Somewhere Between the Flood and the Swarm of Locusts...

In what appears to be another sign that divine forces are aligned against the land of Texas and its inhabitants, it rained mud last night. That’s right: mud. I went out to take a trash bag to the dumpster and noticed the sky was spitting. When I got to the dumpster, I noticed it was all muddy. Looked at my car: all caked with mud. Then I checked out my shirt and I had muddy drops all over. Eww~! It was disgusting! I tossed the bag into the dumpster and fled for my life back to the house, half expecting the swarm of locusts to come tearing around the street corner any second.

I walked out to my car this morning to find it absolutely covered in mud. You could hardly tell it was blue. I had a hard time seeing out the windshield, and I had ran out of washer fluid the weekend before. That was a fun ride to work. I hosed the car off as soon as I got home from work.

When I got home, the entryway was spotless. The front room was pristine. Even the kitchen table had been wiped down. The loft had been picked up and Colin’s bathroom and bedroom were picked up. DeAnn, Colin and I had a long talk about why it’s bad to lie and why it’s bad to disrespect your parents. Lesson learned: we’re called to love one another, and it’s really hard to do that if you don’t have respect or honor for them. He sincerely apologized, and I forgave him and spent some of the evening undoing the teardown from last night. I’ll finish it tomorrow night.

The majority of the rest of the evening was spent looking for a new printer at WalMart. We needed to print out some documents, but DeAnn’s decade-old printer finally bit the dust and refused to print any of the document text. We picked up a relatively inexpensive Lexmark All-In-One and D got a pair of new sandals to replace the year-old ones that are falling apart on her feet. The new printer works great, and is a pretty decent scanner, too. Combined with my cell phone, I can now fax out documents from my laptop without needing to string a cable from one end of the house to the other.

First day of spring tomorrow, and the end of the workweek. “w00t” for short workweeks and 3-day weekends. We have an Easter Egg Hunt and BBQ with Clara’s Daycare tomorrow night, and probably some ingame shenanigans as well. Don’t know if I’ll blog tomorrow, but if I don’t, I’ll have an extra-long Weekend Intelligence next week.

Twenty-One All Over Again

Work today was slow, but the time seemed to go by fast. I think a lot of people are on spring break or something: the call volume just seems to be lower than normal. I finished my chapter on subnetting at work today, but I’m going to need to go through that chapter at least one more time to get it down. Very cornfusing…

I had set a trap for Colin last night. I suspected him of lying to his mother and I about his medications yesterday, so I counted the number of pills before I went to sleep. When I got home, he was absolutely out of control, bouncing off the walls style. I did a quick count of them while he was busy yelling the same syllable at the top of his lungs and running around in a circle. Surprise, surprise: the number had not changed. After calling his name half a dozen times, I finally captured enough of his scattered attention to ask him if he had taken his medication. He replied with an emphatic yes. ORLY? I looked him in the eyes and asked him once more if he was sure he took his medication. Without blinking, he told me he had taken it.

At that point, I called him out on his lie and made him sit in a chair facing the corner until his mother came home. While he was sitting, I removed all video game consoles and handheld video games, locked the cable box down with a password, locked his user account on the PC and removed its MAC address from the switch table. He will be home for the next 5 days on spring break with absolutely nothing to do. No friends, no games, no TV, no computer: nothing but his books, studies and cleaning the house he has spent the last two days destroying. We’ll be assigning chores to be completed by the time we get home if he wants any chance to have those privileges back again.

Probably the worse part about this finding is that he lied so smoothly: no sign whatsoever. I know he did the same thing yesterday. How many more times has he lied to get his way with us? I want this to be so severe that he’ll think twice before he decides to lie again.

The kids went to bed at the same time, and we set out for our static night. The usual camp with the usual rats was it usually packed self, and it took about an hour or so before we shooed off all the soloists. I want to try somewhere else that’s not so crowded, but the problem with those places is that they suck in some way – that’s why they’re not crowded! The experience went pretty well after everyone cleared out, right up to the end of the party. We caught some major linkage of several rats and aggroed worm, resulting in a few more deaths that we’re used to. We just got crammed into a bad spot to try to fight in. I’m going to post a map on the forums to help us organize our camps and maybe help prevent that from happening again.

Study night tomorrow night. I need to review subnetting and see if I can make myself some practice problems. The problem I’m having is the book doesn’t provide enough practice scenarios, and I don’t know enough to make my own. I’ll do my best with what I got. Lastly, if you have a chance and see her online, in person or talk to her on the phone, wish my lovely wife DeAnn a Happy Birthday. No matter how many times you turn 21, you’ll always be my girl, hon.

Shenanigans

Maybe it’s the fact that I love green, or it’s another reason to drink beer and be mischievous, but I love St. Patrick’s Day. I wore my green suit slacks and tie with a green shirt, but best of all, my emerald green Doc Martins. I only break those bad boys out once a year. I got quite a few odd glances and fielded some jokes, even did a little bit of an Irish jig once or twice. Fun times at the office – sure does help a Monday go by!

When I got home, I had to get on Colin’s case to get the dishes done. Both his mother and I made it quite clear that we expected his chores to be done, just as if it were a regular day for him. Not only were things not done, but the house was starting to get a bad case of Colin mess. Paper plates and crumbs all over the kitchen, with jelly smears on the counter and not a flushed toilet in the house. When I asked him if he had taken his medication, he looked at me in a way that said “No,” then told me he had just before breakfast. D quickly saw through that, because she called after breakfast and he hadn’t yet. Since I can’t prove it, I’m not going to do anything this time, but I have a little surprise for him tonight if he pulls the same thing again…

Despite his behavior, I still decided to take him to the game that night. After spending nearly an hour navigating construction in downtown San Antonio and dodging East Side pedestrians, we got to the AT&T Center. Now I had two choices for parking: option A would put us in the boondocks of the regular parking lot and cost $15. Option B would put us in an abandoned gas station parking lot commandeered by a hobo and cost half as much. As averse as I was to dropping that much change for parking, I wanted to make sure my car was still there when we were ready to go home. I waved to the hobos on my way to the expensive parking.

We were up in the nosebleed section, but Colin loved it. He could see everything: the megatron, the scoreboard, the whole court and all the heavily sponsored timeout games. In particular, he really liked the RC blimp with the San Antonio Express-News logo tattooed on the side, flying and dodging around. The Spurs lost, but we had fun together, that was what was really important.

Finished the night with an expensive jaunt in game. I’d been tracking the price of Flood scrolls. They’ve been plummeting lately, and tonight there were six of them on the auction block. I got one for 150k – about 200k less than they were not even a month ago. I also finally bit the bullet and bought a water scroll. Used a little over half my gil, but I have a complete library ready for me until my BLM reaches Lv69, and I’m over 78% done with the Lu Shang’s quest.

Weekend Intelligence: It’s On Fire!

Weekend went by in a blur! Got in some game, did some work around the house, and caught up on some much needed rest and relaxation. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

We were kinda a bunch of bums on Friday. I had a great talk with my wife about some issues I’ve needed to air for awhile now. I don’t really feel like going into the details here and now, but I feel more connected with her than ever before. We celebrated the end of what was one hell of a week with beer and pizza. There was no real FNLE scheduled to speak of, so we drank and gamed (in one way or another -.^) most of the night away.

Saturday, I wanted to focus on getting the front room a little safer for baby to play. As it was, there were stacks of old mailers, papers and pens and all sorts of wrappers and discarded trash that never made it to the trash can. Not a safe place for the baby to use as her primary play area! We went through most of the mail, found homes for the toys that didn’t belong there and picked up the trash.

Her molars are coming in, so the poor girl has been particularly wretched lately. FYI: If you want to use Children’s Motrin on a child under 2, you have to make the dosage calculations (mg/mL) yourself based on the concentration in the infant version. Don’t throw the box away! D:! We also made our WalMart run Saturday evening before Kirin. More on that later.

We made it to the main service on Sunday. On the one hand, I’d love to be able to make the really early service, ‘cause it leaves me with more day and we get breakfast in the bargain. On the other, it was really nice to just leisurely roll out of bed, get some pancakes together and go to church. Most of my spare time was spent finishing up my CCNA chapter on IP Networking and the DoD model. Subnetting is next – oh boy! -.-

After Dynamorz – Valkurm, we decided to go to an Italian Restaurant to celebrate DeAnn’s Birthday. Colin made the cake during dynamis, so we set it in the fridge to cool while we went out. Clara has been slowly evolving into the dreaded Triple T (Terrible Two’s Toddler), and tonight she let loose! Screaming and hollering, throwing packets of sugar and silverware, tossing her food and cuppy on the floor, pulling on the tablecloth and generally being an unholy terror. It’s likely the last time we’ll bring her anywhere nice until she can behave herself, meaning it will likely be the last time we go anywhere nice period for quite some time.

We had some birthday cake madness when we got home. You see that flaming ball of sugary goodness at the top? Yeah, that’s her cake. I won’t tell you how many candles were on there, but I will tell you the heat coming off the cake was more than what was used to cook it, and that they could probably see the light from space. I love you, honey! :D <3

In Game:

There was no real planned FNLE this week, so Keri and I spent most of our time goofing off in game doing campaign battles and ops and trying to get our rank up, and drank copious amounts of beer and a whole bottle of port. I got my Golden Star, and she got the Bronze Star. My next rank will give me an emblem! We ended our in-game fooling around to go play a different game. -.^

We didn’t do much in game on Saturday before Kirin. We had three of them scheduled that evening, so we decided to get as much done outside the game as we could. The three Kirins dropped two osodes. Neither of which I was allowed to lot… There is a policy on the osodes that, unless you can afford the rental fee up front, you can’t lot them. In other words, you can’t go negative getting an osode. This was to discourage people that were only using the LS to get an osode and leave. I was 15 points shy of being able to lot, from lotting the Cleric Cap last Dynamis I was at, so the osodes were slated for sale. I understand why they can’t make an exception for me, but it was still a real kick in the pants. Instead of furthering our sky goals, we’d rather sell it and pad our bank. Brickhouse agreed to do a point audit for me and said he’d get back with me Sunday about it. DeAnn fell asleep shortly after Kirin, so I was left to my own devices the rest of the evening. I did some ops on PLD and leveled to 39, bought and fished some more Moat Carp and cleared some room out in my mog house. Rounded out the evening on the 360, playing some demos – nothing coming out really wowed me.

Sunday’s gaming was for Dynamis – Valkurm. This is one of those dreamworld dynamis’ that are needed for Dynamis – Tavnazia access. While gathering for this, Brickhouse did an audit and found 3 FNLE’s that I lead that did not get points. Not that I lead FNLE’s for the points (they’re fun!) but the points were definitely welcome at this moment. Shortly after, Zhefer sent me a tell thanking me for leading sky when he couldn’t, and presented me with one of the osodes that dropped the night before! I was absolutely giddy: I’d wanted one since I was a Lv55 MNK and saw my buddy Dashen wearing one. I thanked him, and told him that as soon as my studies are over, I’ll be back at the sky hunts.

Dynamis didn’t go so hot. One of our pullers died in a really bad spot, and in trying to extract him, I ended up taking aggro and dying. The mobs eventually moved and Chic was able to get me and Capt, but still kinda embarrassing to be one of the better extraction WHM’s in the shell and I end up needing the rescue. >.< We wiped on the boss and could not recover from it, which was a big disappointment for all involved. After dinner and cake, Keri and I did the quest for her Retrace scroll, and got her gate crystal for Recall-Meriph.

Colin and I are going to the Spurs game tomorrow using the tickets I won from the radio station. Spurs vs Celtics on St. Patty’s Day! Time to break out the green Doc Martins and have me a beer! ^_^/