"It's December already!?"
Or: where life takes us.
Despite two posts in between, when we last left our villain, it was just after Lex.
My post-Lex dip mostly included getting my health back up to some measure of fitness. I gamed, cleaned up the house and chilled. That's it. The weekend I still took it very easy but had an interesting meeting on the Sunday together with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
maglok and several others. I went to the doctor on Monday and my health checked out, though I got the "take it easier" speech from the man. He's been my doctor since I was born (technically before that), so he has that right *grin*. Tuesday I went back to work, and of course there was lots waiting for me. Had missed the work-dinner and one guy leaving, to my annoyance, but I just got back in the sadle, though a lot easier. High point in the week was going to the Golden Compass with a whole group, also eating at a pancake restaurant. It gave me the Lextalionis-Afterdip-Catharsis that I had missed with being ill, and with fresh inspiration I started anew with some plotbits I had floating around up there.
The Saturday afterward we went to Games-In-Concert, well worth it in my opinion; Zelda, Starfox, Tetris... a lot of fun! Dropped the group I was with off at the end of it at home since Jo had some minor cartroubs as well. The Sunday saw the Winterfair, which was a small shopping spree for both Lies and myself, and saw two lectures by Prof. Rotherham, which I always love. Saw and talked to a whole host of friends, and that is always good. All in all, a busy though solid weekend.
The week wasn't great. Luckily I had Crossfire and Alternity to cheer me up, but every day brought new problems to the IT department, which is now in the process of collapse. Thursday especially was meh. Work just didn't go well, a collegue heard that her sister had died in a carcrash and swiftly left, leaving us with yet another man short - for obvious reasons, though, I will take her work without complaint. The baddest news for me personally was that Prima, my Renault, had a serious problem: her ventilation system had stopped working. While not the biggest disaster she was impossible to warm up and de-humidify... I brought her over for repairs and drove Kaylee again, which Kaas had returned. The Renault Dealer looked at it and promply seriously overcharged the repair-fee (we are talking month-of-salary level here), so I said them goodbye and will look for a different garage. I may not be a car-specialist, but you are not cheating me out of my hard-earned cash.
My birthday was good on Friday. A lot of family and people came, and I served drink and got pie with my girl. Gifts were cool, with two things standing out: a G15 gaming keyboard from the Alternity crew and an Aspire 5720 laptop from friends and family. Thank you all. After family had left we had a smaller larper group still hanging around and the conversation inevitably turned to larps, mostly Lex. I have JW two DVD's worth of vids of Lex that I still had on my HD, and the four tapes of Elysium security footage of Lex III. He will digitize it all and it will most likely become quite the archive of the chronicle OC, and a record of ForeSight IC. Close to 12 most peeps left, and quiet descended on to the house.
Naturally, the first thing I did was go upstairs, hook up my new keyboard and install my new laptop with Linux / XP instead of Vista... XP drivers for her, however, required a little creativity, as there was no driver CD (bad, BAD Asus!) and no driverpackage with XP drivers on the site. A few Google searches and building a custom XP installation DVD later I had the basics up and running, but it took me till Sunday-afternoon to get it all online. Linux, of course, was a matter of two hours (had a decent image on CD and took me all of an hour to gather all the drivers). Still, that gives me a laptop capable of most current games, a decent storage capacity and a nice all-round set of tools and handy things. In good tradition I picked out a name for her, one that I considered for the previous computer already: Athena. For obvious reasons.
Saturday Lies and myself shopped in Rotterdam, running into Onno at the Freetime Warrior and hanging around in the city center. After getting new DVD's we went home again and spent a quiet night on the couch, watching Blood and Chocolate, a Werewolf movie, which was not half-bad. Played Supreme Commander and a little WoW the rest of the evening, boosting Lies' alt Sterra the Gnome Frost Mage through the Stockades with my own main. I tinkered a little more on my laptop and eventually slept around 04:00 (Just ONE more level, just ONE more level...).
Sunday we first went for a walk in the frozen forest just behind Krimpen. A nice walk and a good walk, after which we drank some hot cocao and coffee and went to "Mr. Magorium's Magic Emporium". A nice movie, that, and it was done fairly early so we had a good evening ahead of us. Some "The Devil Wears Prada" later I resumed tinkering with the laptop and Supreme Commander, which I promptly played out (something to do with excessive amounts of unlimited ranged artillary and a powergenerator which generates unlimited energy) in under an hour and a half. Gave Sterra a boost again, this time through Blackfathom, my second visit ever there and first with my main. Slept around 12.
Looking forward to a quiet week as I have done most if not all of my Xmas shopping - also, as of the 31st of January I will stop working for Nutricia, for which I am very happy. They will replace both me and another employee who recently left by one person, and I wish that person all the luck in the world. It is no longer my problem. Other then that, not complaining.
I have been having very bizarre dreams, though. Vivid, too. Normally that only happens when I am rested, but now they have been occuring quite frequently. Most, of course, are about friends and larps; only very rarely I share them with others. Three weeks ago I had a dream I called 'the dollhouse' featuring puppets and puppeteers in some kind of larp setting. People played one of those two classes, sometimes switching roles. spacegeest was the main puppeteer, pulling strings and reigning the puppet Kingdom. maglok was the general, and I think I know where that came from. Some person, sometimes a prince and sometimes a princess needed to be rescued, but all the puppets got their strings mixed up because they all wanted to rescue that person first. Some people were really miniature dolls, others were human-sized. Some were wood with string attached, others looked like they normally would, but with strings tied to their arms and legs. Some were dressed in a traditional doll's outfits, some were dressed as Punch-dolls (Jan Klaassen), others were more modern and looked like the Nightmare Before Christmas cast. There was a lot of laughter, though. Maybe I should not have been reading "The Gilded Cage" just before going to sleep...
Last week I had another weird one. I had been reading larplist.com and found a nice post in concepts. There had been this funny-larp called "Life" (levelling as per age), with the subtitle "facing the challenges of everyday life". Had a hoot going over it in my mind and slept soon after; for some reason it stayed in there and materialized in a dream. Most of my larping friends and even a few non-larping friends that I have not seen in ages (due to emigrating) were there in one form or another. There were children which were suddenly played by a larper, or a larper suddenly being a child. There were also elderly who were old, and then suddenly larpers in make-up. I must say, some of you looked quite cute as your infant, toddler and child selves, while others looked really cool as their adult and elderly selves. They all emphasized the good traits about those ages: the younglings were cute, beautiful and playful, while the older ones were wise, kind and patient. It was quite the idealistic world, an Elysium one might say. Some people had multiple parts, playing a child and then their 'own' parent, as if it was some generational chronicle. I remember asking fyrane what the game was all about, and she looked at me weird and said "For ningyomatsuri's bachelorette party, of course!", which at that moment made perfect sense to me, apparently, because the game went on. What was funny is that it was unclear what I was myself. Probably the storyteller. Heh.
Transmutation and change seems to be the main theme here, which is typical of the current era of my life. I tend to wake up quite relaxed from those dreams. Very nice.
Lastly, a test chose from the plethora of New Year's tests around currently.
aka the 99-books meme.
- Bold the ones you've read.
- Italicize the ones you want to read.
- Leave unaltered the ones that you aren’t interested in or haven’t heard of.
I've red most, and those I have not red I am either uninterested in or have not heard from. Only two or three in there that I still want to read but have not found the time for.
1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (JRR Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (JRR Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (JK Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
68. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
69. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
70. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
71. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
72. Shogun (James Clavell)
73. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
74. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
75. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
76. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
77. The World According to Garp (John Irvin)
78. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
79. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
80. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
81. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
82. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
83. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
84. Emma (Jane Austen)
85. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
86. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
87. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
88. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
89. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
90. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
91. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
92. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
93. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
94. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
95. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
96. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
97. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
98. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
99. Ulysses (James Joyce)
okay
