Thursday, November 23, 2006

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for the fact that I finally got some time today to organize my furniture and books. Things are looking pretty good in my little office. I'll have to do some reorganizing on the books now that a lot of them are on shelves, but that should be easy enough.

While I've been working, SciFi Channel has been rerunning all of their series eureka, and I have to say, it's pretty cool. I doubt I'll watch it with any regularity, but that's simply because I'm watching too many shows now anyway. If you happen to see that it's on, check it out.

I week from tomorrow is Julia's and my one year anniversary. Well, it's the anniversary of our first date, which really was the day we started dating. I'm thankful for her.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I Wish

Things have been busy lately. I think I'm tired of saying that, but really, it's true. Julia and I moved in over a week ago, but we still have many boxes that need unpacking -- especially all of my books which I just haven't had time to work on at all. Plus we've been running back and forth to our old places and getting things cleaned up and ready for the final checkout -- and we're trying to rent her place, so we've been back and forth to meet with potential renters. Hopefully we'll get that wrapped up soon.

The house is shaping up, mostly due to Julia's hard work. She's been very busy unpacking and getting things in order upstairs and in her studio. I picked up a cool table from Shana's and found the right screws to put it together (24 of 'em just to attach the legs!). I also put together the bed frame and found some "cups" to protect the floors from the bed's casters. All of this has added up to us clearing out a lot of space for us to actually live in, which is nice. I'll get some photos taken as soon as things are a bit more organized. Maybe in three years, say.

For those of you who aren't in the Seattle area, damn, it's been rainy here lately. It's been about as rainy as people think it is in Seattle, which is saying something. Personally, I don't mind it too much, but it's been pretty annoying because it's been cold, too, and cold rain sucks.

Work is going well. I'll be flying around the country in the next week or two in order to meet with a few of the larger distributors and show off our first game. It will be great to see many of them again, but I wish I could spend a little more time in Madison when I'm there. I think I'll only manage a day there -- maybe a night and a day if I come in the night before and stay over for meetings the next morning.

I constantly marvel at how easy it is to communicate now that we all have email, various chat programs, and Skype up and running. And I keep thinking about how cool it would be to run a roleplaying game over Skype with some other e-tools on my desktop. I have no clue when I'd find the time to do such a thing, but the idea is percolating in my head. I'd definitely be in if Phil said he wanted to run a D&D game for a few of us.

Speaking of games, Seth and I are starting a testrun of some of the things we've been working on for the book we're writing together for another publisher. We'll discuss characters and such next Tuesday and hopefully get started on the campaign that night...even if it's just a brief encounter. In addition, I've been talking to people about starting a Sunday night game that I'd run. The holidays are playing havoc on the scheduling, but I'm sure it'll come together shortly.

Okay, more soon.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Done and Not Quite Done

We're all moved!

We had a crew of 8-12 people over the course of seven hours on Saturday and we managed to get everything moved except for some cleaning supplies and straggling belongings that will fit into our cars. Wow, it was a colossal move, especially all of my comics, books, and games. I'm a moron for having all that crap.

Julia's done a great job getting the kitchen organized and we've both spent time in the living room getting everything thing in place, but the rest of the house still needs work. The nice thing is that we're here and so is everything else, so we can unpack and organize, then take breaks whenever we want.

Cable's hooked up, so we can entertain ourselves and I have access to the 'net again, so I can get some work done for work between bouts of getting work done around the house.

I really need to lower this desk. It's at an uncomfortable height for typing.

In other news; it was interesting to hear that the company that makes Eve Online has purchased White Wolf. It will be interesting to see how an electronic game company deals with the comparatively small profits that come from a role-playing game company. Of course, the acquisition may have just been for the the intellectual properties, which would make great online games.

Okay, time to work some more.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Wow, I'm Ready

I have never been more ready to move. Everything that's not cleaning related is boxed up and ready to go. I'm so amazed that I actually got it all done. Really amazed.

I have a lot of stuff, by the way.

Okay, I'll be offline for a few days, but I'll be back as soon as Julia and I are settled into the new house.

Hmm, this is my last post sitting in this place after five years. Weird, but pretty exciting.

Labels: ,

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Closed!

Julia just told me that our house has closed, so we should be getting the keys shortly. Woohoo!

We went yesterday and took care of signing all sorts of papers with the escrow company. Our real estate agent even showed up to make sure everything went through correctly. It did. Julia mentioned later that sometimes the information on the forms is incorrect and you have to wait while it's sent to the bank, corrected, and sent back, which can take hours. I'm glad ours was correct.

Today and tomorrow I have some work that I absolutely have to get done, but I'll be spending a fair amount of time preparing for the move, too. I still have some things to box up, especially in the kitchen. I'm sure I'll be sick of it soon, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about the move. Probably becasue I managed to wrangle about a dozen or so people into helping us out. That should make things go pretty easily for us and we might get done pretty early in the day because of it.

As for the rest of this week; I played poker on Monday with Chott and a few other regulars. I did poorly, then I did really well, then I did poorly, then I did okay, so I ended up losing 20 bucks. I was sad. I was particularly sad twice during the night; once when my full-house was busted by the higher full-house (I had Jacks full of Queens, she had Queens full of Jacks), and the other time when I had pocket Kings, two Aces came on the flop, which made my Kings pretty good because the chances that the other guy has an Ace in hand is pretty low, but he did and I lost.

Tuesday I stopped by the new WizKids' offices. They look like they'll work alright. They feel a lot like the WotC offices to me, but the new desks are much larger than their old ones and the walls of the cubes are higher, so the added privacy should be nice. I also managed to score two office chairs from the old WizKids office which I'm really happy about. My current office chair is a leftover from my days at Capital City, which closed 10 years ago, so it was time for an update. Plus, Julia gets a chair, too!

WizKids decided they didn't like all of us ex-employees coming in to game there, so we have to find a new place to play. That night Seth was nice enough to make room for us. We'll have to figure out a long-term plan, though. Who knows, maybe once I'm settled in at the house, I can host. That'd be cool.

The elections were interesting to watch. I'm glad things went the way they did. Checks and balances that work are definitely a good thing.

Okay, time to do some packing. More soon...maybe from the new place. Cable will be hooked up on Monday, so I won't be offline for long.

Labels: , , ,

Friday, November 03, 2006

On the Record

I just wanted to go on the record about a few things.

First; Jason (see link at right) is awesome. He's not only going to help Julia and I move next weekend, but he's agreed to come over tomorrow afternoon with his truck and help me take some things over to Goodwill. How cool is that?

I have furniture and accessories that I've been using since my freshman year of college. Now that I'm moving again, I decided it was time to do away with some of the old crap as well as things that Julia and I think we won't use at the new house for whatever reason. It'll be great to get rid of it because it means we don't have to move it. That'll be easier on everyone -- especially considering how many boxes of books I have.

Second; Skype is awesome. If you're not familiar with it, Skype is a program that allows you to talk over the Internet using your computer. It's a free download (but you can pay to get a Skype phone number and voicemail) and then you just need a mic and earpiece. I found one at Comp USA for about $15, so now I can talk "for free" over the net. Oh, sure, I spent over a thousand for my computer and $65 a month for my cable Internet connection, but I still consider it free. Especially when compared to using too many minutes on my cell phone. Crikey! We used Skype today to have a company-wide meeting, which was amazing considering we're in four different cities.

Finally; while going through my things, I found some old copies of Campaign Magazine. I paged through them and I'd forgotten all the stuff I'd written for it over the course of its life. I read through some of it and really enjoyed what I'd written. I particularly liked the Devil's Playground setting for d20 Modern. I don't know how it is for others, but I'm rarely happy with anything I write when I finish it, but if I come back to it later, I usually find that I enjoy it a lot. Now, I just wish I could find the original files for those articles. It appears I don't have electronic copies of them anywhere, which is kind of a bummer.

More later.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Longest Journey...

The big move have started. Julia and I spent most of last night boxing up all my books. I was going to say "books and other stuff", but that would have been a lie; it was pretty much all books -- whether they were novels, games, or comics. It took quite a while, but it went well and almost all of them are packed away. I also have four boxes of books, games, and CDs to sell before the move. I'm going to do that soon so I can get the boxes back, I need them.

Jason's agreed to help me take some things to Goodwill this weekend. I have dishes, an old desk, a coat rack, a DVD rack, a CD rack, some bed frames, an office chair, two TV stands, and more to get rid of. By the way, if any of you locals are interested in any of that stuff, let me know. Some of it's actually in good shape and stuff useful.

I emailed to a bunch of people to ask for help moving and I have a small group who'll be there to help. I'm hoping we can get enough people to really make the whole experience pretty painless, so I'll keep beating the drum.

The nice thing about moving in is that we can pull the truck into the driveway and unload most of the heavy stuff into the basement through the garage door. That's going to be very, very handy.

Thanks to everyone for the nice comments about the house. I'm really excited about it and it's good to hear you all like it!

All of the CDs I'm selling had only a handful of songs that I really wanted, so I put them into iTunes yesterday. My iPod is dangerously close to being overwhelmed, but selling those CDs means fewer to move, which is good. In the course of downloading the songs I found out that Adrian Belew is performing at the Triple Door on November 14th. I'd like to see him, but I doubt I will; concerts just don't do it for me. I also found out that Lindey Buckingham released a new CD last month, so I'm going to have to go pick that up. In case you don't know, he's one of the members of Fleetwood Mac. Personally, I prefer his solo work. He's a great guitarist and very inventive.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of writing on my freelance project. I've finally finished up all the characters and have moved onto the text of the book. It feels like I have a lot left to do, but then I look at it and realize that it's really not that much. I'm having a good time with it, though, so that's good.

Happy halloween, everybody! Talk to you soon.

Labels: , , ,