Category Archives: Misc

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Moving sucks

But hopefully this will be the last time I have to do that for a long time… Just bought a house!

However, that (both the buying and the moving) totally disrupted just about everything in my life, and is threatening to continue doing so for the better part of the summer as I get all the boxes unpacked and used to the mortgage payments. Not to mention, summer is the absolute most busy time at work. *sigh*

I did get a few pics the other day, though…

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SNOW DAY!

Well, we woke up this morning to nearly 6 inches of snow! That’s kind of unusual for December in the South Willamette Valley, (BTW, that’s pronounced ” will · AM · uht “ , for those that don’t know. I’m tired of hearing William-ette. WTF? Doesn’t that just sound silly? Dang, I could have named my daughter that! What was I thinking??? ;-P ) Anyhoo, late January through February is when we usually see any significant snow on the valley floor, but for any time of year, 6 inches is kind of an event. This definitely screamed for a SNOW DAY!

I think I’m a fairly capable snow driver. I’m really familiar with what my car’s going to do, even on a slippery patch. But having to drive in the slick with the other crazy effers zooming around like nothing’s amiss really makes my guts tie in knots. So to avoid being plowed (some pun intended) I just don’t drive at all when it’s snowy. I just DON’T. So that means until the snow and ice melts, the 50-mile round-trip commute to work isn’t going to happen. At least not with me at the wheel. ;-)

There’s plenty of work I can do from home, but with school canceled and the white powdery stuff fresh and new, I thought I’d just waste away part of the day having fun. Heh, waste. Nah, fun is really important! Sometimes I’m entirely sure that I don’t get enough of it. ;-)

The flake-spitting clouds moved on around mid-morning and the sun came out! So before the big kid trudged off to the neighbors’ houses for endless snowball fights (or perhaps endless video gaming, knowing these 21st century kids), the bunch of us romped around in the snowfor a bit.

Brynn was a lot happier with the snow this year than she was last year. She really didn’t even mind when it got in her boots and down her front. (Snowball-throwing Dadda the culprit, no doubt.) There were even some icy cold puddles to stomp in (one of Brynn’s favorite activities). And it was also a perfect day for “Inna Sky;” the game where Dadda tosses her, well, inna sky.

The snow must have been blowing around pretty good last night, too, because all of the flowerbeds were buried. My roses have been blooming since June without much pause. This one still putting on buds even in this weather. And the poor fuchsias are pretty right now, but probably not long for this world.

Have a happy SNOW DAY! Or just a happy Day. Or maybe just a Day, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. ;-)

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Video games on my mind

Watani

Watani - My WoW character of old - FOR THE HORDE!

Well this is expansion number two for World of Warcraft; another historic night spent by hundreds of thousands of gamers at shopping malls across the land. The report from Kylos on the scene at our own Valley River Center Mall..?

“Lots of teenagers and smelly degenerates.”

Haha… I lafs and feels better about not being there this time. ;-) Maybe I’ll get the expansion some day when I have a little more time to play. I do miss gaming sometimes, when I have a moment to reflect on it.

I did play Oblivion and SimCity Societies for a while within the last year, but I ended up going back to SimCity 4… I think my inner child has OCD because there’s something about that game that I just love. *Rubs hands together and giggles.” In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to play. Luckily, my video card overheats when I play SC4, so I generally only get about 10 minutes of play time in before it’s “game over” for the rest of the night. Yeah, my computer HATES SimCity 4 and refuses to boot for at least 20 minutes once it’s tired of the game. However, I probably don’t need to be playing that much anyway. There’s too much else that needs doing.

I have a lot to thank for video games. Back in 1998 a video game was the final nail in the coffin for my old Mac. Creatures (an old, but still very awesome simulation game) was only available for Windows, so I ended up getting a PC, mostly just because of that.

Creatures 1 hatchery

Creatures 1 hatchery

Ah, those were the days. Creatures was so cool. (My inner OCD child babbles incoherently.) You started with an egg in an incubator and it would eventually hatch out this tiny little creature called a “norn.” Over time the norn would grow and learn to talk (simple sentences, much like a toddler… in fact, I really think that my two year old is a norn sometimes!) You could hatch multiple eggs and have multiple norns in the world. As they grew, they would become children, adolescents, and then adults when they could mate and lay their own eggs. Eventually, they would even grow old (or get sick) and die.

The norns came in several different “breeds” but each had it’s own individual traits. Some traits were simply color variations, but there were tons of others. For instance I had one female that never grew sick and never died. Another talked constantly and others would talk very little at all. Some would not pay attention to the other norns or ran away from them. Some of them would refuse to eat or do nothing but sleep all of the time. Very, very interesting and somehow endlessly entertaining.

I haven’t seen the like since, well… not since then! But I have high hopes for Spore. :-)