Too Many People...

I had a stream of people coming by last night... ok well three, and one was Maggie coming home. so it wasn't really a stream but I was looking forward to playing some WoW and didn't get on until 10:30pm. I got to play for a little bit before Helen came home and then had to pay bills and take care of things, and then I went back to playing... and then it was bed time. No time for relaxing...

I had fun though, in a fit of inspiration (In the Alterac Valley battleground) a bunch of people were grouping up to jump the boss of our group (the Horde), so I ran into them and mass feared them. They scattered everywhere and all of the bosses in the room began attacking them as they were running uncontrollably. It made the normal chaos of a battleground even more chaotic.

What I'm really interested in getting though is the DoomGuard. It's a demon you can summon that automatically just begins running around and killing people. Hehehe, I want to summon it in the bank area of a major city and watch the chaos that ensues!

On another note, Helen and I are taking motorcycle lessons this weekend. With the Van down we're looking at it as a we to get around without having to depend on cars. I hope this turns out better than my last miserable experience in taking lessons. Gotta get my jacket cleaned...

Surreal

This weekend has been kinda surreal. Friday night I stayed up way late playing WoW (alterac valley honor weekend.) Got up early Saturday morning and watched the War series by Ken Burns. We had watched teh first episode already but skipped the others until Sat Morning. Watching three in a row was something else. I tried to play more Wow but was too tired and went to sleep for a while. I got up and Helen and I had a nice candle-lit dinner outside where we cooked skewers over our little fire-pit. It was a very nice night and we both had a great time.

Sunday we had breakfast with Eve and saw the movie "Resident Evil: Extinction" It was decent, not great but decent. If you liked the first one, this one is better. More zombies and a lot more ass kicking. I liked the new white queen, I want my computer to do that.
Hint the computer is the little girl in the white dress.

I spent most of the afternoon working or trying to work. It was difficult to stay focused.

I woke up this morning having a bad dream. I dreamt that I was getting a tatoo of some dolphins playing in the surf under the setting sun. The problem was the guy giving me the tattoo was using an old razor blade dipped in ink to do it and his girl friend was helping and she just had a hunk of metal dipped ink that she was scraping my skin with. It was disturbing, so I'm up early on a rainy Monday morning thinking of the week ahead, (Helen has her surgery) and the work I need to do and feeling a slight twinging in my shoulder.

Playing WoW for two years....

I was reading over a site that tracked characters in World of Warcraft... My oldest character was first seen on July 5, 2005. Which means I've been playing for over 2 years now, or just that I've been screwing around for a really long time.

Link to the Record

Me at work...

Sunny Thursday Morning...

The rains have mostly gone, but the ground is very soggy in places. I worry about the back of the house where the AC drain comes out. That area is extremely wet with standing water in low places.

Pooks & I went out to a trivia night thing with a bunch of ppl from work. We answered questions and ate a ton of wings. I was pretty drained from the day though so by the end of it I was ready to take off. We had a good time though.

I set up a feedburner feed for my warcraft journal. It seems like a cool thing, we'll see how well it works and if it generates any traffic. I want to keep up my writing on that blog too, I enjoy writing the mini-histories of my characters in WoW. The feeds allow a central location for people to "subscribe" to the updates to the journal. It will be cool to see how and if it works...

Rainy Monday Morning...

After a long relaxing weekend it's kinda tough to be back at work, but it's not that bad. I feel more relaxed than I have in a while about work, I've been making some decisions about that. More on that later.

I had a good time Sat. night playing WoW with Helen and Mark. We all got together with some low level characters and went around doing various quests. It was fun even when we all died.

I finished shelving all of the books we had in our new "library". I really think we need another chair in there though. It was enough work though, just getting all 12 volumes of the Interpreters Bible and the 10 Volumes of the Myers Expository on the New Testament (yes 10 very heavy books on just the New Testament!). So I don't feel to bad about trying to arrange furniture after that.

A good Evening

I got home from work early yesterday. Helen and Patti were there working on their things, so I went ahead and zoned out playing warcraft and began working on some rendering things. Maggie got home and the girls began working on making chinese dumplings, and then Marlon (a kid from our neighborhood who I pay to mow the lawn) came over bringing homework he needed help on. So we had all five of us sitting around the table, the girls working together in like and assembly line to make dumplings and me helping Marlon with his algebra. It was fun and exhausting all at the same time. We stayed like that for a while moving through dinner and then Maggie working on her homework too. The girls eventually went off to wal-mart and Marlon and I finished up.

I was able to get to re-stringing my guitar after that. It was fun and a little stressful because I was worried about breaking the new string too. After a lot of tuning I finally got it right (and figured out more about the little electric tuner I borrowed from Maggie (I was having trouble reading the screen)) and was playing again. It's cool. I really like the new string I can't tell if it's just expectation or there really is a difference, but the new string sounds "nicer" than the old one. Maybe b/c it's not just the cheap string that came with the guitar but a really nice one. I had fun with it once I got it together and it gave me a cool sense of accomplishment. It's old hat to any long time guitar player, but this is the first time I'd ever had to replace a string. It gave me a cool sense of having moved ahead of where I was.

I finished up the night with practice at the kitchen table with Maggie slogging through American History. I don't know how history books manage to make history boring, but they do. I stayed up a little late to play some more warcraft and help a guy get a special sword he wanted. Fun and a little mindless.

Online gaming and RL...

So bleh Patti's having problems again...

Bleh.

In other news, a couple of cool studies, done for IBM, about leadership in online games... http://www.seriosity.com/downloads/GIO_PDF_web.pdf (short Version) and http://www.seriosity.com/downloads/Leadership_In_Games_Seriosity_and_IBM.pdf (Long Version). They are both good reads if you are interested in the subject matter.

I've had fun working on the "blog" of several of the characters from World of Warcraft. It should be pretty cool and nicely in line with something I enjoy anyway. Fiendhammer's Journal...

I'm starting work on a couple of my other sites as well. Trying to make them into something that generates a little bit of revenue. We'll see how things go. So far I've got two customers for my simple hosting setup.

Waiting...

The server my home area is on (where I do my computer work) is getting rebooted and some new hardware put in so I'm waiting...

That was so last week, so I'm actually finishing this blog post today...

So Pooks' is getting job options from clients, I'm still working on my stuff, and I'm back to playing WoW like a mad man. Part of that is that I've made two characters and I had been using them both for seperate professions ( mining& blacksmithing for one and enchanting and tailoring for the other...) hmmm might need another blog for me to just talk about WoW lol.

Anyway I made some WoW changes that are really taking up time.

I have been spending time building scenes for my 3D renders. That takes time in setting things up. The are like lego's that never quite snap together just right. It makes it time consuming but hopefully having it done will mean I don't have to do it again. It's also failry easy to work with scenes instead of figures b/c scenes have much lower polygon counts and so are easier for the computer to handle and so easier for me to put together quickly.

I've been thinking about taking up guitar again, but doing that will mean I have less time for my other activities. Pooks and I joke that I get a new "hobby" every week and stick with it for a few days before jumping to the next one. Even today I caught myself thinking that I could make an illustrated Book of Hours, before saying "No" to myself. It's annoying sometimes... It makes me feel un-focused.

With the renderings I have a slightly different problem in that I'm not quite sure what to say. So It's hard to make a comic book when I have no story. I can think of situations just fine, but an overall combining "story-arc" has been much harder to think of. I'm also just not sure of how far to go with it or what I want to happen to the characters.

... to jump back a little to being un-focused (except seemingly about WoW) I think part of it is that I need a little more 'life' in my life. I just do work and home. I tutor physics on the side, but I am seeing that I need a little more. It used to be church for me, but since I haven't been recently, that's left a hole I need to fill in a more positive way. Probably with a new hobby ;-)

New Year, New games, new fog covering the city.

Still playing WoW. I got a riding wolf now, I have made one payment on my house in Animal Crossing Wide World and I have gotten my friend code for it too!

Getting the riding wolf was a long expensive procedure where I had to grind away at getting stuff to sell and selling it and doing it over and over again. 87 Gold for a wolf. It was a lot of work. I'll post a screen shot later on.

Maggie has outpaced me in Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing is a video game for the Nintendo DS that places you in a new town paying off a mortgage to a raccoon. Stupid Raccoons. So fishing, collecting fruit, collecting shells and fossils and running errands for other residents allows you to get "bells" (the money of Animal Crossing) so you can pay off your mortgage and also get things to improve your house. It's a very popular game and a lot of fun just exploring a little world. The real fun started when me and Maggie linked our DS's and went to each other's towns. I felt bad because my house looked bad, peaches all over the floor and nothing setup nicely. So I spent some time last night cleaning my virtual house and planting flowers around it. Hmmm.... so now I'm doing this in the virtual and real worlds.

I spent my day off on Tuesday cleaning the front garden. Somehow I like gardening. I weeded the flower beds. Whoever was here before us simply mulched over a rock bed so I was digging through rocks as well. I dead-headed the flowers and edged around the beds. I think I want to get a mower soon so I can get the grass cut. I think that some step stones would look good in the front as well and I want to do a stone border around all the flower beds.

By the time I got done I was really sore, but it felt good to be working outside. While I like working with computers, working outside is cool b/c I can always see the progress I have made. I was sweating and the sun was burning my skin, but it was good. I spent time praying and thinking while pulling up the weeds. It was great.

I'm back at work today and a thick blanket of fog was covering the city, it's pretty much lifted now though.

Back again for the first time!

WooT!

Greatings to all my readers (all 4 of you)!

It's been an active time since I last wrote something. I married Pooks on Nov. 4th, I'm closing on a new house, I am learning to live with two new people in my life and I got my warlock to level 45 in WoW.

Me & Pooks:
That's the only picture I've got that I really care about.

So we're happily married going through the growing pains of wrestling with learning to live and be with each other. It's fun being with her even through the rough times.

We're trying to get things rolling on a business doing things online. I can't say we're more focused than that b/c we're not. Not the best business plan to start off with, but it's what we've got for now.

I haven't been getting much sleep recently. Between Maggie's school work and my own trying to clean and get things given away or packed I've been up past midnight twice this week. A big spaghetti lunch and now it's catching up with me. I'm so ready to just curl up and sleep.

In the meantime though, I will keep plugging away at work and fixing up the websites we've got for work stuff.