felt like I was trying to say I didn’t want to spend time with her….Which was a tough conversation because I was trying to say was that I needed to spend more time at my house with them and I wanted her to be there with me, but she was just hearing the first half of that. But that is neither here nor there. Eventually we got it straightened out, it just took time.
I really am trying to do better by the kittens and we’ve been spending more time at my house. In fact, every day this week I’ve been here loving on the kittens and her at the same time. Its been great and Tanja has said the same thing.
We just need to work on a balance. I’ve never actually been in a serious relationship or had any pets. So, I’ve been kind of lost on how to do that. But I AM trying the best I can. And I really appreciate my friend caring enough to go off on me about it and only wish I could have seen her and the others words for what they were sooner.
The other part of the conversation I had with her was more difficult, because its not something I had been trying to fix and not even something I ever considered “fixing”. I am not and have never been registered to vote. She seems to believe very vehemently that this is going to be the most important election of our lives. She flat out told me that if I did not vote she would lose any respect she had left for me (which is hurt more than you’d think because I honestly thought I had already lost all respect I might have had).
That simple statement is the only thing in my whole life that ever even made me consider registering. All my life, I have hated all things politic. My family is very religious and has some very strong beliefs associated with that. Beliefs that I generally don’t agree with. Now, you might think that would make me want to vote against them right? Nope.
I think that comes from my brother. He loves politics, and more than just that he loves arguing politics even when its not something he believes at all. He just likes to get people riled up and he is so good at it that he can argue either side of an issue passionately and thoroughly. I hated the conflict this caused in my family and still do. So I avoid all such conversations.
It also showed me that every single issue had pros and cons for both sides of the argument. I still have never cared enough to follow political issues, but anytime the subject does come up I remember that fact and see those pros and cons. Which leaves me feeling like both sides are right and the only thing that really matters is that one of them has the power to move forward with their agenda. For me, it doesn’t matter who’s in power at all. It just matters that somebody is.
Sure, that is a pretty passive way to look at things, but that is how I see it….
That being said, it turns out that I can’t and never will be able to vote in the state of Mississippi. They have more stringent restrictions on who can vote than most states. Unfortunately, I have a past that I’m not proud of and that prevents me from registering because of it….
On to other things….
The other conversation was with a friend from high school. I have seen her all of one time since we graduated, but we have been chatting a lot. Lately, she’s been having a lot of problems, a few months back she lost her job (still hasn’t found anything), family health problems left and right with her family and her husband’s family, her daughter needing major surgery, her son being diagnosed autistic, her being sick with a sinus infection, ear infection, and flu for the past three weeks or so; and on top of all that she and her husband have been having issues.
Not good at all. But apparently my naïve views on love and me talking to her about Tanja has been helping her, because its moving her to fix the distance that has come between her and Wayne. Now I know that I absolutely don’t have the experience/history to be able to give people advice on long term relationships. That isn’t what I have been doing at all. Instead I have simply talked to her about my own feelings for Tanja and how I do things (little things that don’t even take much effort) in order to keep those feelings strong, especially on days when real life is bring us down. Yes, she has quite literally laughed at my naivity in some of these conversations, but then maybe its that fresh look at love and how to express it that does so much good when people have been in a long relationship and lost sight of what it was like in the beginning.
I’ve also been linking certain blogs to her. One that really hit home for her was this post on Everything I know about being married. (yes, I read a lot of mommy/daddy/married blogs, even though I am nowhere near any of those stages in my relationship, I find them amazingly fascinating and very thought provoking). When I first read that post, I knew she absolutely had to read it. And even though I had been trying not to overtly talk to her about her marriage for my own reasons, I sent it to her immediately. Last night she admitted the effect it had on her and told me how it moved her to start making changes in her relationship with her husband.
Even though she is still sick as hell, she started taking the first steps in repairing their relationship and already he has started responding to them. From what she said last night, it sounds like he has begun taking steps on his own too. I think it will take time but with the both of them working at it, I have no doubts whatsoever that they will be able to get back the happiness that brought them together and that brought them two beautiful children.
From everything that I have seen, I know that kind of happiness is hard one, but it is oh so worth it. Just take a look at my friends (John and Maddie in particular) and the joy that I see in them as they are preparing to bring new life into their marriage. It is so damn beautiful! And I am happy for them all. :)
Happy Things:
Let’s see….being drunk dialed would probably be a harsh change in subject after talking about such high ideals as sustaining love over time and the beauty of bringing life in this world.
But then I am at a completely different stage in my relationship. Sometimes that worries me because it feels like I may not have a place within my friends’ lives any more. But after talking to Maddie the other day, I feel better on that note.
Actually, forget this drunk dialing girlfriend stuff. That is really what has made me happy this week. After my last post, I really felt the friendships I have with all of them by their reactions to the things I had to say in that.
I may have let Tanja take up all of my free time, but my feeling of friendship towards them has not changed one bit on my side, and the conversations I had, particularly with Maddie, made me realize that I don’t need to have those worries that have kept me up at night sometimes. |
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| General Update |
[Sep. 30th, 2008|06:32 am] |
Let's try to make this a quick update. I've actually been trying to make a post for a while now, but can never seem to finish it because I get too wordy.
So, what's been going on? Well, the biggest thing that has happened recently would be Tanja's birthday. I can't remember if I talked about it at all on here before or not (probably not) and I'm too lazy to check. Tanja's birthday was two days before Krissi's (though the party for Krissi's was the Friday before both of their birthdays because she and Jerm were going on a cruise).
I kind of went overboard in dong Tanja's birthday….both in the gifts I got for her and helping out with the party. But come on, it was our first birthday together. I wanted to make it something special for the both of us. I actually had…wow 8? gifts for her. Yeah I think that's right. Don't get me wrong, they weren't all real nice things. Two were dvds that I bought for $5 each. One was a gag-gift that was like $2 or $3. But I also bought her a horse riding game for the Wii (she loves that game), a pair of green earrings, and a green necklace (I love her in green and she doesn't actually have much green jewelry), and a very unique piece of jewelry (murano glass jewelry is what she's always wearing), oh and a travel coffee mug that she had been eyeing at Starbucks the last time we were in there.
I'll admit that some of the gifts I gave her without wrapping. I can't remember what it was but about a week before her actual birthday she had a really bad day for some reason. I didn't find out how bad until I was already on my way to her place. I happened to have some of the gifts in my car. So I ended up giving her three of them to cheer her up (the Wii game, a movie, and the earrings). She loved them all (immediately putting on the earrings, then putting in the game and playing all night, with the only break being dinner when we watched the movie).
Then that weekend I surprised her with another gift in the middle of the day (the other dvd), just as something small to keep her excitement up (she was getting a little bit stressed over the party planning).
Then the morning of her birthday I surprised her by writing a message on her bathroom mirror in the steam from her shower and hanging the green silk bag the green necklace came in from the top of the mirror. Yeah, she really loved that surprise.
Then that evening I had planned out a very nice dinner for us…well, I'd actually planned to take her out for dinner. But she told me that day that she just wanted to eat my house. So, I scrambled and threw something together real quick. I bought some nice candleholders from Bed, Bath, and Beyond; a bottle of wine (Wild Horse Cabarnet I believe – mainly because of the Horse logo on it); and everything I needed for a new Italian pasta dish I found a recipe for (it actually turned out far spicier than I thought it would, but we both like spicy food so it was all good, and she absolutely loved the cheese rolls and spring vegetables I made with it).
And to greet her entering the door I had a little gift box with the unique necklace in it along with a birthday card (I normally would never get people birthday cards). The card was perfect! I spent a goodly amount of time picking it out and it was oh so perfect. She also loved what I wrote in it so much that she still has the card sitting on her nightstand. :)
Oh yeah, I completely forgot I actually got 11 gifts for her…but we don't need to talk about those. ;)
Anyways, we were celebrating her birthday in style for the whole week leading up to it. In addition, we had a huge party planned for the Friday following it.
Ok, I am going to go ahead and say that this party totally kicked assed. Regardless of anything else, every last person that was there had a ton of fun and are still talking about how great it was. That being said there were some negatives about it too.
Earlier when I started posting about the party, I kind of got bogged down in the negatives….it was too soon for me to talk about it calmly I think…..
Shit, I'm doing it again. Quick and simple: less than half the people who said they were going to be there showed up, most without bothering to call or email to say they couldn't make it. This left us with a ton of extra food and drinks that we spent a lot of money on and left Tanja feeling like the people who didn't show don't care anything about her.
And the other thing that was negative….well, that is between Tanja and I. I'll just say that I was upset enough about something she did that I couldn't even hold it together enough to hang out with my friends the next day to try out Rock Band 2 even though I wanted to. I had to make up an excuse about being tired and then go home for a while. Tanja and I have talked about it and its…ok now. I was just really upset at the time.
But let's get back to talking about how much fun the party was. It ended up being 15 peopl (Tanja and I included). We were renting out the club house room at Tanja's apartments' which is great. It has a little kitchen area, mens and womens restrooms, a couch, a tone of different chairs, three tables and a plasma tv. We also borrowed Jerm's Rock Band setup and had my Wii setup with Guitar Hero, Wii Fit, and Tanja's Horse Riding game (I told you she loves it).
We had the whole place decked out. We covered up all the windows with some decorative wall screens (night sky with stars and whatnot, really just something to put up so we didn't have people looking in at all our fun). And there was a huge Happy Birthday banner that we put up covering one huge bank of windows. All the tables were covered in black table clothes with different birthday table toppers in their center, along with some disco specific confetti spread out on them. We covered up all the ceiling lights with colored cellophane to give it some mood lighting (it worked wonderfully). From the chandelier in the center of the room we hung the disco mirror ball and we had little swirlly disco decorations hanging all around the room. The little bar segmenting off the kitchen area even had a disco themed banner along its edge.
Oh and I can't forget the posters Tanja put up. We had one on the main door to welcome everybody to the party (gold posterboard with fancy lettering and glued on glittery swirls). One that I used during the Birthday Trivia segment of the night, and then three more that she taped various pictures from her life on (the comments she wrote next to the pictures were hilarious).
It was perfect.
Food wise, we had two large trays of Panelli (sp?) brought in from Lonnie Tant's Italia Pizza Café (I can't say enough about how good their food is and how great it was to talk with Lonnie personally when we were planning the catering. He's just a great guy and very personable. Oh and they've recently upgrade to using an even better grade of all their cheeses, which is saying a hell of a lot considering the quality they were already using!) with accompanying garlic bread; miniature quiches; a huge salad; and the usual party foods such as cheese on crackers, chips and dip, etc.
Drink wise, well, we raided my supply of liquor (I hadn't been drinking it at all so why not). We had a huge bottle of Bacardi Rum (only little used previously), a bottle of Captain Morgans spiced rum (never opened), a bottle of Smirnof vodka, a bottle of Jose Quervo tequila (as well as some top shelf El Patron Anejo tequila that was only for the people we really like…I think Caroline was the only one who got to try any), half a bottle of gin, two different kinds of margarita mix; half a bottle of brandy, and more beer than we had any right to get (partial case of Heineken, new case of Samuel Adams Octoberfest, a six pack of a Summer Shandy beer Tanja likes, a six-pack of Wersteiner beer, as well as some Parot Bay wine cooler type drinks), and can't forget the Jaegermeister or the bags of jello shots that Ed and Sandy brought with them. Oh and various not alcoholic drinks. Yes, most of that was to mix with the alcohol, but aside from the sodas, orange juice, and red bull for that, we made sure to have plenty of bottled water and even made sure that people were drinking water while they were partaking of the other stuff.
With that long list, you may be thinking we were having a huge drunken party. But nobody got wasted. Nobody even got all that drunk. Speaking for myself, I can say that I only had a very mild buzz going after I fixed myself a gin-sour and there were no effects at all the next morning despite me having eaten nothing since breakfast that day and going on very little sleep.
What's really funny is that the thing that sticks out in my mind most as being fun at the party is the one thing I wasn't really looking forward to, the Birthday Trivia. Normally I can't stand being in front of a bunch of people and talking; but Tanja really wanted it and I can't say 'no' to her. We actually ran out of time and didn't plan out the questions like we were planning to. Instead, I just winged the whole thing. For the trivia on Tanja I didn't have much trouble coming up with questions (hahahha, I love the 500 point value question….mainly for people's reactions to what the correct answer was). For the other categories, 70's music and 70's movies/tv, I really didn't have any trouble….thanks to my mighty iPhone! 5 minutes before the party I googled 70's trivia on it and found a perfect page for each of them. When it came time to host the game show I just browsed back to the site and picked one out that would fit the right level of difficulty. I was having fun picking out the questions and a hell a lot of fun play acting to confuse people about which of the multiple choices I was saying was showing on the page as the correct answer and which ones I were making up completely out of the blue.
As a prize we gave away a double-shot bottle of Jaeger, though I really think Tanja's first thought on a prize would have elicited an even greater positive reaction. Teehee
I got a could video clips of people trying out the hoola hoop game in Wii Fit as was a general party pictures. Looking at them you can definitely tell everybody loved Rock Band. I was a little bit disappointed that there were no pictures of Tanja and I together, but I was the only one with a camera and really, most of the time we were both working the crowd separately. I don't know why but we were both working hard to make sure everybody was having a good time. I guess because there were so many different groups of people that didn't know each (Tanja's horse riding friends, people we both know from the Meetup groups, people from her work, and even her chiropractor showed up), we felt like we needed to do that to get them talking to each and enjoy the general party. It worked great. Like I said, everybody loved the party. We just didn't have much time together during it.
Its ok, we'd already had our own party with just the two of us.
At the end of the night, around 2am, I tucked Tanja into bed and then went right to work at cleaning the club room up. It had to be completely done by 10am that morning (apartment complex's policy). I kind of figured I wouldn't be able to pull myself out of bed early enough to get it done otherwise….and I needed some time to myself right then. Anyway, Tanja wanted me to preserve as much of the decorations as possible….which takes a lot of time. I was didn't get back to the apartment with everything cleanup up until after 5:30am. By which point I needed a shower before I could possibly think of laying down.
So, I was up until 6am….and then Tanja had to get up at 8 to be in time for a riding lesson with Ally at 10. I got up with her and got stuff ready to take down to my house, mainly just because I needed to return Rock Band to Jerm. He said he was going to get back from the cruise Saturday night and I was going to try to return it to their house before they got because I suspected they would buy Rock Band 2 on the drive home.
As it turns out, I was right about that, but Jerm was wrong about when they'd be back. They'd actually made it back Friday night like Krissi had thought they would. No big deal though. He had text messaged me that morning to find out when I could bring it down to them. I just had to wait for the leasing office to open so that I could return the clubhouse key to them and then I was heading down to Southaven/Horn Lake with Rock Band and a bunch of other stuff in my car.
After getting to Jerm and Krissi's house, I helped them setup the instruments again and even tried out a little bit of Rock Band 2 with them. It was a ton of fun; but my mind kept wandering and then John and Maddie came over which brought a pause to the game and just made me think of the party more. After a fairly short time, I had to bow out using lack of excuse and went back to my own house to….spend time with my cats I guess.
Eventually, Tanja called me back after her nap and I headed back to her place so we could talk.
Last week is kind of a blur to me. Tanja and I got back to acting normal relatively quickly, but then I came down with an illness. I can't remember when it started exactly, either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, but it quickly worsened. I was so bad Thursday that I even had to bow out of seeing my friend Todd who was in from out of town. I wasn't sure if I could have any fun even with the distraction gaming with him and everybody would be; but I knew for sure that if I was that sick, I shouldn't be around Maddie and the coming twins. Pregnant women can't take very many medications, and I didn't want to risk getting her sick at all just so I could hang out with the people I've been missing far to much of lately.
It was even worse Friday, which is why I broke down and actually went to the doctor! Anybody that knows me would nearly die of shock from hearing that. Nobody was even pestering me to do it, I did it because I was feeling THAT badly. I could barely find the energy to get dressed and drag myself to her office which is only a couple miles down the street from my house.
She told me I had a sinus infection/flu. Not too good there. She gave me an antibiotic to take twice a day for 10 days and it seems to be working fairly well, though it took a couple days to kick in.
I was so sick that I had to miss out on yet another time with my friends. I just wasn't going to be up to hosting gaming at my house Saturday. So, I emailed Jerm (from my iPhone because my computer up and died on me that morning with a bad cpu or motherboard!) and he moved it to his place.
Friday night I had to spend alone because I didn't want to get Tanja sick. And Saturday, I think I did as little as possible until I got a call from Tanja who wanted to come over. Honestly, I wasn't feeling much up for company, but she was upset about some stuff and I wanted to be with her to comfort her. It was bad enough that I ran out and bought some flowers to cheer her up. I had it all setup for her to take a relaxing bubble bath by candlelight in my bathtub with the waterjets and speakers to play her Pavaroti music on. I also would cook dinner for her (I'd already started a fresh batch of focaccia bread).
It was late enough that she skipped on the bath that night, but she really appreciated the flowers and food. A candle-lit dinner would cheer anybody up. Wouldn't it?
Its funny, I really do thrive when I have somebody else that I can be taking care of. From the moment I heard she wasn't having a good day, I forgot about how badly I was feeling and only thought of what I could do to help her. My illness was completely forgotten (well, not completely, but at least I was distracted from its effects on me).
It was a good evening.
Sunday, we had to get some work done. Tanja agreed to redesign a website in exchange for riding lessons from a woman that was short listed to be in the Olympics for Dressage (the type of riding Tanja does). However, we'd been so wrapped up with other stuff going on in our lives that we hadn't done more than the initial layout design of the pages. Despite this, Tanja was promising to set it to go live on Oct 1.
Personally, I'd prefer more than 1 month to do a major site overhaul like we are doing, but that wasn't up to me. And I do enjoy doing this stuff. So, we spent 13 hours straight yesterday working on the website. Tanja decided that she wanted some significant changes done to the initial design I had come up with and then we had a bitch of a time populating it with the content for the homepage.
Yeah, that many hours and all we got finished was the homepage! But then, I've never been professionally trained in site design and I was doing most of the work. Tanja was giving suggestions and coming up with the content to add while I worked on the graphics and coding.
What we've got is pretty good I'd say (www.alrdressage.com/testing). But then I'm kind of biased.
Tonight, we'll be returning to my house and working on populating the rest of the pages with stuff. That shouldn't take nearly as much time, but I am still a little bit worried about how much time it will take. We'll see.
What else is going on in my life?
Well, shit continues to hit the fan with my sister and her divorce. I don't understand it at all, but her ex-husband continues to live in the same house with her and the kids even when he's pulling shit like busting into her room at night and yelling at her to stop using his bed (he gets it in the settlement) so that she has to pull it and the sheets out her room and toss it into the garage and then sleep on the floor. I borrowed Tanja's truck to help her get a new bed from Costco and he was yelling at her over the phone saying that she was there with another guy……Sorry that shit just pisses me off. Of course he wouldn't say one damn word to me when I was at their house dropping the bed off.
Also in family news, my mother's remaining dog has been diagnosed with a congenital heart disease and given an estimate of 1-2 years left. Which has sent my mother into a new depression where she says shit like how she's "surrounded only by death". Yeah, I'm not exaggerating there. What the hell do you say to that? She continues to refuse seek professional help when I try talking to her about it and is telling me that I don't care about her and that my family is of no importance to me any more (basically, she's being even more dramatic about the old nonsense about me abandoning her, now its just extended to the whole family).
I'm sorry, but I let myself be control by that shit for 30 years and I've had enough. I can and will have a balance between caring for my family, my friends, my love, and myself! And so should she. She needs to realize that. Its been far too long that she has focused only on the misery of herself.
On a more positive note, Tanja and I are going to be going to a wedding together…not our own just yet (despite Keli's helpful hints/attempts to get Tanja to move in with me). Somebody she knows from her chiropractor's office is getting married and she invited the two of us. It's going to be on Saturday Oct 11. So, I will miss gaming that weekend, but I think it will be a lot of fun. We are probably going to go shopping for a new suit for me to wear this weekend and maybe something new for her too. We'll see.
I'll also be missing gaming on the following Saturday. My older sister's in-laws are coming to town and they are having a cookout that Saturday afternoon. Particularly because Tanja and I may not be here for Christmas this year, I want to make an effort to be there at family gatherings like this. We'll see how it goes. Tanja still hasn't met my parents yet. So that will be a big deal I'm sure.
I think that's it. Damn, that wasn't a very short post at all, was it?
Oh well.
Happy Things:
"If I had a million dollars, I'd sell you for a monkey." What does that even mean? She'd sell me to a monkey? She'd sell me under the ruse of me actually being a monkey? Or is it that she'd sell me for the monkey that owns me and is too lazy to do the selling himself?
HAHAHA. Sorry, I'm sure that means nothing to you. But it just brings a huge smile to my face. I really do enjoy waking up to silliness such as that in the morning. :) |
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| Health |
[Sep. 4th, 2008|05:09 pm] |
Well, today I went back to the doctor. I still haven't gotten around to getting the MRI and MRA done, but when I reminded her of that she told me not to worry about it at all. The blood work she had done came back with everything looking great (like so many doctors I've had before, she had to comment on the excessive amount of platelets in my blood compared to the average person, but that is a good thing). But of course, the main thing that had her concerned after my previous visit was my blood pressure. And apparently the medicine she gave me to take isn't doing much. In fact, my blood pressure was actually slightly higher this time around.
The medicine has seemed to help with my migraines though. I've still been getting headaches, but only one or two escalated into migraines in the last month or so. That is an enormous improvement. And the migraine medicine she gave me samples of took care of those migraines (though they did leave me feeling rather weird). So, she wanted to keep up with it. But now she's doubled the prescription to see if that will be more effective (she says she may double it again if it still hasn't done anything by the time I see her again in six weeks).
Tanja and I have also been talking about exercising together and I think I am really going to push for that in the hopes that it will help too. We'll see what happens in 6 weeks!
In other news, my father is still recovering from his prostate surgery. He seems mostly recovered from that, but now he's contracted gout some how. Tuesday he woke up with his foot hurting too much to walk on and a red spot as well as swelling on it. He finally went to the doctor about it today and they told him it was gout and gave him some medicine to help with it.
Hopefully he will recover from that soon as its hurting him more than the surgery seemed to right now.
Happy Things:
The "nameless" baby….
She's not really nameless. I'm referring to my niece Kaitlyn, which is a rather heavy baby being over 17 pounds at 4 months (she's already in 9 month clothing!?!). She's too cute though.
Anyway; the other day when my sister had her over to my parents' house, I went up to her and said something like "hello, are you going to tell me your name?" and it got the biggest smile you could possibly imagine from her. I have no clue why. But I kept doing it and every time she would have the same reaction. And so, now I'm calling her the "nameless" baby until she is able to tell me her name. hehe.
Just some fun sillyness. You can never have enough of that in your life! |
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| How do you balance life? |
[Sep. 4th, 2008|05:07 pm] |
Now, I knew I had been neglecting things while I've been spending so much time with Tanja. My kittens have been tearing up the house because I haven't been spending enough time with them. My yard keeps completely overgrown because I can't keep up with the mowing. And the only time I see my friends is for the few hours that we game each Saturday….
It didn't really hit me until today just how badly I was neglecting my friends though. Somehow, I was letting my mind trick me into thinking that chatting with them online and playing the game with them was enough. But it really just isn't anything remotely like hanging out with them.
So, what brought this on? Well Krissi messaged me to say "my dad got the job here". That is wonderful news, but I knew absolutely nothing about him even applying despite her saying that she's been talking about it for weeks. I just haven't been around at all to hear her talking about it, except at gaming when we are just busy playing the game and not chatting about the interesting things happening in each others lives.
It was actually just like the other day when I messaged her about my father having come through his prostate surgery ok. I had apparently not mentioned it to her at all, although I had been talking about it for a few weeks myself. I had chatted with Jerm about it some which is saying a lot since I typically don't message him because I always feel like he's too busy at work to really chat.
Now, with events from the beginning of this year in mind, I have to say that it is actually a good thing that I no longer only talk with Krissi about the things that have me concerned/worried. That was a mistake on my part that will never happen again. I too easily got confused and fucked things up.
But there is a world of difference between that and failing to mention anything at all about something as big as my father having cancer! That right there is absolutely another mistake I have been making, one of total neglect. And I dearly want to correct that.
I should be able to balance time with Tanja, my kittens, and my friends. Its just that I have never dealt with anything like the relationship I have with Tanja. I couldn't see how bad it had gotten until now. What I'd really like to be able to do things with Tanja and them together. She's a large part of my life now and but my friends also need to be in my life. They have been there for me even when I didn't deserve their help. I'd like to share the enjoyment that is their company with Tanja and vice versa.
I believe I can do that. I just need to actively try and work at it. I'm going to talk to Tanja about it tonight if I get a chance (I'll be gaming with Jerm tonight, so I'm not sure how much I'll actually talk to her). And depending on how that goes, maybe I'll try planning something with my friends this weekend. I know John and Maddie will be out of town visiting with some of his family. But Jerm, Krissi, Jeremy, and Beth may be available to do something.
There is also my friend Amber. I've been talking to her about bringing her husband and kids over to my house some time, but something always comes up. For instance, we had talked months ago about going to see Casablanca showing at the Orpheum tomorrow night. It's a favorite movie of both her and her husband (as well as Tanja and I). So it would have been perfect to go see it with them and I could finally meet her husband. We even talked about going to one of their favorite restaurants in town that I'd never heard of (she's mentioned something about genuine gypsy dancing at this place). But her husband Wayne is out of town for work yet again and not going to get back until tomorrow, which means he'll be too tired; and Tanja has a riding lesson and will probably bee too exhausted from it to do anything. So, there goes that great Idea.
I'll just have to come up with another one though. All of my friends are worth far more effort than I've been giving them lately.
Happy Things:
We're playing tSoY tonight! Woot!
Can you tell I'm excited? I've been really craving this game, but its been weeks since we played that first session, even though we scheduled a game session a couple different times since that first game. Krissi won't be playing any more since she's back in school now, but it sounds like we are going to have a full house as several other people are going to be joining us.
I am definitely happy about that. :) |
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| Another Adventure Group Meetup… |
[Aug. 30th, 2008|04:49 am] |
Before, I get started, I'll go ahead and say that this Tanja and I had a great time. This was a ton of fun and I do believe we will be doing it again. Not on to how this started off with a bad beginning….
So, the Adventure Meetup Group had another meeting planned. Done by the same organizer as the disasterous kayaking meetup, this one was to be a rock climbing meetup at the Outdoors Inc. in Cordova. We RSVP'd 'yes' to it quite a while ago, and had almost forgotten about it. But we were really excited about trying it, particularly after the kayaking one was so disappointing.
Then Wednesday night, we got an automated email from Meetup.com saying that the details of the event had been changed. No, explanation of why or even any clear indication of what exactly got changed. It took me a few minutes to figure out the guy had changed the date until Sept. 11. The guy hadn't mentioned it at all to anybody else in the group or even the group's main organizer who had been planning to attend. He just changed it on his own without any explanation. That kind of pissed me off. I mean, it was the night before the event was supposed to take place. What if somebody hadn't checked their email that night? I even emailed him to find out what was up but he has yet to respond. Which pisses me off more.
Anyway, Tanja and I decided we still wanted to do it. So, I called and checked if they were still having the class. Yep, they have it every Thursday night from 7-9. Great, we were going. We called up Dana to see if she still wanted to go this week even if the guy had changed the date. As has been the case with her lately, she seemed rather distracted or maybe a bit depressed and said she'd skip it this week, but wanted to hear how it went (we need to email or call her to tell her all about it).
So, we planned to just go on our own. I considered posting to the group about us going anyway, but it just seemed rude to undermine this guy that was at least trying to be a sub-organizer of events for the group. Oh, and the woman Tanja boards her horse with joined us (though that had a lot of drama associated with it that I don't feel like getting into).
We got there just a couple minutes before 7 and then stood around talking while we waited for the rest of the people that would be taking the class to show up. Eventually all 6 of us were there and ready to learn. There was a young couple probably in their early twenties. The guy had been climbing before, but his girlfriend had not. Then there was another woman, in her mid twenties I think that was by herself. Then Lorrie, Tanja, and myself.
Damn, I can't remember the guy's name that was instructing us, but he was very personable and seemed quite knowledgeable. I'd say he was probably in his mid to late fourties. He's been doing climbing since the 70's. First he went over the various pieces of equipment used in climbing, particularly noting everything we would be using, but also going over the other stuff for informational purposes. He explained the different types of climbing shoes, how they should fit, the variety of carabineers, the ropes, the harness, etc. Everything was very well explained before he ever had us do a single thing (much better than our experience with the kayaking class).
Then he showed us the knot used to tie your harness to the line, a double figure eight. Well…first he showed us the single figure eight knot and had us practice it a dozen times or so to make sure we got it. It isn't a complicated knot, but you sure as hell want it to be right. Then he showed us to feed the line through the loop in the front of the harness and finish the knot by tying a second figure eight knot into the first. And we practiced that for a bit too.
Then he showed us the doodad that the belayers use to attach the other end of the rope to their harness to anchor the climber should the slip off and for when the belayer lets them down easily when they are ready to come down. He explained the principles of it as well as demonstrating how it functioned. Then he showed us how the climber checks over the belayer to make sure everything is correct and the belayer checks the climber to make sure their ok. Oh and he also explained the need for one word communication between the two in regard to taking up the slack of the line or giving some additional slack.
Then it came time to climb (forgot to mention that we had all picked out climbing shoes they had ready for the class earlier in the lesson). He broke us into two groups because of the three climbs on the indoor climbing wall, there was one that was a bit more intimidating that the others at first because of it overhanging early on.
In our group, Lorrie was climbing first and Tanja was belaying. Lorrie had actually done this once before on a cruise she went on years ago and I think it showed. She got right to climbing the wall and was making good progress until she was a few feet from the top. At that point, I think she just wasn't seeing good places to grip the wall or place her feet. She started saying she was ready to come down, but we kept calling for her to reach the top. After a few minutes of that, she eventually did do it because we kept badgering her. Then she came down with Tanja slowly letting her down…..oh yeah, I forgot that at one point in the climb she needed a rest. Tanja was easily able to hold her in place while Lorrie just dangled there for a couple minutes (she actually kicked the other girl that was climbing in the head to she first let go, but only lightly).
Then came Tanja's turn to climb and I would belay her. She was extremely nervous about the whole thing and had to go to the bathroom for a few minutes before she could attempt it. She did try it though and I am very proud of her for that. She didn't actually get that far up the wall, but it was still good. She was just doubting herself too much I think. But I wasn't going to force her to keep going if she didn't want to. Nor would I let anybody else try to do so.
Then it was my turn to climb and Tanja belayed me. I can't tell how quickly I was going or anything since it just happened that nobody else was climbing at the same time I was (the young couple was switching to the harder climb for the boyfriend to do it). But I did indeed get up to the top. I saw exactly what Lorrie did when she got near the top. You just get nervous about the hand/foot holds you are using and its hard to go those last couple of feet. I'm pretty sure I didn't take as long as she did to continue moving though. ;)
But I still had to get down. Although I had seen everybody else coming down just fine relying on the belayer, it was still a little bit difficult for me to just let go of the wall and release all of my weight into the harness. I think I probably did it a little bit slower than the others, but I did do it and Tanja started to let me down….Of course there was one little problem….a weight disparity. It shouldn't really causing that much of a problem and they have floor anchors there to use when it is particularly significant, but Tanja wasn't using that. As such, she actually kept lifting a little bit off the ground as I was coming down. She was laughing so hard from it that it only made things worse. She started swinging over the padding they had on the floor even. It was hilarious and still fun. Neither of us were in any danger. The equipment was good and she was doing exactly what the instructor told her to do, keep her hand on the loose end of the rope. The contraption we were using for belaying is a special one that mostly works even if you somehow forget your hand there. But it is still best practices to be in the habit in case you aren't using the expensive item. I did make it down safe and sound; and laughing right along with Tanja. I had to give her a big hug as soon as I got on my feet because I could tell it kind of panicked her. It was all good though. It was just a funny little incident.
Then Lorrie tried climbing again and she did even better the second time, getting to the top without needing any break and without the long hesitation before the top. Then we talked Tanja into giving it another try. She got a lot further up this time which was great. She didn't go all the way up, but that's ok. What she did was plenty and it showed that she was really willing to try it. As with most things, the more you do it, the better you will be at it.
Case in point, I was next up for climbing. This time I didn't hesitate at all. I just got right to it and climbing rather quickly. In fact, I was climbing too quickly for Tanja to belay me. I was building up too much slack and she had to yell at me to slow down. I had already gotten over half way up there though, hehe. I was just having a hell of a good time. I let her pull in all the slack and then climbed a little be slower after that, but I still wanted to go quickly. It was just that much fun. I easily got to the top. Then Tanja let me down again. This time keeping to her feet a bit better as she had Lorrie help her hold on to the rope, lol.
Then Lorrie gave the difficult climb a try with the instructor belaying her while I talked to Tanja for a bit. She did good. It was slow going, especially early on with that overhang, but she did well and got most of the way up before she got tired and came down. I was going to give it a try to, but the rest of the class had already left and I realized it was closing time. The two hours of that class had just flown by it was so much fun!!! It was a $20 very well spent and we are definitely going to have to go back again (particularly because you can go back any time and do it for only $5 after you've taken the class!). Next time, I'm sure that Tanja is going to be able to get to the top, and I am definitely going to do the intimidating climb. :)
Happy Things:
Well, other than the greatness that was the climbing class….I guess its just the little things in life that brings such pleasure. For instance, yesterday morning Tanja had to be at work early and so we were waking up at 5:15am. Well, she is not a morning person and I know this. So, I went ahead and got up so that I could fix her morning cup of coffee. This seems like such a little gesture to me and yet it really makes me happy to be able to do it for her. Apparently, it makes her even happier than that too because in all her life she's never had somebody that had done that for her even once (other than her mother). Considering that I know she had some very deep relationships in the past, I find that hard to believe. It just seems so natural to me to go ahead and do that for her. She never once asked me to do it, and I think she actually felt guilty about it the first couple of times. I had to explain to her that I genuinely enjoyed doing it.
Anyway, that is just one of the little things that really makes me smile (even when I running on so little sleep). |
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| "Learning" to kayak |
[Aug. 21st, 2008|01:07 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | meetup | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
So, its been forever and a day since I last posted anything. I actually started to type up several posts in the last couple of weeks, but I have just been too busy at work to get them done and they just became out dated and pointless over time. But this is something I just really feel like writing about….
Last night Tanja and I went to another meetup. This one is for an "adventures" group which is planning activities such rock climbing, kayaking, skydiving, etc. Last night's meetup was a beginners kayaking class at the UT Med Pool. Sounds interesting right?
Well is totally sucked ass! This guy instructing the class didn't even proscribe to the "sink or swim" method of learning new skills he was of the "force you to sink then try to swim why keeping your legs immobile in the kayak" method. Let's just put it this way, Tanja ended up having to sit out of most of the class because of the way he was acting and his lack of any compassion and I only kept going because I am stubborn even when I wasn't learning a damn thing.
I'm jumping the gun. Lets start from the beginning. First off, the meetup wasn't very well planned. Originally it was supposed to be last Wednesday, but too many people said they wanted to go. So, the organizer broke it up into two groups and Tanja and I volunteered to wait until this week to do it. Also in the class this week was the meetup organizer and another member (I think her name was Linda). There was no contact information and the only description of the location was "near the corner of Madison Ave. and Mannasis".
So, Tanja and I drove there and after driving around there for a few minutes not seeing anything that said "UT Med Pool" or anything like it, we finally asked somebody and they showed us where it was. When we got there, Linda and Jeff (the organizer for this event) were already there. The instructor was picking out a kayak for Linda to use and then adjusting it for her.
They weren't very organized and so it took a while to get things straightened out and get out kayaks for all of us and then pick out skirts (a rubberized skirt that you put around your waste and then attach to the kayaks opening to keep water from getting inside). Then the instructor took several minutes to adjust Lindas kayak for her height, a minute or so to tell Tanja how to sit in her kayak with no adjusting (which later caused problems because it was too loose for her), and no time on show me anything.
With that the instructions started…with no demonstration and only a little bit of description he got right into flipping my kayak over and having me pull myself out of it. It wasn't that complicated, but a demonstration or a simple reminder not to come straight up might have prevented the bruise on my head as I came up and immediately hit my head on the kayak. It also didn't help that he took obvious pleasure in telling everybody that I "panicked". I shrugged it off, but that is beside the point. It's just bad form to insult your students when they are completely new to it.
Linda was next up and she learned from my example and didn't come straight up (see a damn demonstration does help). Then came Tanja…now Tanja has had a bad experience with canoeing in the past and expressed trepidation about if we were rolling the kayaks in this class. I serious would have thought they would give us some instruction on maintaining balance in the kayak and paddling around since we were all beginners. But no, they had us jumping right into flipping us over, who would have guessed?
Well, I was worried about Tanja because of this and I tried making sure she was ok with doing it, but she seemed determined to try it even if she was nervous about it. Anyway, the instructor flipped her over and she came out quickly and easily, but the instructor still said that she "panicked" for some reason. For which she really took offense and I could tell that she was getting upset by the way she got quiet and wasn't talking at all anymore.
After that we weren't given the chance to practice getting out of the kayak at all like you would normally think you'd do after learning something new, but oh well. Once again I got to be the guinea pig when we jumped right into learning to roll out of the water if we flip. He gave us a little bit more description this time around, but he was facing away from Tanja at the time and not talking all that loudly. So, she had to ask him to please repeat what he said, to which he rolled his eyes and gave a very brief description.
Once again I was the guinea pig, first he told me to demonstrate the "hip snap" that he had described to us. I gave it a try and was rewarded with him saying "well I'm not sure that he's a guy, but that was ok" (supposedly it's easier for guys to do, but its damn difficult to do something right the first time when you've only heard it described to you). At the time, I took that as a bit of a joke, but with everything else I'm now thinking he really was just being an ass!
Then he spent a few minutes demonstrating to Linda and Tanja how to roll by flipping me over in the water repeated and hoping I would somehow magically figure out what to do even though he wasn't giving me any hints as to what I was doing wrong each time he pulled me back up. Then he moved on to giving Linda personal instruction and ignoring Tanja and I. Eventually, Jeff started trying to show Tanja what to do when it became apparent that the instructor was going to be busy with Linda for a while. He has been kayaking before, but he's not an instructor. Still he tried his best.
This is when they realized that the kayak was not adjusted properly for Tanja. Her legs were moving around too much in the kayak and it was making things difficult for her. Jeff mentioned this to the instructor who responding by telling Tanja to adjust it herself. Which was finally the point that she'd had enough. The whole point in taking lessons for this was for the instructor to show us how to do things, but he kept wanting to just have us do it on our own which is overwhelmingly frustrating. Jeff did start to describe to her how to make the adjustments, but that wasn't the point. He wasn't the instructor and that is who should have been doing the adjustments, particularly because we don't even know that a properly adjusted kayak would feel like.
Tanja decided to forget the rest of the "lesson", but not wanting to ruin it for me she just went and changed in the locker room and then sat and watched the rest of the lesson. Honestly, I was getting really worried about her because she was gone a long time in that locker room and I thought she was upset. I was ready to go if she said she wanted to just get out of there when she came back, but she was smiling and told me to just keep going with the lesson.
Anyway, at some point while she was in there, the instructor finally decided to move on from giving Linda one-on-one instructions and show me what he had been showing her (it was another 10 or 15 minutes before he even realized Tanja had left…great instructor, eh? I wonder if he'd even have noticed if she were still in the water and flipped her boat and couldn't get out). Basically, he was trying to teach me how to do the roll with a paddle in my hand. Unfortunately he can't teach worth crap. Repeatedly, I would do what he described only to get my hand pinned against the side of the kayak and the paddle in my hand as he kept pressing the paddle down against the kayak. Yeah, I understand that the paddle is supposed to be against the kayak for proper positioning, but dammit when you are pressing it there forcefully watch out for my damn hand and don't dismissively say "everybody complains about it hurting their hand" in an insulting tone when I mention it. And again, he wasn't really giving me any hints as to what I was doing wrong each time. So I was learning jack shit. He was just becoming more short with me and forcing me to try it over and over again.
Eventually though, he ended up just telling me "well, we only have 5 more minutes. So I'm going to go play." What the hell!?! I thought this was supposed to be a lesson, not fun time for asshat to insult people and then ignore them. What the hell ever.
I just got out and quickly changed in the lockerroom. When I came out, I was greeted with more proof that the meetup was ill planned as the instructor got bitchy about the money. We were told it would be $10 each, which I thought was pretty reasonable considering it was supposed to be a basic lesson for beginners (though having experienced the “lesson” I’d say it was too much). Anyway, the guy wanted us to pay $25 each. Apparently there is a $10 fee per person to use the pool for an hour plus there was an additional $15 per person for the lesson. If I had known that beforehand I would have skipped it as we are trying to budget our money better and $50 is just too much to try out something that we will likely never actually use, especially with this crappy instructor.
Once we straightened that shit out (and no, I did not pay $25 for each of us for this shitty experience) we started to leave. But the instructor wasn’t finished insulting us just yet. He just had to tell Tanja “sorry you FAILED so quickly!”
That is total bullshit. I don’t care who or what you are teaching, but you should never tell somebody they are a failure because you aren’t good enough to actually teach anything. He didn’t once try to help her with anything he was having us do. He didn’t once give her a word of encouragement. He didn’t once even try talking her into getting back in the kayak. Hell he didn’t even notice she had gotten out of the water until over half and hour had passed. And then he had the audacity to insult her for it!?! That is just fucking wrong.
Jeff tried to invite us to go out and have some drinks with the others, but we’d had enough and there was just no way we were going to spend any more time around that instructor.
I guess all of the meetups can be good, but this was a seriously bad one and I am definitely sorry we tried it out, because all I really got out of it was a bruised head and an even worse bruised hand.
Happy Things:
Sushi. It wasn’t that long ago that Jerm, Krissi, John, and Maddie introduced me to sushi, but I really love it now. Tanja and I have gone out for it several times and enjoyed it each time. This morning I had to stop at Krogers to get something to eat (I didn’t even have the energy to eat something for breakfast this morning) and I just happened to notice their fresh sushi. Now, I am not going to claim it was amazing sushi, but it did taste good and it really satisfied me when I ate it. Hmmm, hmmm, good. |
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| Inspectres |
[Jul. 25th, 2008|10:00 pm] |
So, last night I joined Jerm and Krissi in heading over to Michael's house for some gaming again. Kelly was not going to be able to join us however. So, we would not be playing the Shadows of Yesterday game. Instead, we would be trying out Inspectres, a completely new game to all of us. Jerm also talked about possibly doing a Jedi game based on the Dogs in the Vineyard ruleset.
Honestly, I was rather disparaging of both these options (you can see a little bit of it in my last post). I hadn't looked at Inspectres at all, and the idea of trying out a new game for the first time on a weeknight after we had all been at work just sounded like a bad idea to me. Though as it turned out, Inspectres is so simplistic that I shouldn't have worried. As far as the Jedi game goes…I just wasn't interested in giving the Dogs in the Vineyard ruleset another try.
Still, I'm always happy to spend time with Jerm and Krissi (and I've probably been spending too much time on my own the past couple weeks). So I was hoping it would turn out better than my negative expectations.
We started off the night's gaming with a quick round of Jungle Speed. Jerm and Krissi and most all of our friends love this game, so Jerm wanted to show it to Michael just as something quick and fun. We just played the one game and the spastic nature of Jerm made sure he won. Not sure if Michael liked it or not, but he seemed to.
Then we moved on to Inspectres….Ok, I'd prefer not to tear the game down and grind it in to the dirt. So, i'll try not to pick on every little thing. It wasn't that it was that bad a game, it just seemed completely flat and empty. The system is so simplistic that it might as well be non-existent or maybe just diceless. There are 4 stats: Academics, Athletics, Technology, Contacts. And you make up a Weird Talent that can be anything in the world (we each just chose a former career as I believe Jerm mentioned an example in passing, though it seemed like it could be anything that you think might be useful in the game). And that is it. Oh and there are some bank dice or something like that, but there was no reason whatsoever for us to use them. Hence my lack of memory on what they were called/used for.
I was playing a strong guy that was good with people (former plumber), Krissi was playing an average person (professional student), and Michael was also playing an average person (can't remember his career, accountant maybe). The game started with us getting a call to see some guy at the Department of Transportation. He was calling us in to investigate two people that had gone missing at one of the cities subway stations (oops…forgot to mention that this game is sort of based off the Ghost Busters with an MIB slant). For some time, that station has been having a problem with the lights going out at the same time every night 12:47am and they would stay out for a minute or so. They haven't been able to figure out the cause in the past, but it hadn't been a problem until now….This time two people went missing while the lights were out and we were supposed to find out what happened before the press got wind of it.
We headed straight over to the subway station though it was early afternoon. It was crowded and we weren't really seeing anything. I went and talked to some guy playing the guitar for change, who told me that these two weren't the first disappearances and that it had been happening for years. Krissi went and talked to the ticket booth people and also found out that the lights didn't go out at the same time every night like we had been told, but that it was whenever one particular train passed this station (which only happens once each day).
We then went to the library to look up so background info. We discovered that there had been a bad wreck involving that particular train at that particular platform and that some guy had gone missing shortly after that. Krissi was also able to discover that the platform we went to is not the original platform, that there was another one below it, and that was where the accident actually happened. She even found schematics for it that we could use to find our way down there.
So, we headed back to the subway station and found the door down the stairs. It was locked but I used Athletics to get us past it, describing the lock as completely rusted and falling apart in my hands. Below we found the old platform…and some metallic webbing with caccoons of some sort. I walked right up and broke up a cocoon and then found out from the person inside (one of the two that went missing) that a man with one leg grabbed them off the platform when the lights were out. That's when a ghostly spirit of a one legged man came down out of the darkness. He said he was protecting the people from the hungry train and was going to let them go when it was safe for them. Then Krissi used the system mechanic of the confession which takes you out of character as if you are telling the story in an interview afterwards and lets you say stuff like "It's a good thing I remembered to grab the last rights kit back at the base so that we could send this restless spirit on his way." (which is what Krissi said).
And that was it, the game didn't even last 2 hours including chargen and everything.
The main problem I had with it was that there was no sense of resistance. There was no conflict whatsoever. Each time Jerm had us roll the dice, we always succeeded and we could say whatever the hell we wanted to. I mean, from all I can tell that very first roll when I talked to the guitarist I could have said that he confessed to kidnapping the two people…Would that have ended the story right there? As far as what we saw of the rules in this playtest, yes it would have been because there is nothing that was limiting what we could and could not say. Jerm just told us to tell him what the result was.
This just seems to ask for a very disjointed story as there is no incentive for players to do anything other than push for the quickest ending possible. And whatever the GM had come up with that could have been an interesting story line can be completely derailed with each and every roll of the dice.
I guess what the game needs is a dedicated/quick-thinking GM to deal with situations like that and players that are more interested in creating an interesting story than winning a game (a concept relatively foreign in gaming, at least our gaming). In the situation of me winning that first roll and saying the guitarist confesses, a GM dedicated to a particular plotline could have that be what happens, but the guy is really just a lunatic driven insane by all the time he's spent in the subway and there is still some spirit that we have to find/defeat, or the guitarist is the spirit and he goes incorporeal a moment later to escape us cackling as he grabs another commuter and takes her with him into the station walls, or any of a number of things. See that would create some conflict as the GM is reacting to the descriptions we give of what happens, instead of him just accepting everything we tell him.
In another example, when I broke the lock on the door and said we found stairs leading down, he could have said that they ended in a pile or rubble and then we'd have to be creative to come up with another was to get to the original station. Or how about when Krissi was giving the guy the last rights…maybe the spirit didn't want to go and tried attacking us to stop her. She had only described in her confessional that she had brought the kit and that it was a good thing we had it. So, maybe it turned the spirit solid for us so that we could defeat him.
I don't know, I could come up with a million things in retrospect, but that doesn't help much since we didn't come up with them during the actual game. Actually, that's particularly a problem for me and why I don't think I ever made a good GM. I can be quite creative, yes. But it takes time for me to be creative. I'm just not good at all at doing it on the fly. Its why I choose to be a player and not a game master.
Anyway, I didn't really care for the Inspectres game. I'm not sure if I will ever be able to enjoy a game with that much of the narrative in the control of players. I remember once Jerm told me about some game where there was no GM at all and just everybody made up the narrative, but in that game I seem to remember the other plays would check and balance you. There was a mechanic that allowed for them to act as the resistance to your ideas about the flow of the game. It wasn't just getting whatever you wanted.
The way we played Inspectres it just didn't have that and the game was pretty much a failure in my eyes because of that absence.
Happy Thing:
Its Friday and the weekend is here. 'Nough said. |
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| Rambling update |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|08:46 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
I feel like writing something today, but for the life of me I can't figure out what to write. Yeah, I know I could write-up the in-character post for the tSoY game last week. I was really excited about doing that…but then I found out we won't be able to play in for at least a couple of weeks because Kelly can't make it until August. And that kind of drained my enthusiasm a little bit, I was just really looking forward to playing again this week and doing a write-up of the first session was to be an expression of that excitement.
I'm not sure what we are going to be doing. Jerm mentioned wanting to try out either doing a Jedi game using the Dogs in the Vineyard system, or trying out a new system entirely called Inspecters. Personally, I didn't care for the DitV system. I hardly remember it at all, but I just don't think I liked it, even more so than not being into the storyline.
Inspecters would be a new system to all of us which causes its own problems. I mean every time we have tried learning a new system there have been hiccups left and right. The only game that went relatively smoothly for us was tSoY. And in that case all of us had at least read over the rulebook days before hand. Even with that, we spent many ours creating characters and talking about the rules before we actually played. And if I remember correctly, the first play was just a very simple test of the system. It wasn't until the second session that we got some good game play in. With that in mind, I just don't see how trying out a new game for the first time on a weeknight after work is a good idea at all.
I'll play if he runs it (if nothing else it will be something to do instead of wasting away the evening at my house), I'm just not expecting much out of such a session. I would have preferred playing some boardgames or something until Kelly can play tSoY again. Or maybe some different game that some of would be familiar with, say Feng Shui or Paranoia. But whatever. It will be ok.
What else has been going on? Well, I've been able to talk or chat with Tanja nearly every day she's been gone. That's been rather nice. Its funny how much better I feel after being able to talk to her even if I can't see her. It sounds like she's been having a wonderful time in Europe with her folks. They were in the Tuscany region of Italy for a week at a country home they have been to several times in the past. It looked wonderful when she sent me the link to their website. Also, the pictures she's put up on picasa look amazing.
I so wish I could have gone with her. She and her family have expressed the same sentiment. However, we have actually been dating a mere two months (Monday marked the two month anniversary). And when she had been ordering her tickets we hadn't even been together a whole month. At the time, it just didn't feel right for me to even ask her about if I could join her and it seemed like she didn't feel right about asking me if I could join her. So we just left it unmentioned until it was already too late. Besides, even if I could get the time off from my job, I frankly don't think I could afford to go on the trip, not without putting most/all of it on a credit card which isn't something I'm going to do.
Anyway, she's having a blast, went out with some friends from high school last night, tonight she was going to another street festival (they must have those a lot at this time of year in Germany because that's the third or fourth one she's gone to), and has plenty of things planned for the rest of the week. Not sure how it going to work out with her working from there next week. But I'm sure it will be ok. I'm just looking forward to next Thursday when she gets back in town!!! :)
In the meantime, I've got other things going on. I'm completely reworking the flowerbed in my front yard (Maddie was saying that it made my home look like a crack house, so I finally had to break down and deal with it). Tonight, though, I'm going over to my parents' house. Honestly, I'd prefer not to, but my father has been freaking out about his cancer so I've been trying to be a good son and see him at least once a week. It cheers him up, and it's the least I can do.
Um…what else? Oh yeah, last weekend was so bad for me that I've finally broken down and decided to go see a doctor. I called the doctor Maddie had recommended to me, the same one John uses for general check-ups and such, but the number she gave me had been disconnected (they'd recently moved locations). So, it wasn't until Tuesday that I was able to call them and set up an appointment. Hopefully, she'll be able to help me. I just hate going to the doctor. I'm not sure why that is. I have no problems going to the emergency room for the many many many cuts I've gotten over the years that needed stitches. But there is just something in me that doesn't want to go for something like my migraines, or my inability to sleep, or anything other than something that needs stitches. In fact, its probably be more than a decade since I last saw a doctor for anything other than at the emergency room. Come to think of it…I think the last time I was even in an emergency room was a decade ago. I was either 21 or 22 when I nearly cut of my thumb with a sword, so that's either 9 or 10 years ago….Wow.
Yeah, I guess it is past time that I saw a doctor, particularly because I'm over 30 now…
Oh, just realized tomorrow is supposed to be another big meetup with one of my groups. I guess if we game I will be missing it. That's kind of a good thing. It would just feel weird going to a Night Life meetup without Tanja around and really I don't know how to deal with the organizer any more. Apparently, before Tanja and I started dating she had to have a talk with Tanja about me and how she was interested in me too. Later, after Tanja and I started dating, she sent me an email that…well it just felt like she was fishing to hear that Tanja and had broken up or something because I had cancelled going to a few meetups. I tried to make it clear that we were very much still together, but I'm not sure what she'd be like if I went to a meetup without Tanja being around. This is the woman broke up with her boyfriend shortly after I met her while still waiting to finalize her divorce (I think that's finally done now after something like 2 years), then she was ok with him coming to a meetup and hitting on some of the other women in the group, and then she was back with him for the next meetup, and all kinds of other complicated shit.
So, yeah, its kind of a good thing that I won't be going to that. Though I feel kind of bad that I haven't seen anybody from the groups in a while, particularly Larry who was so downcast at the last meetup with his car having been stolen. Tanja and I felt bad about not going out for drinks with him after that meetup, but we'd already planned to head back to her place and watch a movie (of course, I don't think the movie actually got watched, but that is neither here nor there). Eh…Tanja is back next week. We'll just have be sure to check out the next meetup after she's back.
Ok, I think that is everything…good enough anyway.
Happy Thing:
Would it show that I am preoccupied with something if I said "Tanja will be back next week"?
Hehe. Well too bad, because I'm just really looking forward to having her back here.
Something else to be happy about is that the Chasing the Bard podcast is almost complete. Its been wonderful and I am looking forward to the finale. I'm also looking forward to its sequel being released in print on 8/8/08 along with the new Billibub Baddings novel by Tee Morris. Pip and Tee are just wonderful authors. I'm not sure if I'll get the same sense of enjoyment out of a book as I do the podcast versions of their work, but I still want to support the both of them.
Also looking forward to Mur's book Playing for Keeps to be released on 8/25/08. That book was hilarious in podcast form, and I'm hoping to give it to people to read that might not ever listen to a podcast (too many of my friends just refuse to listen to podcasts even when both Krissi and I go on about how great they are). |
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| The Shadow of Yesterday - Session 1 |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|04:12 am] |
Well, I can’t get myself to sleep at all tonight for whatever reason. So, I might as well get around to doing the write-up of the Shadow of Yesterday game Jerm ran the other day. I think I am going to turn this into two separate posts though. One that has metagaming stuff and the other in character. I think previous write-ups may have been a bit muddled as a tried to combine the two very different things into a single story.
So, who was involved in this game, Jerm was of course running it; Krissi was playing Devi Nadren a thuggish and female version of Inigo Montoya, there was also Michael (the person who sold Jerm and Krissi’s house to them coincidentally) who was playing Bolden Hardwall, we didn’t have that much actual gameplay this first session, so I didn’t get a real strong feel for just what type of character he was going for; Kelly, a friend of Michael’s, was also there playing a smooth talk face type character named Thomas Veyp; oh and I was playing Kev Isington which ended up being similar to my last tSoY character in that he specializes in deceit and has the key of the Imposter, I plan to try playing up his connection to his family more and have also taken the key of the Guardian.
Both Michael and Kelly are new to the tSoY system. In fact, they are both relatively new to gaming. Well, I think Michael used to game years ago, but has only recently tried playing some D&D, which ended with some very bad experiences apparently. They were quick to pick up the game concepts, however. TSoY is a pretty simplistic system, but it has many subtleties to it still. And they seemed to grasped them rather well.
Still, first time chargen can take a while as you are reading through all the skills, secrets, and keys, explaining how they function in the game. It was also slowed down a bit because we only had the one copy of the rules, but that wasn’t a big deal. We were also fixing pizza and getting familiar with each other. I think it took us 1 ½ to 2 hours for all of that before we actually got to some game play.
Let’s see if I can remember my character (I had Jerm keep my sheet for me)…for the Pools, I believe I went with 2 Vigor, 5 Instinct, and 4 Reason. For the innate abilities, I believe I took React at Adept, Resist at Competent, and Endure at Unskilled. For my chosen abilities I know I picked Deceit at Adept (which I upped to Master with some of my starting advances), I think I also took Stealth, Aim, and something else…maybe Theft (I’m only saying that because that would just be so typical of me, I haven’t a clue what my third one was) at Competent. For Secrets, I took Secret of the Hidden Pocket as my freebee. I know I bought some other Secret with an advance, but for the life of my I can’t remember what it was. For my Keys, as I already mentioned I took Key of the Imposter and Key of the Guardian (bought with an advanced). I started to take the Key of Power instead, but then we realized both Michael and Kelly had also taken it. So I decided to change mine to Guardian.
As far as what other people took, there isn’t much that stuck out in my mind. There was some debate both at chargen and during gameplay about what Key would most fit Krissi’s character concept. Suggestions were Key of Vengence, Key of Mission, and Key of Vow. I think maybe she settled on Key of Mission because she has the mission of finding out who killed her father. I guess once she finds that out, she could maybe buy it off and then switch to using the Key of Vengeance to designate that she is then targeting a specific group/person. Really, its kind of just semantics, but sometimes I know Jerm and I both can get hung up on the semantics of things.
Oh yeah, Kelly also wanted to create a Secret that would let him kind of be overlooked all the time. From Jerm’s reaction/look on his face, I don’t think he got the concept right off the bat. However, I knew exactly what he was talking about, mainly because it is a character trait of a main character in some of the Steven Brust books, Kragar. Its not something he does on purpose and it actually harms him sometimes or it used to because he was a general and everybody kept overlooking him so much that when he gave commands in battle they didn’t even notice him. Yeah, that degree of the ability is a bit far fetched, but I could still see where Kelly was coming from. I almost suggested calling it the Key of Kragar just to see if he actually knew of the reference. lol
In brief, the storyline is this, we all work for the Thieves Guild in the city of Kingsport. The old Underboss (need to figure out if that’s like the Godfather for the whole city, or the region, or maybe its just level of middle management “under” the Godfather level as the name might imply) has only recently died and Malek Veyp is taking over in the role of Underboss.
The story begins with the four of us attending Underboss Nassien’s funeral as all good member’s of the guild were doing, as well as many of the elite society of the city, implying that Underbosses have a lot of connections as is easily imagined. It was a somber affair I’m sure, though the description kind of glossed over the details to speed us along to the actual story.
As we left the funeral, we were all approached by one of Malek’s chief thugs and summoned to Malek’s side with no reason specified. We were formally informed that we were working for him now and he demanded that we basically swear fealty to him. Krissi’s character made a point of holding back a little bit before uttering the words, but the rest of us just went right along with it. He then told us we were now a “crewe” and would be in charge of a particular district near the harbor, along Highwater Street. We’d be expected to collect moneys for that district and hand over the majority of it to our new boss. How we did that would be up to us, but there would certainly be a minimum amount that we would have to keep bringing in each week. Also, Malek was wanting to know about a courier by the name of Esaac Yuron (sp?) who went missing in that area.
Malek, being a busy man, didn’t give us many details, just orders. We were to meet an associate of his for further details at one of the gambling halls in our district. Bull was a monster of a man and we went right to establishing where he stood in the organizations hierarchy (metagaming with Jerm). Basically he seemed to be on our same level, so we kind of did not hit it off well with him when he wasn’t being that friendly. In fact, Krissi’s character tried to start an altercation with him. She looked to me before doing it possibly expecting me to intervene, but I was more interested in seeing where this would go and see how Michael and Kelly would handle it.
As it turned out, Kelly stepped in with smooth words and got things settled down quite well. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was still some animosity between Bull and our crew, but that is just his damn problem…lol
Anyways, he gave us some more details about the district and about the missing courier and once he left, we got right to establishing our presence in the area. We went right up to the owner of the gambling hall we were in to talk business. Kelly started out with the smooth approach, but I kind of butted in and when straight to talking straight. I’m not sure which of brought up Malek’s name first, but I know we were throwing it around pretty heavily both here and throughout the game (I’m seriously expecting that to come back in bites up in the ass as most criminals don’t care for their name being tossed around). Either way, this barkeep went right along with the program and even thanked us for bringing some protection to the area that had been without a real crew to run it for a while.
After that we decided to head over to the gambling hall that the courier was last seen at. Our reception wasn’t so great there. Again we used Malek’s name left and right. First to find out that the owner was upstairs, then again as I just walked right past two guards in the hallway outside the upstairs office, multiple times while talking to Ulesson (the Golden Drake’s owner), and I think later too when we were talking to one of the dealers.
Ulesson was being a prick when we walked into his office and wasn’t showing us the proper respect. He started out talking to us with his head still in a book. I’m not sure exactly when he did finally look up at us since Jerm didn’t really say a specific point for that, but if he had tried talking to us like that the entire time, I was going to do something more than talk with him. We established that he would be paying us the usual protection fees from now on. Also, we learned that the courier hadn’t even checked into the room that had been reserved for him the night he disappeared. Instead, he sat right down at one of the tables to gamble, got drunk off is ass, started a fight and promptly got thrown out into the gutter. Ulesson was nice enough to have one of his people point out the dealer and two other gamblers that had been at the table with Yuron.
Kelly wanted to deal with the dealer by himself, and told us to hold back for a minute. Krissi, headed over to the bouncers to talk to them, Michael just kind of hung back a little from Kelly, and I just got a drink at the bar. There was a lone gambler at the table with the dealer we wanted to talk to. So Kelly tried to sway him to leave. I believe this was our first dice roll and it didn’t go well for Kelly. He rolled a null and the gambler rolled a +1, which meant the gambler won and the dealer was now upset with Kelly for trying to run off his patrons (part of the stakes negotiation that I suggested for the conflict). We discussed letting Kelly ‘bring down the pain’ but he decided to take the loss.
That is when Michael decided to step in and try to verbally strong arm the guy to get him to leave. I think we may have gone to dice again, but Michael the result was a tie so they weren’t getting anywhere, so he waved over Krissi who hadn’t really gotten a chance to talk to the bouncers. She came in with knife drawn. We did have to go ahead and make a change to her character here though. She had originally taken dueling, but she was going for a more thuggish approach, so we switched it to knife fighting instead. I believe the result was still 3 to 1 in favor of the sailor though I may be mistaken (in fact I think I am mistaken, I believe switching her skill gave Krissi a 2, but that is still a loss), which means that she got cut by the sailor who had brought out his own knife.
By this point, I just had to step in as I figured I could get some XP out of the situation. I strolled right in to the situation and loudly declared that I was with the city guard. I easily lied my way through the encounter as everybody went ahead and gave me bonus dice since it was near the end of our gaming for the night. Jerm did give me a penalty for not having any of the accoutrements of the city guard, but that wasn’t a big deal. I sent the Sailor off out of the bar and also told Krissi to go away to keep up with my assumed identity. Then we set about questioning the dealer.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have much he could tell us. Likewise the bouncers weren’t able to tell Krissi much either. Then I decided to continue with my charade and grabbed the two gamblers Ulesson’s man had pointed out earlier. I succeed with another impersonation and dragged them into an empty room for questioning. As we all had kind of figured about by this point, they didn’t know jack shit. But I went through the motions anyway…I was rather enjoying the actual roleplaying after the almost solely combat oriented D&D game we’ve been playing on Saturdays.
I believe it was Michael that even came and knocked on the door to get me to bring the questioning to a halt. Whatever the case, we pretty much ended the session there. Which meant I was the only one who got any XP that night, but that isn’t bad for only having an hour or so of actual gameplay.
All in all, I would say it was definitely a good game session. I’m even looking forward to it more than the next session of D&D even with us leveling up in the D&D game.
Going forward I was trying to think of what kinds of activities we’d be involved in. The question I’m really wondering if is we are going to be doing most of the grunt work ourselves or if we will be able to treat it as our own territory that we rule over. What I mean by that is are we going to be able to start up illegal activities in the area and have other people operating the day to day activity for us (example would be setting up a Fence for stolen goods if there isn’t already one)? How does the organization feel about expanding one crewe’s territory (will we be able to move in on our neighbors territory some? Will the be able to encroach on ours without the Underboss stepping in?)? Also, I’d like to see my Key of Guardian coming into the storyline. I mean, it would be fairly easy to have some mooks threatening my family for some reason. Other ideas would be to have a sister who gets involved with the prostitution in the area and then have me try to pull her out. Or how about a sibling gets addicted to illicit drugs and it motivates me to try and clear our district of drugs completely? That could be interesting as it would impact the money we’ve got coming in each week and what we are able to send back to Malek.
Ok, I am too tired to do the story write-up right now, but I will do it sometime soon.
Happy Thing:
Things are going quite well with Tanja, and I am definitely looking forward to continuing talking to her while she is away and even more so looking at when she gets back from her trip at the end of the month. |
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| Tanja and me |
[Jul. 15th, 2008|12:21 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  surprised | ] |
It's surprising and maybe even a little bit scary how quickly and to what extent I have grown accustomed to having Tanja around, particularly at night. We've known each other for less than two months (well I guess it's been almost exactly two months since we first met, but it's still a week away from when it will be 2 months from what we are counting as the "official" start of our relationship). Yet we had been spending very nearly every single day together. In the three weeks prior to her leaving on her trip, I believe I only spent two nights away from her. One because I needed to take care of my kittens and do housework (no worries, I checked in on the kittens more than that, but I didn't stay the nights) and one because she had to get some stuff done and whenever we're together we end up getting distracted from getting stuff done.
It's no surprise that I haven't been sleeping well since she left. I have always had trouble sleeping (though that doesn't seem to be the case when I am with Tanja). What is surprising was what happened last night. I woke up in the middle of the night…and was actually startled to find that Tanja wasn't laying there next to me. I went so far as to get up out of bed to go look for where she might be. I made it all the way out of my bedroom before my mind finally reminded me that she's away on her trip…
I can't really remember how that made me feel. My house just felt kind of empty at the time. Sure, my kittens and I were there, but I could feel something was missing. It wasn't a sad feeling like I have had in the past when I have felt lonely for one reason or another. It was just an odd sensation where the situation just didn't feel right.
I'm sure this is a common thing with couples when one of them goes away on a trip, but it is something new to me and the fact that it has come so relatively quickly in the relationship is slightly frightening. From the very beginning the two of us have felt completely at ease with each other….that more than anything is wholely foreign to me.
All my life I have been a shy, introverted person. Never even that comfortable with my closest friends. I have felt overwhelming fear in even asking friends if they were interested in doing something, or even just calling them to see how things have been going. Often times I would end up just not asking them or not calling them. However, on those times that I did call or ask them, nothing bad ever happened. They either say sure that sounds good, or not; or would chat with me for a while on the phone or whatever; but the entire time I would be thoroughly nervous, because I just wasn't comfortable. I think most of that was because I wasn't comfortable with myself, but that is neither here nor there. Over the past couple of years I have made amazing progress to get over that shit thanks to their help, but I still feel nervous sometimes talking to my friends, and I probably still hold myself back occasionally from calling them or asking them to do stuff.
However, when it comes to Tanja, that isn't a problem at all. Hell, I called up her parents in Germany yesterday so that I could talk to her and it didn't phase me one bit. I even chatted with her mother a minute or two as she was the one to pick up the phone. I didn't get nervous, or worried about it. I just talked away and really enjoyed hearing Tanja's voice. :) |
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