Training, sir!
Bad news: we all have to take Office 2007 and MS Vista training; it’s not optional, even for Mac me. Good news: The company will reimburse tuition for any Microsoft certifications to which this training leads. Methinks I’d be a complete fool not to take advantage of this – extra certifications can’t hurt, right?
At the moment, Starr and I share the house with four cats, two of ours and two from her family that are on extended ‘boarding’ with us. We must put in a fair amount of effort to keep up with demands for food and clean litter! As a result, though, I woke up this morning with one cat sleeping on my lap, another nestled tight against my left hip, and a third tucked under my right armpit. It seems I make an excellent cat pillow.
Tonight, Starr works late, and my chore list includes laundry, cooking, and cleaning; our Shadowrun group meets again Monday, and I don’t intend to spend the weekend picking up. I need to chill, and take care of some happier business.
Trying this at home
My coworker Lee B. was joking about heading to PiChiTa for lunch – the local Pizza Hut / KFC / Taco Bell combo. I responded that he’d best be careful, because if he said “pichita” too loudly over there, it would end up as their newest menu item.
Then I got to thinking. Take some lightly seasoned diced chicken. Put it in a taco shell, cover with a little pizza sauce, add a judicious amount of your favorite topping (crumbled sausage, chopped pepperoni or shrooms, whatever), and melt some mozzarella atop the whole thing.
Frankly, that sounds pretty good. If Starr’s brave this weekend, we may have to experiment a bit. If it’s good, I’ll give Lee full credit.
Daft music, schedules, and composing
Now that I’m digging the Daft Punk, everyone’s been saying over and over that I needed to get the Alive 2007 album. Picked it up this weekend, finally listened to it with the speakers turned up on my morning commute. That’s some fine commuting music, that is.
It looks like Starr won’t be making it to Technicon Last; she can’t get out of working that weekend. Her shifts are crazy – it’s a regular thing for her to have five days off in a row, but somehow her scheduled weekend shifts always fall on convention dates. It annoys us both. She has more than enough PTO to cover it if she took off, but that requires a great deal of shift-trading, and for some reason few of her co-workers want to work extra weekend shifts. Can’t imagine why.
I may have a very memorable con costume this year.
I like Twitter because it provides useful writing exercise in expressing onself succinctly. I shouldn’t fret, though, if I miss a few dozen because I’m away from a ‘Net connection. Most of the stuff I’ll want to know shows up in LiveJournal, and LJ’s much easier to keep up with. (Blogging of any kind forces me to keep in mind two good practices: try to avoid that cursed passive voice, and don’t write a novel where a couple of paragraphs will get my point across better.)
The latest Guardians
Having already closed a couple of tickets this morning, I bounced over to my RSS feed reader, which notified me of the day’s posts on dailycostume.com.
Clicking through the links, I brought up this particular group of variant Sailor Senshi. I thought, “Okay, cute, bet I’m missing someone’s fanfic story here…” and then I suddently realized exactly what the theme in question was meant to be.
All I can say is, there’s a weekday afternoon cartoon that I’d put on the DVR recording list.
Brief updates
- 11:38 I hope that plenty of folks got to take LeVar Burton’s Birthday off yesterday. #
- 13:42 Holy smoke, I completely missed the WoW “Love Is In The Air” festival! Glad I wasn’t going for the meta-Achievement this year. #
- 14:22 @dragonpearl Print jobs submitted late always made me homicidal, because I knew I’d be staying until 11 or 12 that night. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
John Milton revisited
I’m curiously drawn to re-interpretations in modern fiction of the underpinnings of Christian theology, such as the one in the beginning of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Since I’ve enjoyed Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, I picked up To Reign In Hell at a con or bookstore, and gave it a read.
Well, I tried to. Twice. The first couple of times, for some reason I couldn’t get a sense of the characters or the premise. Last night, I took a deep breath, and tried a third time with much more focused attention, getting much farther into it. The attempt didn’t work out…
Ye Olde Abandonede Warehouse
Last night we had the complete gaming group together for the first time since the Shadowrun game started. Jesse’s razorgirl and Amy’s decker joined in as the group looked for a place to hide their rock singer. The group procured a rent-a-squat, obtained food and water, and decided to turtle up and wait out their contract.
Shrewlet Update
Cindy’s in Roanoke Memorial, room 906 West, phone (540) 266-5424. She has Internet access as well (no, not including WoW).
They tried to give her a steroid injection to improve the situation a bit, which she describes as “the most painful thing I have ever encountered. I’ve been fighting in the SCA for 20 years and have never taken blows that hurt that hard as that shot.”
They are going to see if the injection helps, but surgery is still an option. At last report, she didn’t have full sensation in either leg.
More as I know it.
Brief updates
- 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for “Elder” in the last couple days you have left? #
- 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
- 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr’s work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
- 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting 🙂 #
- 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
- 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
And she was moving very slowly… rising up above the earth
Could a techno-magical item in an online computer game be a sign of personal growth in real life?
At level 70 in WoW, players unlock the ability to ride flying critters (for a substantial training sum of 800 gold pieces). At this point, a player will usually spend an extra hundred gold to buy a flying mount, but engineer characters may build their own. (Unless one’s second profession is mining, one’s going to spend much more than a hundred gold on the necessary materials.)
There’s a single part to the flying machine that my miner/engineer didn’t know how to make on her own, and it’s only taught by one NPC – who would teach her the blueprint if she achieved “Revered” diplomatic status with his organization of dimension-hopping smugglers. The good news is that she could gain 250 reputation points every time she turned in 10 certain emblems that certain slain enemies would drop 33%-50% of the time. The bad news? She needed about 18,000 reputation points to reach Revered.
The good news is that in the process, my engineer looted enough gold to pay for the flying training. In fact, about 14,000 points in, she had enough to just go and buy the griffon flying mount. But, despite temptation, I didn’t do so. Enough of the enemy characters had died to populate a small village by this point, and the whole thing had become fairly tedious, but I’d started this job, and something inside me wouldn’t take the easy route. I dug in my heels, and little Mirandala collected another 160 emblems.
Now, Mir has her Gnomish Flying Machine (a magical steampunk rattletrap in which the engine misses a few cycles every five minutes or so). And, funnily enough, I’m proud of myself. Sure, it was only a game; but I find it easy to fall into the trap of procrastinating about things, taking shortcuts where offered, or being distracted by shiny things that catch my attention. Here, I chose a task and stuck to it, and now I have something different than the griffon buyers do. Not too shabby.
(Yes, I did much other cool stuff this weekend, including a good party and some general housecleaning. It really is still just a game.)
