Holidays!

Holidays are over. This makes me sad. I did have a LOT of fun though.

For my vacation I drove to Maine, through various states to the South. I met a bunch of friends from online, and drank a lot of beer. So a very successful trip. I ended up traveling just under 9000 km in the span of a week and a half though, so I got pretty used to my car. Definitely worth it though.

I'll be posting more info on my trip later. I need to still go through all my pictures, and collect things together. Highlights include all the microbreweries I visited, the awesome lakes I hung out at in Maine, and the Creationist Museum.

One of the interesting side effects of my trip was essentially a huge upheaval to my sleep schedule. I think it was good though. While on the road I was getting bored fast, as driving is boring, so I was stopping for more breaks. This made my sleep schedule better for most of the driving legs. But I also traveled 2 time zones, so that messed with my sleep schedule... End result was a lot of craziness. It broke all my routines, which has opened me up to re-establish some better ones. Thus, over the next week or two, I'll be changing my sleep times. Plans are to wak3 up at 6am, swim, then head to work. Naps at Noon before eating lunch, and 5pm ish, before driving home. This will let me skip a lot of the traffic as well, which was something I liked back when my old routine was similar. I do have a family reunion this weekend, which may challenge my re-adjustment.

But I need to get back to work. I have quite a few things I need to finish up to catch up from my holiday. Hopefully I can make a post later this week, or early next with more trip details.

Excitement

I'm am getting very excited.
I am laying down more solid plans for my road trip to Maine. People are getting confirmed, and making orders for things from Canada. It will be a great time to actually meet some of these good friends. Plus, two weeks off work is always a good thing. At the rate things are going too, I'm going to need that holiday.

This week is hectic. My mothers birthday was Tuesday, and my father is having a big retirement party tonight. My sisters are all in town now, so I've been doing family stuff a lot this week, and have more planned. It should all be fun, but sheesh. I'll get to unwind and recover a little over the weekend, then rehearsals and Jazz festival starts picking up. I have to help plan / prepare for our annual Canada Day party (that anyone who is reading this is invited to). I think we're doing it Sunday afternoon / evening. Wait... hmm... I think I'm supposed to be playing on the free stage... I guess I'll miss a bit of my own party. Then it's Jazz festival week, which I think I'll be taking low key this year. Less concerts, save money for my trip to Maine. But as Jazz festival wraps up, I'll be hitting the road. So for the next about 4 weeks, I guess I don't really have much free time in evenings.

And all that may be made more difficult if I hear back from any of the places I sent my resume to. Now that I finished school, I applied to a couple companies I'd like to work for. Some farther places, like LA, and Vancouver. We'll see if I hear anything back. There is a local place or two I applied to that I think would help me learn more than my current job, and have better potential for promotions and such. It's all in the waiting stages now though, as I have to see if any of these companies are interested in me. I don't like the waiting stage. I talked to some people at the local places though, and I should have a good shot at getting in. It's a bit longer of a wait right now though, as the main hiring person is on holidays...

I somehow always manage to keep my life very busy.

Well

Summer apparently isn't here yet. What the heck. It's cold, miserable, and snowing in places. This is stupid. However, it has the nice side effect of my allergies being very minimal this year. It's been too cold for the pollens to spread. That is a nice thing.

So this weekend, my house had a big D&D session. It was quite a bit of fun. They finished up the Keep, and the last fight was very entertaining. We had people falling unconscious, some big hits, and it was very close. They did win though. On the way home, they got attacked by some Bandits though, and as I was setting it up, a friend stopped in unexpectedly. It worked out extremely well. The character builder had a example character that was about the right level, so I just printed him off a sheet, and setup the encounter as he was being attacked by the bandits, as the party came up to him. I think he had fun. But as the fight was wrapping up, something quite unexpected happened. The Rogue in the party decided to try to kill the newcomer, to steal his stuff. Everyone else in the party was against this. The rogue surprised him, and tried to use his daily power. He missed. He quickly started apologizing, and back pedaling. The Dwarf counterattacked, using his daily. He also missed, so it looked like it would be a stand still. Then I explained Action Points, and what the word "reliable" meant on his daily power. He got very excited, and used his action point to try to hit the rogue again with his daily. Critical Hit.

The attack had a max damage of a lot. The rogue is not known for his hit point pool. The rogue had also taken a couple hits in the fight, and wasn't full. He dropped to -20 or so, putting him fully dead, not just unconscious. It was awesome. They hauled his body back to town, and were very shocked to see how much it would cost to bring him back from the dead. There was a lot of negotiations going on at the table about if it was worth it. They hunted for black market temples that could put a curse on him as they brought him back too, so they could override his actions to try to prevent him from screwing up that big again. I thought it was a good idea, but didn't want to take that control away form the rogue, so didn't let it happen. He is in a fair bit of debt to everyone though, and it seems like they will be making him work if off for awhile. Very entertaining round. I have to prep some stuff tonight and tomorrow for the game this week though, as now that they finished that module, I don't know where I'll send them next. I have some ideas.

I said I'd let them adjust characters after the dungeon, as now they have some D&D experience in fourth edition, and can fix some of the things they didn't understand fully. They are jumping in deep though. One guy switched every single power and feat. One guy is debating just rolling a brand new character, of a different race and class. Next session will be pretty interesting.

So I might be having some big life changes happening soon. We'll see how quickly I hear back from some of my early week work here. I'll keep you updated.

It's been one week!

Since I last posted. There goes my good record.

So I'm participating in a triathlon team. I'm doing the swimming leg. I have to swim 500m as fast as possible. It's currently not very fast... But as a result, I've bee hitting the pool quite regularly. I've been enjoying it. I feel like I'm getting in better shape, and there is a cute lifeguard there in the mornings. =) It's quite refreshing to wake up and swim though. Hopefully I can make it through the triathlon swim. An interesting side effect is I'm sleeping better now. Maybe it's just the addition of another routine thing, maybe it's just the physical activity. I'm getting back to a good core sleep. I'm currently exhausted by my afternoon nap, I think I need to move it a little earlier, as it's pretty late currently. So I'll be making those tweaks in the next week. It's nice to have my polyphasic sleep back on a good track again.

So due to weather, I still haven't gotten any of my garden in the dirt yet. I did till the ground, but we are still getting frost warnings every night... Maybe I can actually plant this weekend. It's supposed to be nicer. I want my plants to get going! Quicker they start the quicker I can eat them.

So on the weekend, I was vacuuming the lawn. Yes, you heard me correctly. I had to borrow a shop-vac, and vacuumed the lawn. It's the first I've ever heard of anyone doing it. The story is an interesting one. Friday after work, I turned a bunch of dirt, and did a bit of weeding, and found a hole in our hose. The key thing from Friday was the backyard was great. Then, Saturday morning, I look out the back window, and see our patio table overturned. It had a glass top. Our backyard now had a section that was just covered with broken glass. Awesome. I was planning to mow the lawn that morning. Alas, I had to clean the glass up first. So I tried to pick up some of the biggest chunks, but pretty much all of it was crumbling further when I went to pick it up. It was a mess. So I tried sweeping it up, and raking it up, and collecting it in a dustpan. Those techniques did ok, but there was still a lot of glass it was missing. Only thing I could think of to try was vacuuming. Which, for the record, worked great! I am intending to spread some dirt in the area too, after mowing, just to make sure no small sharp edges are left.

So we were trying to figure out how our patio table decided to smash itself on our lawn. All I could figure was a) The Wind, and b) Young Hooligans. I thought the wind was pretty unlikely, as nothing else in the backyard looked moved, and the neighbours stuff was all fine, so I was forced to blame young hooligans. Around supper time, I answered the door, and it was our neighbour. He apologized for breaking our table, and I was confused. Did he jump the fence and smash it? He continued to explain. Apparently his dogs, in the morning, decided to break through the fence, and run around our yard. They ran into our table, knocking it over, and making a huge mess. (The dogs were fine). It did however leave me with a bit of an uneasy feeling. If those dogs can trash a patio table, they could easily take out roomies. (As the heaviest of the roomies, I suspect I'd have the best chance at survival). Our neighbour explained that he has now lined the fence with chicken wire, so they will have to break more than just weak boards to do it again, and he is intending to buy us a new table, which is nice. I'm glad he was honest, but at the same time, frustrated at those dogs. They bark all the time, and now they are damaging our property too? Sheesh.

I'll let you know my thoughts on the patio table our neighbour picks to replace it. I might just ask him to pick us up like a home depot gift card or something for the value of it, then we can pick it ourselves.

D&D Adventure Update!

So, my crew is having a blast.

They all took to D&D better than I even expected. Soeric started as the only one with a big backstory, and that hasn't changed, but Pamp, the rogue, has sure started to go crazy. As a rogue, he doesn't really get anything great on his minor action yet, so he constantly is trying to surprise people, scare people, and try crazy things. I've decided that I'll let him try to do pretty much anything he wants on his minor, as long as he can explain it to me. Then I'll determine what skill he has to check, and what the effect will be. I also don't let him do the same thing twice. So we have a little halfling rogue, running around trying to pants people, juggle, attempting comedic one lines, all sorts of interesting things to try to confuse the enemy. It's very entertaining.

The players just can't seem to have enough either. We were scheduled to play tonight (Thursday) after playing last Thursday, but on Sunday, Soeric suggested we play on Tuesday in addition too, and everyone was really into it. They also just got level 2 on Tuesday, and I caught my roomies spending easily a couple hours last night reading books, discussing feats, and strategies they want to try. They seem to be really enjoying it.

I started them in the dungeon delve book, just doing the first dungeon to see how they took to D&D. It quickly became apparent that they wanted a bigger story to go on. So I took the Keep of the Shadowfell adventure (which is free from Wizard's as a pdf) and basically replaced the first stretch of the adventure with the first dungeon delve. I swapped the young dragon at the end of the delve with Irontooth, and it worked out perfectly. So now I have them about to enter the keep, which I'm pretty excited for.

Should be a fun evening.

New Toy!

SO I picked up an Asus Eee PC 1000HE yesterday. I haven't been able to play with it as much as I want to. So far though, I'm reasonably impressed. The battery life does seem to be pretty good on it. I'm trying to condition the battery today, with full charge to full discharge usage, so I'll actually get some more real world-ish numbers. I do like seeing 30% battery left, 2:40 minutes. I'm just finishing my Ubuntu Netbook remix download, so tonight I'll likely be setting it up to dual boot, assuming I can find time somewhere between the Carbon Dating Service show, and 1 vs 100 Beta on Xbox live.

I came with some useful apps I wasn't expecting. Largely Skype. I've been working to install a couple other important apps, like Firefox, Media Player Classic, and so forth. I think I'll end up using this little thing more than I was planning. I still need to try watching some higher def content on it, to see how it handles it. I'm going to install and try some older 3d games on it too. Might run not too bad. I'm pretty excited to use this on a big road trip, like my Maine one I'm planning. Then on rest stops I can watch TV, play games, do whatever.

I need a good wifi coverage map for the North Eastern States... or to find a decent WEP cracker for a netbook...

Holy Spring Cleaning!

So I went on a cleaning binge. It was pretty satisfactory. I rearranged all the furniture in my room, and now have space to keep some of my music stuff up there. I'm hoping that will motivate me to practice more, as I really should. It also is now laid out to force me to keep it cleaner as well. Assuming I can keep up the habits I'm trying to form. I've decided I want to change some aspects of my life, and the organization / cleanliness of my room is one of them. It ties into others as well, as now I have enough floor space to do sit ups, and push ups, and potentially get somewhat back into shape.

My next goal, after the completion of my room cleaning, is to clean and reorganize our basement. It's not very great right now, and organizing it would open up a fair bit of space. We are planning to build a bigger gaming table too, for board games, and D&D, and it would likely go in the basement. It's too warm in the summer to not hang out in the basement. I essentially need to get permission from my roomies to junk a lot of stuff, then just have at 'er. I also had to wait until after today, as our garbage container was pretty full from my room cleaning.

All that said, I'm open to suggestions on a design for a good gaming table. We want shelves or drawers, somewhat light-weight, maybe modular? It would be great if we could put a cover on it too, to "pause" board games/D&D sessions. It might be quite the undertaking...