Weekend Intelligence: Ending Chapters

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." - Semisonic, "Closing Time"

In one fell swoop, my game time, my free time and my work time have all turned upside down. Its exciting and nerve-wracking all at the same time. I'm really looking forward to it all. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home (and game?):

To back up a little, on Thursday, DeAnn decided to "quit" FFXI. Without getting into a very long-winded story, there has been extreme drama over my BLM static, and it goes back to very old issues and the relatively new issue of poor linkshell attendance. She doesn't find it fun anymore and has not logged on since. This has made my free time even more fragmented: I now have to juggle work, family, wife and recreation time. Despite this, I still advised her (as I've advised everyone over the years that loses interest in the game) to quit.

So when Friday night rolled around, normally we'd FNLE and do some campaign. I had agreed to do the 18-man avatar battles, but now I've lost my campaign partner. She was in the same room, but it felt very awkward talking to her about it instead of her actually being there. She's signed us up for Blockbuster by mail rentals. She'd like to do a movie night with me every so often, and I think it would be a nice thing to do together, considering we have nothing set up now. After I'd finished up my ingame promise, we sat together for a bit and started building our movie queue. There's lots of movies I want her to see, and even more she wants me to see. There are some that we've both seen and want to see again together, and some we want to get for the kids. We're starting with the "one movie at a time" plan, with a maximum of 2 movies a month. I honestly think we're going to have to up that at least to the unlimited movies a month plan though, if not more than one at a time. The queue is enormous. More on that likely to come.

Saturday started off a bit rocky. I don't know why, but D and Colin are really hard to get going in the morning. No mercy whatsoever - I'm just trying to get the day started! Anyway, once breakfast was had, I set up the gates so Clara could play, then asked Colin to help clean the living room, crush cans for recycling and do the dishes. Colin finished his tasks in a timely fashion, so I let him go goof off with friends. D started pulling weeds outside, and I was resolved to mow the lawn...

At this point, I think its appropriate to have a flashback moment to about this time last year. We had just clawed our way out of a near-fatal financial crisis, bought our first house and D just got her job. The thought then hit us that we were now homeowners, meaning we now had to mow our own lawn. We weren't in the financial spot to drop a ton of change on a mower, so we bought the cheapest one we could find that was adjustable and would bag clippings (which proved to be the most worthless bagger ever). It was a piece, but it did the trick.

Fast-forward to Saturday, with me stooped over this piece of junk priming it for the first start of the season. I hadn't run it since, like, early November. I primed the chambers, checked the gas and oil, and made sure the plug was in place and connected. Pull, Pull, Pull! Nothing. That's ok, it's gotta be a bit gunked up, right? It's been sitting around for months. Try again. Nothing. Reprimed and checked the spark plug. Everything checks out. Try again. Nothing. Now my arm is starting to hurt. Try again. It's dead. DeAnn notices that I'm having a hard time with the mower, and she tries. Nothing, and now her arm hurts. -.- So it's decided that the time has come for a new mower. We made a quick trip to WalMart and picked up what we'd wanted the first time around, but couldn't afford: an electric mower. After about 10 minutes of assembly, the mower is running and cuts through the tall grass like a hot knife through butter. No pulling, no priming: just pull a lever and it starts and let it go and it stops. Immediately. The other spiffy thing was that it weighed about a quarter of what the old mower did. After mowing and pulling, we just basically hung out the rest of the day. I gamed a little, but it still felt very awkward, and I did nothing of note.

We slept in late on Sunday and missed church. D had a bad headache anyway. Hit WalMart for the upcoming week's supplies. We got a nap somewhere in there, too. I did Dynamis - Jeuno in hopes of completing my WHM relic, but no dice. We finished off the evening by redying D's roots before bedtime.

Tomorrow is the first day at my new job. I'm very excited and maybe, just maybe, a bit nervous, too. I'm sure I'll do fine - I like the what I've seen and heard so far. But I will miss all the people I've gotten to know so well at Valero. I wish them all the best.