The Ring

No, not the One Ring. Just my engagement ring.

And we now return you to your regularly scheduled insanity.

Wedding website, wooo!

Not too much to report in my end. It’s been a long crappy week, with lots of headaches over various things. I’m hoping that this week is gonna be better, cos the other option is just too damned tiring!

We’re making progress on the wedding front, but not too much is going to be done this week other than picking up the engagement ring from the jewelry store. Next week is when I head up to Oxford for various meetings. Included in that is going to be checking out the various hotels in town for both me and guests. I’d prefer that everyone not get killed with hotel bills. ><

Other than that, we finally have a wedding website up. Here ya go! Once the trip to Oxford is over at the end of the month, I’ll be able to fill out some more info on there for everyone.

And on that note, off I go to deal with the latest sinus headache. ::sigh::

It’s Monday

Thanks everyone that gave me congrats. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster the past few days, and I still can’t believe it’s only just happened 4 days ago. Everyone keeps asking when we’re going to have it and where, and that stuff is still up in the air. The engagement ring has been picked out, purchased, and sent off to be resized, so once I get that in, pictures will happen. Colors have been picked (I picked blue, like that was a shocker, and Jared confirmed that purple is awesome). Other than that? Not. A. Clue. ::grin:: Discussions and negotiations will occur later this week.

In other news, I cast on a baby blanket for Breana, took it apart, cast it on again, knitted one row, pulled it apart, cast it on again, counted, pulled it apart, then cast on a 4th time. I think this one is going to stick. Sheesh. After I get done with that, I have another baby blanket, same pattern but a different color, to do for my friend Anne’s sister-in-law. At least this time, I know what I’m doing for the cast-ons!

Game-wise, I’m trying to get back into LoTRO, but my brain can’t handle it right now. I did get a Wii for Xmas, and bought myself a Wii Fit Plus, and have been making myself very very sore as a result. I think today is the first day that I’ve woken up with no back pain, but there were other things causing that, so we’ll see if it was the Wii or the other stuff soon.

Now to -finally- get to that book order and get some stuff done around the store!

The Answer

A modest proposal

Moving soon – let the pain begin!

Moving is a pain in the rump. When I moved into my house in Atlanta, I had movers do it. I’d had movers do it ever since the one apartment move just about damned near killed me and my friends I’d been able to beg to come help me. After that, I said “Screw it. $300 for two guys and a truck to get it done in 3 hours? Sounds great.”

When I left Atlanta, it was a self-move. I just didn’t have the money to hire a truck and people to move us. Instead, we talked to the guy that was doing the build-out on the store and he knew of a couple of guys that would be happy to earn some extra cash to help Jared unload the rented truck. Me? I know my limits. I stayed upstairs and pointed where everything would go, while reassuring the cats that they weren’t going to die and everything was okay. Oh and I passed around water bottles. It was hot as hell that day.

Last Friday, we got new neighbors. And aren’t they a treat. It was bad enough that a building that had been blocking the view and the noise from the railroad tracks on the other side of it had been knocked down, but the new neighbors neglected to find parking suitible for them, as well as all of their friends. What neighbors? A bar. A glass-fronted bar. Not a suitibly sound-proofed with a double door entry way that blocks the sound, but a plain old plate glass all across the front of the whole damned thing with no sound proofing qualities at all bar. Oh, and they have live music. Joy.

Now, back in the day, I used to go to bars. They were also properly sound-proofed. (Hey Jas, remember Netherworld? ::grin::) I don’t go to clubs anymore, and even if I did, this would not be a club I’d go to. It’s been a bad build from the start, with a small fire, arguements with the historic preservationists, permit issues, and then the cracked slab that would have been for parking, except they didn’t bother to check to make sure there wasn’t a hole underneath the slab of the early 1900’s building they tore down. So we got to watch everyone circling the blocks for parking (this is not a complex I live in, but refurbed early 1900’s stores/offices, so it’s street parking for all), and then Saturday night, the 3 cop cars coming to deal with the one drunk guy stupid enough to take his shirt off and start screaming obscenities at the bouncers.

Yeahhhhhhh, so not where I want to live. Did I mention I’m literally across the street from this place? /growl

It all got capped off with me having to call the cops an hour after everyone had left and the bar had closed for the night because we had more drunks standing out on the sidewalk in front of our apartment being loud and I couldn’t take it anymore. I was tired, cranky, and wanted SLEEP! The cops came, and told the people to go home and the people… stayed. /sigh A couple of them live below us, and they didn’t go inside their apartment, so I slept on the couch.

However, the lady that co-owns the store with Mom, the store that I’m the manager of, she also owns some “apartments”. They’re called apartments, but I went and looked at them yesterday with Jared. They’re bloody townhomes. Small, only 1100 square feet (the house in Atlanta was 2100 sq. ft.), but that’s about what we’re living in now. We’re also not using 1/2 the bedroom (bad positions for load bearing posts), and a 1/4 of the living room (more bad load bearing posts). It’s got carpet (yey! no more cold feet!), brand new appliances (yey! no more questionable freezer closing!), and two bedrooms (yey! seperate room for the comps!). Best of all? TWO AND A HALF BATHROOMS! /swoon Hey we’re dealing with a 1 bed, 1 bath right now, and when Jared’s gut and my gut are both having issues at the same time, it gets dicey.

The new place comes with washer/dryer connections, but she’s going to order some for us on Monday when she gets back into town, so we don’t have to worry about having to buy some. The kitchen’s a bit small, but I’ve lived in worse. Best of all? There’s covered private gated parking. It’s quiet. And there’s not a bar in sight.

So some point in the next week and a half, it looks like we’re going to be moving. Tonight, Jared and I get to sit down and discuss when we want to do this, when he can get his friends who’ve already offered to help in exchange for free lasagna to commit, and when we can get all the utilities on at the new place. the biggest issue is going to be the cable/internet, but that’s always the way. Me? I’m just hoping that this weekend is the last weekend we spend here. It’s been lovely, but we really need to go now.

It’s cold

It’s cold outside. Yep, cold. And I’m somewhere between “yey!” and “…hate you”. “Yey!” cos I’m tired of the hot weather. “…hate you” cos I loathe being cold. And I haven’t finished my first pair of hand-knited socks yet. I kinda got distracted with the WoW guild going boom, the release of Dragon Age: Origins, and restarting playing Lord of the Rings Online. Whoops. ^^;

LoTRO’s going well. I’m having a fun time, other friends are poking their noses in and checking it out, and while I still adore my hunter there, I’m having some amusement leveling a Guardian, which is a tank.

Yep, a TANK. You may now all feel free to pick yer collective jaws up off the floor.

Why? Cos someone had to do it and everyone else is too busy playing healers or DPS and giggling. That includes the “I’m a damned good tank!” boyfriend. He’s off either muttering “burgle burgle burgle” udner his breath before breaking out into giggles, or playing around on his Lore Master (think druid with animal pets instead of animal forms). His LM and my Guardian are the same level, so we’ve been leveing together. Which has lead to some interesting comments between the two of us.

“Grr.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, if I’m going to try to, well, tank, it’d be nice to get aggro FIRST.”
“…::dies giggling and pulls the next mobs with a spell crit::”
“…::sighs and proceeds to hit every threat button I have::”

My muttered comment to him, since he’s insisting on being Aggro Whore, is I can manage to keep the mobs on me, and not on him, by end game, I’ll be a damned good tank and able to handle anything. His response? “…::gringigglenuke::”

…bastard.

And in a bit of good news, the problems that were plaguing me in LoTRO before, which was my keyboard/mouse would randomly disconnect with no notice, then reconnect at it’s leisure, unless I plugged and replugged the damned thing were fixed. Turns out, the mouse disconnection was strictly because it was plugged into the keyboard. The Apple keyboard was the issue in Windows. Whether it was from a faulty driver, or it was starting to develop a short in the line, it’s been fixed. How? I bought a G15 keyboard. Things are much, much better. ::grin::

So this weekend, I’m hoping that I can get a little more cleaning done on the apartment, fix bagels again, get some LoTRO time in, and play some more Dragon Age. Still haven’t finished it, but been distracted. Oh, and knit! Mmm… knitting. /purr

Well that was fun

Last Tuesday, I got Dragon Age: Origins. I promptly threw myself into the game, cackling over the fact I had the rest of the week off to enjoy it. I’m now almost (or just over, I lost track) 30 hours in on my first character, and damn, I’m in love.

Yeah, there’s some stuff that irritates me, but it’s so minor, it feels like I’m trying to find something bad about it. The conversations that the rest of my party has with each other while we’re walking crack me up. These characters have personality, which can be lacking a lot of times in games. Bioware hasn’t let me down in the past, and they didn’t this time either.

And yes, there’s a romance section. I went for the easy obvious choice for a human woman character: Alistair. He’s irreverent, cocky, cracks jokes at the worst times, and you can almost see him poking and prodding those people that irritate him til they explode, where upon he would run off giggling. At the same time he’s fiercely loyal, honest, brave, and while not ambitious, he’d do whatever it takes to ensure peace, and god help you if you hurt those he cares for. Add in that he’s been sheltered his whole life and has NO clue how to deal with the opposite sex, so he keep trying to not trip over himself and screw things up.

Did I ever mention I have a very large soft spot for sarcastic-yet-sweet knight errants? Yeah, thanks Bioware. I got to hear growling from the other end of the couch while playing this and grinning my head off at Alistair’s profession of love to my character. At least cookies calm the Jared-beast.

The voice acting is amazing (and a little odd when I blink at the screen and yelp “Hey! That’s Shishio!” at a random dwarf), and the storyline is compelling. The only real problems I’ve had are:
1. I’m not at home still playing this and,
2. The Fade makes my eyes hurt from constantly trying to focus.

So all in all, not too bad of a use of my time off last week, as far as I was concerned. Especially since my guild has effectively ended in WoW. Jared and I both sighed and got to evaluating our options. We could either move to another guild for end content, move to another server, stay where we are and accept we’re not even going to do 5-mans within the guild, or say “So long and thanks for all the fish.” Well as of right now, neither of us has cancelled our accounts, but he’s handing the leadership over to another guild member.

We’ve both reactivated Lord of the Rings Online, and have been playing that this week, when we haven’t been playing DA:O. I have so many group quests in there on my main character, it’s insane. Right now, I’m waiting to see if the couple of guildies that are exploring LoTRO with us continue, and if they do, then when they’re at that level, we can do the quests together. Siarian is now level 30, and I’m starting to sweat the gold gathering for a mount at level 35. It costs 4 gold and 220 silver. I have 2 gold, barely.  Did I mention that one gold is 1,000 silver? /faint

So how do I feel about the guild all going their seperate ways? To be honest, not too badly. I keep in contact with a good chunk of them via Facebook and emails, so I’m not exactly losing many of them. And weirdly, when I got the Hallowed title on Wrenn, I thought to myself “Okay, WoW can blow up tomorrow. I’m good.” Would I like to see more of the game? Sure. I’d love to see what the end of Uldar looks like, or any of ToC other than the 5-man stuff. But most of what I was doing in WoW these days was fluff bits – hunting for more achievements and pets. Things that didn’t really advance the game for me. So while I’ve not cancelled my account yet, I most likely will at some point. I’ll be a little sad, but I still have the friends that I made in it, and that’s really what matters.

Tired Nightravyn is tired

This weekend, Exar and I went to go see Mom. Well, that was part of the visit. The main reason for going was what I posted on Saturday: the Ole Miss football game, tailgating in the Grove, and all the rabid Rebel fans you could shake a stick at. It was Exar’s first sight of the Grove completely overtaken with tailgating tents, girls in pearls and heels, guys in khakis, and about half the alums already tanked at 10am. Due to the ticket sales fiasco (major overselling, and people were moved all over the place), instead of the sideline seats we were supposed to have, we were in the endzone. The endzone in the sun. Can we say sunburned? Oh good, so can I. I can also say “Solarcaine.” (Owie.) I’m down to the itchy part, and starting to peel on my face (joy), but at least it’s not the pain that I was in on Sunday when we drove back home. At least it was a good game, and Exar enjoyed himself (and the BBQ nachos, but we won’t go there).

Another part of our trip was talking some stuff over with Mom and her builder. She’s working on putting an addition onto the 1930’s bungelow than my great-grandparents built. The original house is 1300~ square feet. She’s adding 2000 square feet. Yes, she’s got that much stuff, why do you ask? Fortunately her builder is a good guy, and the stuff she needed to go over was quickly taken care of. She still needs to find some tile for the kitchen backsplash, but it’s mostly taken care of at this point. Colors for paint got nailed down too, so that’s off the “need to bug the kid about” list, thank heavens. At least she’s gotten most of the appliances already purchased or lined up. The addition is going to look -good- when it’s finally done. When we were there, they’d managed to get the trees taken out to make room for the addition, and dug the pit for the foundations. Yesterday, it had managed to dry out enough that they could pour the foundations. With luck, the framing guys will be out there within the week to start framing and then they can really get some work going.

As far as WoW goes, we got back on Sunday where we promptly fell over dead. But Monday was a good day for me. I managed to go from 406/700 Kalimdor quests to 445/700 quests. AND I also got the following:

1. To All The Squirrels I’ve Loved Before
2. Explore Darkshore
3. Explore Durotar
4. Explore The Barrens
5. Explore Mulgore
6. Explore Ashenvale
7. Heroic: Azjol-Nerub
8. Volunteer Work
9. Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom (Missed a boss so no Heroic on it)
10. Northrend Dungeonmaster
11. The Old Gnome and the Sea
12. Fish Don’t Leave Footprints
13. 250 Fish (woooo!)
14. Expert Fisherman

I might have been a bit determined yesterday. >.>

Gone Tailgatin’

Be back later…