Mish Mash

The new company is still not up and running. I've been a paid employee since sometime in September, but we haven't locked down our financing package just yet, which is making moving forward on production, design, and (now) salary, difficult. We have some very good leads, but nothing that's resulted in more money coming our way. It will be "interesting" to see how the next couple of weeks goes. Especially if I don't receive a paycheck at the start of next month.

Due to the unknown nature of the funding, I'm in the midst of a job search, just in case. Like everyone, I have expenses that I have to cover every month, so being without a paycheck will prove to be tricky after a very short time. I have some freelancing money coming in soon, though, so that will help -- but I was really hoping that could go towards a new TV for my office as well as to pay off some of the mortgage and build up a little savings cushion. Anyway, I know something will turn up soon.

Valentine's day was yesterday. It was fun. We didn't do gifts for each other, but I surprised Julia with a card and we ended up going to see a movie (Volver) and having dinner with her parents, which was awfully nice. Plus, they paid, so that made it even nicer. As an extra added bonus, one of the previews was for Children of Men, which I've wanted to see for a while -- and after seeing the preview, Julia was interested, too. So I'm sure we'll see it soon. The only downside to the day was that I had a really bad headache. The diet I'm on for some reason (blood sugar? sugar withdrawal? I dunno.) often gives me an incredibly painful headache within the first three days of starting it every time (its an 11 days on, three days off sort of thing, so I restart it every two weeks). A couple of times it hasn't been bad at all, but last night's was particularly painful and exhausting. Dinner helped. So did a night of sleep, so I'm much better now. Overall, I'm okay with a bad headache every couple of weeks. I've dropped about 25 pounds since starting, so it's worth it.

Later today I have to go help move some furniture out of Julia's grandad's place. Some of it is coming here and other pieces are going to her brother's and parent's places. My elbow still doesn't feel quite right, so it'll probably be pretty sore for the next few days. I really wish I had some kind of medical coverage.

Despite a couple of very challenging fights in my D&D game (I almost wiped out the entire party), everyone seems to be enjoying how things are going. They're in the midst of clearing out a keep for their patron, and so far they've been doing that for two sessions with probably one more to go. What surprises me is how long it seems to be taking. I don't think the pacing is off, but I don't think that I or the players have the patience for multi-sessions "dungeons" anymore. Maybe that's an effect of the shortening of our attention spans, but really I think it's because we're all more interested in seeing the story progress, so we can all see what sort of interesting things are going on. The positive side of this are 1) I know this now, and 2) they characters are now 3rd level, so I (probably) can't kill them in one shot anymore.

A similar, but very different, thing is going on in the Warhammer game. Thankfully, they're both a lot of fun. And next week Wilhelm will be running Spirit of the Century and we're taking a two-week break from D&D because people are unavailable. It'll be nice to have a break from running and prepare for future adventures.

More soon.