Land of Confusion

Lots of stuff going on, so I'll just dive in. The expected euphoria of the end of Daylight Saving Time was somewhat spoiled by my number one son deciding to vomit around 3:00 am. I really need to have a talk with these kids, "Look, we have an obvious scheduling problem here. 3 am just isn't working for me could we reschedule your normal illness onset time, preferably to some time when I'm awake? Or better yet while I'm at work?"

I finally tackled the leaves on Saturday. I was putting it off because I had hoped some kids would come along and offer to do it. In fact there was a group of kids who came by earlier when about 20% of the leaves were down. I said they could rake what was down, and asked them how much they wanted. They told me to name a price. I hate that. So I offered them $20. After raking up the 20% they must have decided that it wasn't worth it because even though they promised to return when all of the leaves had fallen I never saw them again. It ended up taking me about four hours, and as I recall the final count was over a dozen bags, once the leaves were off I mowed the lawn for what I hope is the final time. I was reminded of what a mollycoddle I was when a blister formed on my hands after only a couple hours working the rake.

I'd never actually seen the word "mollycoddle" before, but the word I wanted to go with, "poofter" has such clear homosexual connotations that I decided against using it, and "mollycoddle" came up when I ran wimp through the thesaurus.

So as I believe I mentioned in a previous blog I started Tad Williams "Otherland" series, four books each averaging about 700 pages. Since getting through 1000 pages on the vacation I've only managed to get through another 200 which is somewhat depressing, particularly since I'm really into the story and would really like to see how it ends. Perhaps even more depressing is that I already took one crack at the series and ran out of steam 1/3 of the way into book 3. I don't think that will happen this time, at least I hope not. One thing that has impressed me on the second read through is how good the writing is, perhaps because having already read it once I'm free to focus on the language. Or perhaps it's because I've read so many things recently that were truly awful (like my blog for instance).

I've started working on my Dreamblade Warband for the SoCal 10k. I'm up to version 3 already and it doesn't look much like the original concept, but hopefully my core concept will remain in there somewhere. With only three weeks to prep time is at a premium. Speaking of which Neverwinter Nights II a game I've been waiting a couple of years for comes out on Wednesday. Oh and did I mention that I'm actually trying to get some business done at SoCal that I should prep for, and don't think I've forgotten about the 1600+ pages I have left in that series I'm reading. Things are going to be tight...

Also, apparently, there's not much love to go round