What happened???

“What happened last night?” I asked myself upon waking on New Year’s morning. My head didn’t hurt. My mouth wasn’t dry. I actually had a clear memory of the night’s events.

But that can’t be right. It was New Yea’rs Eve. New Year’s is always fuzzy. Could it be that my decision to stick to beer and avoid the shots and the mixed drinks was a good one? Did I actually make a responsible decision?

There are truly the end times.

Happy New Year, and may Quetzalcoatl bring you a great year to come. You know, before he ends it all on December 21st! 

Back to Work!

Well, I’m back to work as a writing tutor for my local college. I love the first week because it’s dead, so the tutors get to catch up with each other and find out what we all did during the break. Still, I unfortunately got into the habit of going to bed late and getting up just before noon, so the shift to getting up at 6:30 AM is kind of jarring. I still go to bed late, mind you…I’m just operating on far less sleep now.

What else to say? Nothing really. Even though there have been a lot of changes at the college, and even though we’ve been cut down to twenty hours a week, the job itself remains the same.

And as much as I hate being dropped down to twenty hours, I kind of like having Fridays off. I won’t get too used to it, though.

My New(ish) Hobby

When I was in college, let’s say around 1996-1998, I missed a lot of class. Yeah, I was one of those guys. I did well enough, but I spent most of the class time in the basement of the student center, usually playing Axis and Allies, Battletech, and whatnot. It was something I found really fun, but it got in the way of school, and my wife at the time didn’t like the games I wanted to play, so it was a short lived hobby.

Fast forward about 15 years, and I am with a new girl (whom I think I’m mentioning here for the 1st time…Hi, Adele!) who actually likes to play these games! So, I’m back in the game!

The Action cards I played in one hand of Dominion

Adele and I play board (or card) games a few nights a week, and we sometimes go to vents like BoGA Night at Underhill’s Games. Some of our favorite games are Pandemic, Settlers of Catan, and Dominion, just to name a few. And yeah, it’s a geeky hobby to have, especially with websites like Board Game Geek where you can talk about games on the message boards and track all your games played.

Me and a few friends at BoGA Night, running into trouble after entering Castle Ravenloft.

Of course, we’re trying to convert our friends and family over to the dork side. I got my brother and his wife a copy of the game Tsuro for Christmas, and we try to get Adele’s brother and sister to play Ticket To Ride or Carcassonne when we visit. My brother and his wife now want to get together to try more games, and I’ve played Settlers a could of times with Adele’s brother, so we’re making progress.

So anyway, if I start rambling about these games, you know what I’m talking about.

What to do…

My upstairs neighbor beats his girlfriend.

This is a fact. They’ve both denied it to the police several times, but I’ve heard it.

Since the police won’t do anything about it, I was about 30 seconds from breaking down their door yesterday and taking care of the problem myself. By the time I was up there, though, he had stopped hitting her, and so instead of protecting her, I would have just been retaliating.

On the advice of a friend, I left a note on the door to the building that read:

To the guy upstairs who hits his girlfriend:

We can all hear you. We know you do it. We’ve called the police, but she always denies it. Just so you know, if it ever happens again, we’re coming up there. We fucking mean it.

Signed: EVERYONE.

NEVER. AGAIN.

Today, the note was gone, but the only neighbor who wouyld have seen it at that hour was my downstairs neighbor. So, my only other able-bodied neighbor would rather sit back and let it happen than get involved. This is why the crime problem is so bad in our neighborhood and in our building. No one cares enough to do anything.

So, the dilemma is: do I go up and do something about it next time? Some of my friends say I should, and some say that I’ll just get myself killed. Honestly, I figure if I try anything, the girlfriend will jump to his defense, and I will be outnumbered. Plus, I’ll end up going to jail from breaking & entering and assault. Some friends say that I can’t help her until she helps herself. I feel like if I don’t do anything, I’m just as guilty as he is.

Anyway, thoughts? Advice?

Just a reminder…

…that I also write on a music blog at …to eleven. I wrote a new post there. If you follow The Most High and Holy via RSS feeds and all that, follow me and Jayson at the new blog, too!

I’m back!

*brushes dust off of his blog, looks around to make sure nothing’s missing…

Sorry about that! My laptop’s been wonky lately, but thanks to my brother, a new wi-fi card, and a new power cord, I’m back. Just in time for the start of the semester, too. Expect to see me around here more lately.

As you were.

A tale of two spiders

OK, so yesterday, I found a spider walking in my shower. I am afraid of spiders…terrified, actually…but I don’t usually kill anything, so I got a peice of toilet paper out and got the spider to climb onto the paper.

Now, I had seen that the spider had made a web in my bathroom, which I didn’t get rid of due to an ant problem I had (due to rotting wood and my landlord’s negligence, not a lack of hygiene on my part), so I put the spider there. Except…

It was the wrong spider. The spider from the web came out and attacked the other spider. I felt terrible, but what could I do at that point? They were already biting each other. So, I took my shower and left.

I had expected to find a spider web with one dead spider and one living, but slightly battered, spider. But that’s not how this all panned out.

Now, both spiders have migrated to the ceiling and are building new webs about a foot from each other. Occasionally, one spider goes to the other’s web, then comes back and builds his (or her) web even bigger. So, I’m part terrified of these spiders hanging above me, part fascinated by this game of “keeping up with the Joneses” they are playing, and part wondering how long it will take me to give up and sweep them out the window.

Thoughs on “The 4400″

I just finished watching the show The 4400 last night. I was left wondering:

*If you had a 50% chance of death, and a 50% chance to get a power, would you take Promicin?
*Would the world be a better place if everyone had powers, or would we use these powers to continue the same conflicts we always had?
*Weren’t Unibent Software’s office’s just the 4400 center with some monitors on the walls? (I swear Imroth’s office was Shawn Farrell’s office!)
*Why does everything feel like Canada?!?

A Road Less Traveled?

Yesterday, I decided to try to find a shortcut to the grocery store. You see, usually, I have to walk south about 1/4 mile, then East for a while, and finally North about 1/2 mile. A couple of weeks ago, I saw that just north of me, there is a “Covered Bridge Park,” which looks like it goes straight through to the store.

When I got to the park, the 1st thing I noticed was that it is hilly. You can’t really see from one end to the other over the hills. Also, there is a baseball field where some kids were playing. Around this field is a track. This track is where my troubles began.

The track is covered in rocks. I suppose they call it gravel, but it was rocks. Sharp, pointy rocks. In my generic chucks (actually, Old Navy brand canvas shoes), I could feel every one of them. So I stumbles and limped along the track until I got around the baseball diamond. As I expected, as my luck usually follows this way, the path is a loop. When I got behind the diamond, I had nowhere to go but where I came from. i had hopes that I would find, hmmm…maybe a covered bridge!?! No such luck.

I decided that I would not be deterred…I pushed my wat through the trees along the path, hoping it would lead me to the store. I pushed through one side of the wooded area and into…

A cemetary. What the hell? As far as I knew, there was no cemetary between my apartment and the store, so I was officially lost. Not only that, but due to my lack of direction sense, I wasn’t sure which was would lead to the road. I listened for traffic, and thought I knew where it was coming from, so I headed in that direction.

fortunately, I was right, and I trecked out of the graveyard and onto Cleveland Avenue, the busy street where the store is. Unfortunately, it seems that I overshot the store by about 1/2 mile.

The end result of the adventure is that a 45 minute walk took 2 hours, my feet are blistered, and I still don’t know of a shortcut to get to the store.

Change of Plans

Well…I haven’t been around much this week, like I said I would. This has nothing to do with Amuirin’s prediction that my cat would be mauled by zombies, but rather that I’m getting back into the swing of work after a two week break, and the thing I was going to do this week didn’t work out.

I had a meme-type-thing planned, which I think I’m still going to propose. I worked on it on my laptop, but the laptop crashed (I hope to fix that soon).

Besides that, I really have just been lazy. When I’m not working at work, I’m reading, so I just haven’t gotten to the blog like I wanted to. Anyway, I’m hoping to get more done this next week. So we’ll see, I guess.