Voted!

Over the weekend I received my "absentee" voting ballot, filled it out, and dropped it off at a ballot dropbox at the Crossroads Mall after gaming on Tuesday night.

As usual, I was happy to vote. I find I actually get pretty jazzed about actually voting, even if the whole political circus exhausts me more than a little. Also as usual, I voted for the democratic presidential candidate. I'm probably the only member of my family to do that, but they might surprise me.

It's funny because this election I thought I might end up voting for McCain. Early in the process I was pretty sure Clinton was going to cinch the democratic nomination and there was no way I was voting for her. I hate that there have been two Bush's in the office and I would equally hate having two Clinton's. I absolutely despise the establishment of dynasties in the office of the president. No family or families should be that closely tied to the office.

Anyway, when it looks like Clinton was going to make it, I thought, "Just let McCain make it for the Republicans and I'll vote for him." Of course that was back before he started strongly catering to the portion of the Right that turns me off. Luckily, Obama managed to secure the democratic nomination and I was ecstatic. Okay, maybe ecstatic is a bit strong, but I was really happy because he's who I wanted to vote for from the beginning.

In other news; Julia's brother-in-law was able to fix her car, so we picked that up Wednesday night. I also spent part of the evening filling out a test for a job. It's for a position I'm very interested in and I plan to finish the test over the weekend. It's due Monday morning and I'll easily make the deadline. I'll keep you updated on how that goes.

I still have plenty of boxes to move upstairs, so I'll be spending most of tonight dealing with that. I think there's enough space in the game room to accommodate most of it, but we'll see.

This weekend I have to go to my monthly game on Saturday, which means no gaming Sunday. And that means Sunday I'll be finishing that design test!

More soon.

The Garage, Part II

Following up on one of my last posts; it turns out the car may not be as hard to fix as we first thought. So, Julia had it towed to her brother-in-laws to have him take a look at it. They're going to put some time in and see if they can fix it -- probably for less than half of what we'd thought it would cost. And that makes the fix worthwhile for us. We're hoping to have the car back on Wednesday or Thursday, but we'll see.

Julia was busy with jewelry all weekend, so I got motivated and cleaned up the other half of the garage. Now everything that is going somewhere in the house is actually in the house. Sure, it's all in boxes waiting to go upstairs, but at least it's not in the garage anymore. As for the garage, it's now filled with a couple of tables we're goint to get rid of, all the stuff I have to sell on ebay (as soon as I find the postal scale), lots of boxes for shipping, and all my HeroClix that I'm not selling. Really, it's starting to look pretty good out there and I'm really happy with the progress I made this weekend.

Sunday (Hmm, maybe it was Saturday. I forget.) our TV decided it didn't want to work anymore. I did some snooping and it seems the projection lamp burned out, so now I have to replace that. I've already ripped the front off the TV and removed the old one, so replacing it will be easy. It's really just the $115 price tag that annoys me (and Julia). I hope this isn't a recurring problem. Those lamps are supposed to last for thousands of hours and this one is only a year old -- and we don't watch that much TV. Anyway, fixing it is better than tossing the TV.

Monday night I spent my evening moving things from my computer's hard drive to an external hard drive in preparation for reinstalling Windows. I've never done that before and I'm a little afraid of the whole process. I mean, what if I didn't save some important files!? I know it's just nerves over doing something new and foreign, but it still makes me nervous. I'm hoping to do the big reinstall this weekend. Hopefully that will solve the random crashes my computer has been suffering for a while now. I really hope that's the case.

More soon.

VOTED!

It's official! I've never been more excited to vote. I just filled out my ballot and I was so happy to make all those little marks. One mark in particular, actually. Tomorrow it goes in the mail!

Something New!

I've started my gaming/comics/work blog so I can spare friends and family all of my geeky talk.

If you're interested, you can find the new blog here:

Stand by for Adventure!

It's All In the Timing (Belt)

When Julia and I were driving to the bus stop near our home on Tuesday morning -- her in her car, me in mine -- and we drove through a section of the street with some construction. Julia drove over the first bump, then pulled over to the side of the road. I pulled up behind her to see what she wanted and when I walked up to her car she said it had died when she "hit" the bump.

It was still fairly dark (this was at 7:05am) and I don't know all that much about cars, but I opened the hood to see if something had been knocked loose. No luck. The engine started, but didn't come to life. We called AAA and waited.

When the guy arrived we told him what was up, he looked at the engine, had Julia try to start it again, looked around some more, then said he thought the timing belt was broken and showed me where it should be and wasn't.

Julia's car is . . . old, so most likely the broken belt spells its doom. We had him tow the car home for now, but we'll likely take it to her brother-in-laws so he can either try to fix it or junk it. Since timing belts require a lot of work and are typically very expensive it makes more sense for us to save up and buy something new for her. Unless it can be fixed inexpensively.

We had a chance to talk to Matt (Julia's brother-in-law) on Wednesday night. We went there right after work for his 40th birthday party: a good spaghetti dinner, cake, ice cream, strange relatives with a strange compulsion to give fart-joke birthday cards. You know, the normal things. Bleh.

Regardless, the night was good and it was fun to play with the kids a bit.

On a completely unrelated note; I think I've come up with a name for my gaming blog. One way or another I'll get that up and going very soon.

More later.

Committed

I had a good talk with my mom last week; Friday I think. She mentioned that she doesn't like when I don't post anything for days and days. Okay, she said "four", but you get the point. Anyway, I'd planned to post over the weekend, then yesterday, but everytime I thought about it something came up. I guess I should be happy that I live such a full and exciting life, but mostly I was disappointed because I never made it here to write an update.

As for what's been going on; Julia spent most of the weekend working on jewelry for an upcoming meeting. She was excited about it, but also dreading it a bit because it's coming up fast, but after working all weekend she was feeling better about it.

Saturday we ran some errands and found out that one of the jewelry supply stores in Seattle might be moving soon. North, which doesn't work well for us, but mail-order is still doable. That night we were supposed to have her parents over for dinner, but it was canceled. I had the option to attend Jordan's annual Halloween shindig, but I didn't think I'd be able to go and hadn't prepared a costume. ("Come as your favorite rock star, living or dead.") I'm sure it would have been fun (and some of the pictures I've seen confirm that), but it wasn't to be. So instead we did our own thing and then sat in bed and watched the last disk of Battlestar Galactica Season 3.

Sunday we got up and moving early because I was going to be gone in the afternoon to play Chott's new D&D game. After a quick breakfast we headed into the garage and spent a couple of hours moving some boxes inside, finding things to take to Goodwill, screwing some shelves and pegboard to the walls, and generally organizing things. When we were done we'd made enough room to get one of the cars in the garage and made that half look quite presentable. We still have the other half to go through, but there's not as much there as it appears and I have to get some things squared away inside before we can tackle that. I will attempt to get some pictures of the "good" side of the garage.

Remember that D&D game? Cancelled. One player told us ahead of time he wasn't going to be there, but then Chott, the GM, emailed to say he was sick, so it was called off. That was too bad because I was looking forward to playing and I had a book to return to one of the guys. Next week, I guess.

Since Julia was still working on jewelry up in her studio, I worked on some things downstairs, which involved going through all of my loose HeroClix figures and then spending about 5 hours fixing a number of errors in an upcoming book for Mutants & Masterminds. I'm officially the Developer on M&M now, so writers and editors have begun emailing me about projects. I hadn't known this particular project was coming in, but it was a good thing I was around, because it really needed to get done.

Sunday night we've been watching Mad Men on A&E (and you really should be watching it, too!), but it's also on OnDemand, so it's not a big deal if we miss it. And we've been missing it lately in favor of watching the second season of the amazingly interesting VH1 show The Pickup Artist. I'd say it's a guilty pleasure except I feel no guilt. I watch the show and marvel at how these super-nice, really geeky guys almost literally transform themselves into confident, socially adept people. I wish I'd been exposed to this show when I was a lad. It's very good and not as silly as the intro makes it look. Mystery (the host and alpha pick-up artist) seems like a weirdo until you see how much he actually cares about and wants to help the guys on the show. Anyway, that's now what we watch Sunday nights. Check it out.

Monday and Tuesday have been good, although I didn't sleep well either night. I'm not sure why because I've been tired. I think it may be caffeine. I fear the headaches, but I may be cutting it from my diet again. I don't really need it and if it'll make me sleep better if I don't drink it, it's gone.

Okay, that brings us to now. I'm about to leave for my first session of my new 1940s M&M game. Wish me luck.

Summit Summary

I was incommunicado this weekend because I was playing and working with the Green Ronin folks at their yearly(?) summit. We had a good and very different meal out Friday night at Marakesh in Belltown. We all sat around a smallish round table and ate family-style with our hands. The food was excellent and my two favorites for the night were a plum chicken and a phylo-wrapped chicken "pie" covered in powdered sugar. The latter really surprised me, but it was very good. I really want to take Julia there.

Saturday and Sunday were work, pretty much all day. We talked about all of Green Ronin's product lines and (I think) made some good decisions and put together a schedule that will hopefully be very doable. We also planned my takeover of the M&M line, which will happen with the start of a product called Aces & Jokers for the Wild Cards line. I'm hoping to get some PDF products done before then, but we'll see how that all fits together. Schedules are touchy things.

The thing I walked out of the summit being most excited about, however, was the Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Hal had a copy of the PDF that was sent to George R.R. Martin for approval and wow does it look fantastic! I have a copy on my computer and I open it frequently to read little bits of it and admire the artwork. If I weren't starting up an M&M game, I'd definitely start a game of that instead.

Enough of gaming talk for now.

Due to the summit, my work week didn't really end and my motivation is at low ebb. I'm getting things done, but I'm not energized. It will be nice to have a weekend off.

Julia and I have a dinner planned with her parents sometime this weekend. It's our gift for her dad's birthday. Her parents are getting their downstairs worked on right now, so they don't have a kitchen, living room, den, or dining room to use, so we thought it would be nice for them to be able to sit at a table to eat and then spend some time sitting around somewhere other than their bedroom. I know her mom is really tired of the house being torn up. I think the house will look great once it's done though, so that's good.

I'm thinking of changing the design of the blog. It's looked like this for years and it's sort of getting old. The changes will reset everything to the default template, so I'll have to re-add my links and all the badges along the right-hand side and that will take some time. I'll do it over the weekend sometime. Anyway, keep an eye out and don't freak out if the site looks different soon.

Okay, more soon!

For Whatever Reason

Okay, so the last week or so has been . . . ordinary. Which may explain why I haven't posted. I'll go over the highlights.

The week before last, Seth forwarded me a job posting from the Gamasutra boards for a position at Nintendo that looked interesting. I sent off a resume and received a reply the next day and we set up a phone interview for sometime last week. The position sounds great and I'm really excited about it. I felt pretty good about the interview and I quickly sent off the requested writing samples. I'm hoping to hear something soon.

I watched or listened to most of the vice-presidential debates last week and they were interesting. I was hoping for some harsher language -- something VPs can get away with that their ticket-mates can't. Admittedly, I have a hard time taking Palin seriously. At all.

Friday I had to get home a bit early to talk to Steve Kenson about some Green Ronin/Mutants & Masterminds stuff. There are cool things happening there and I'll update more soon.

Saturday we got a call from Julia's mom about some plants that were free for the taking, so we went to see what there was. We grabbed a couple of rhodedendrons (sp?) and an 18' tall tree. We really needed a good-sized tree to block the neighbors' views of a shed we're planning to get, so it was quite a score. However, since it was not a light, little sapling, it was quite a chore to get it home. With some help from family friends we managed to do it. Then we dug a big hole -- and found a three foot long rock in the process -- and planted and staked it. It's still standing and looking pretty good despite a couple of windy days lately. I hope it thrives. Oh, it's a flowering pear tree. I'm sure I'll get a picture of it soon.

Sunday I was supposed to play D&D, but Tyler (the gamemaster) got sick. They're trying to reschedule for next weekend. I hope to make it. I took advantage of the time off by taking six magazine boxes of comics and games and two boxes of card and board games to the Half-Price Books in Crossroads Mall. I must have had a number of things they really wanted because I collected a fair chunk of change from them. I was really amazed, actually. I'll have more to take to them soon since I still haven't gone through all my books, games, and comics.

Tuesday night we played what may be the last session of Warhammer Fantasy for a while. The game's been running for two years, but the GM says work is gonig to get crazy for him soon and I suggested playing a superhero game using Mutants & Masterminds. It turns out the players want to try a four-color 1940s game. I'm excited about it. I've always liked the Golden Age and it will be fun to do a Golden Age game with some modern sensibilities. I'm currently waiting to hear what characters everyone wants to play. Fun stuff!

Wednesday night (last nigth as I write this) we joined Julia's family for her dad's 61st birthday at a place in Renton called Vince's. Given the name it shouldn't surprise you that it was Italian. I have a somewhat smallish, but very good chicken parmesan sandwich.

And now you're up-to-date.

7 Years

I somehow completely forgot to repost my cross-country trek with Seth to mark the 7th anniversary of moving out here. I remembered it last week, but then spaced it out over the past few days.

I don't know if any of you really wanted to reread those posts, but if you did, you can check them out in the old posts.

Wow, I can't beleive I forgot that.