geek-a-licious

Today Josh and Lori are coming over to play Magic: The Gathering. Emille might come too. I got paid, so I get to buy a few cards – not sure yet what I’m going to buy, I have a few decks on the go.

Worldwide D&D Game Day is coming up! This sounds like it may be the awesomest thing I don’t get to do on November 3, because I live in the frigid north where there are no game or comic book stores.

D&D is one of those fallbacks for me. It brings me back to my childhood, and making the friendships that have survived since orcs and kobolds.

I will always remember my first adventure when I was but 9 years old. Talking to a tree that spoke in riddles and having my friend put on a cursed helmet that kept shrinking. We only got three questions, and he ruined the last one by asking how to get the helmet off his head. Good times.

As we got older, we always went back to D&D. I played D&D, AD&D and then D&D 3rd edition. D&D 3.5 came out shortly afterwords and I had to buy the core rulebooks for that too (which is actually still my favourite version).

I toyed with D&D Miniatures, and I’ve always had a love for misshapen blobs of lead or pewter with paint stuck to them. Some I’ve done are sad creations, and others are works of art.

Wil Wheaton popped this onto my radar today, with this appropriate remark:

“Wizards has wisely created 4th level characters for the festivities, so players won’t have to suffer the indignity of being killed by a single kobold. On the other hand, players won’t get to enjoy the rite of passage we all enjoyed the first time we were killed by a single kobold, while trying in vain to defend ourselves by casting Light.”

So, if you live somewhere you can get to one of these things, and have fond memories of D&D as I do, round someone up or go alone, and perhaps give it another go.

Maybe I’ll try to organize some kind of little event around my place for this…although knowing me, that would turn into a campaign, and then I’d have to plan and plot and DM and stuff.

Hmm…maybe I’ll stick to Magic.

No Longer the Mistress

Well For all of you who don’t keep obsessive track of dates and times,  as of October 25th Jeff was officially and completely Divorced,  and I got to spend my fist day as Jeff’s girlfriend rather then The Mistress,  Yaaa!  So what does this mean for us,  The tides have changed and I can no longer rely on just sex to hold o to him as mistresses usually do.  And he can stop giving me expensive baubles all the time as that is the only way a married man holds on to his mistress…. 

Yea right!

I guess that dynamic just never worked out for us cause I don’t remember many expensive baubles,  and well,  I don’t think that sex could actually make up for all of my crazy quirks and stuff,  no matter how good it is.  So I guess time will tell how things will pan out,  (I’m hoping to see running boards in my future, lol)  but for the fist time ever we are just a normal couple,  well as normal a couple as we could ever be.

Sam

aka:  Just the girlfriend!

his uterus?

From our weekly pregnancy newsletter, courtesy of walmart.com.

“If you’re having a girl, his uterus and Fallopian tubes are formed and in place. If your baby is a boy, his genitals are noticeable, though he may hide them from you during an ultrasound.”

Wow.  I’m glad that his uterus andFallopian tubes are formed.  That’s exciting news – about the best I’ve heard all week.

There is good stuff in this newsletter, I promise.  Sam made me read behind the cut (I almost never do) and there is interesting stuff there today.  Like about his Fallopian tubes.  Neato and scientifical even.

Sign Language

Misty @ Live Granades writes about sign language today:

“I can’t tell you the amount of frustration his ability to sign cut down. Many times when he was tired, a sign would ease the way to compromise. We didn’t do the endless pointing and asking, “Is this what you want? No? How about this?” And it gave him some power. Even without vocalized words he could still let us know what he needed. We also got an excellent start on good manners. To this day, he will still sometimes make the sign for ‘please’ when he says it out loud. I was continually amazed at him making signs for stuff and me for understanding what he wanted.”

Sign language is something we talked about with Ivy but never followed through on.  I think this is one thing that we’ll probably change with the upcoming baby – Misty has some good book recommendations that I’ll be taking a look at.

Raising Rusty

I found a blogolicious diversion today.  It’s called Raising Rusty, and is written by a guy who has “a great dog, and some fantastic kids”.  His neighbors say his dog is the best trained on the block, and strangely enough, his kid’s teachers echo the sentiment.

His blog is a “tongue-in-cheek look at how raising kids and training dogs is not all that different.”

Today’s tidbit was:

“Chicken bones are too small for dogs and can cause choking…For your kids, I don’t recommend you give them dog bones, unless they have been really, really good.

Tip: Try quartering grapes or slicing hot dogs lengthwise to prevent choking in toddlers.”

If this blog stays consistent it may make my top children raising blogs I read.  Hmm.  Perhaps I don’t have a list yet.  Maybe I’ll make on.

Or maybe not.  That sounds like work.

Testing

This is Sam, testing my new account.  Soon to be two authors here.

Birthday

It’s my birthday this week.  Tomorrow in fact.

Samantha is planning something, and I’m not sure what it is.

It could be a trip to another town to stay in a hotel and go shopping or something, possibly leaving the little cutie behind for the first time ever.

It could be a barbecue and some magic cards and some friends.

Whichever extreme it is, I’m ok with it.  I’m actually excited and I’m not usually excited before my birthdays.  I’ll be 28 this one, and I have a cute little girl by adoption, a child in the making process, and a beautiful woman whom I love to spend my time with.

I have a job I’m happy with, a truck I love, and we have our own home to do renovations on.

This has been a good year.

…and the birthday surprise might include a jacuzzi tub.  ’nuff said.

Tremors.

Major Seismic Activity.

And I’m not talking about a volcano this time.

The other night I felt the baby move for the first time.  It was real, and very obvious what it was.

It was my first real contact with our embryonic overlord.

Magma and my old house.

My old house will soon be covered in a steaming heap of magma.

Maybe not exactly.

I spent many of my formative years growing up in Gillies Crossing, a suburb of Nazko. That is to say, Gillies Crossing is a name of a couple of chunks of property at the crossing of the Euchiniko River (which runs into the Blackwater right nearby). About 30km NE of Nazko. Nazko, a village and First Nations Reservation (sounds weird…Indian Rez is how I’d have said and heard it growing up) is about 100km west-ish of Quesnel.

Nazko has a defunct volcano, part of a chain of volcanoes stretching from here to the Pacific Ocean. It’s in the news lately as it has been causing lots of earthquakes this week – and now steam is reportedly rising from the area. By lots of earthquakes I mean over 100 between .5 and 3.2 on the Richter Scale.

Volcanoligists (who may or may not live long and prosper, and are not to be confused with Vulcanoligists) are so excited about the news they’re shaking. (ba dum-dum-dum)

To be fair, the volcano in question is about 20km from Nazko itself, and probably won’t endanger anyone’s life. Their cattle, trees and other property however, that could be a different story.

On a tangential note – all our forests here are primarily Pine. We’ve been hit with a devastating case of Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic - all our pine is dead or dying. Our forests are dry and ready to be kindled by flaming lava flows – the real natural disaster here could be forest fire related, rather than seismic or volcanic.

Hmm.

It sounds cooler when I say my old house in Nazko is going to be covered in a heap of fiery magma.

New Daycare

Ivy has a new daycare.  Amanda has had some health problems and scares with her pregnancy, so she isn’t able to do it anymore.  This makes us sad.

Our new daycare however makes us happy.  It’s a real structured one, cause we felt we couldn’t get lucky with good in-home liscenced daycare options again.

We have to  pack lunch for her now, and it requires a little more effort on our part, but the people running this place seem pretty awesome.  They’ll work with our schedule as much as possible, and if we start something like potty training (which we’re in the very beginnings of) they’ll work with us to make it good.

More to come as we use it a little more and find out what we like/dislike about it.