One advantage to being home sick is that you get to say in all honesty that you spent the day in bed, even when you have the X-box hooked up so that being in bed means you were propped up and got to the end of the game just before midnight.

What a cool game!

This is the first time I've ever played a game from start to finish in the same year in which it was released (unless we go back to Mystic Quest, which is a Final Fantasy game). And despite Rob's insistence otherwise, I only looked up a hint online once -- and that's because I needed to finish the game. Needed to know how it turned out, and there I was so close to the end. It has a good ending. I was perfectly light sided as a Jedi. Got the guy, saved the universe -- all in a day's work.

Now I gotta go play it the other way around, as a dark side Jedi. Bwahahahaha! I can't wait to use some of those cool phrases -- "That's right, I'm the Dark Lord reborn! Now die!"

So like our power went out this morning, probably cosmic rays bursting from the sun! Or the windstorm that apparently swept over the state while we slept. Either way, since I feel like crap with tonsils the size of golf balls I wasn't going to work. I do admit a twinge of irritation when Rob announced around the golf balls in his throat that our power was out because if you're going to be home sick, you need to at least have your electronic toys to keep you company, right? And how can I see what happens next in Knights of the Old Republic without electricity?

Which, btw, I hit a point in the game the other night and it totally took me by surprise. I'm sure everyone else probably saw it coming several planets back, but I'm so innocent. :) It was a cool, "Holy cow! I didn't see that coming!" moment.

I'm glad to see Lynn posting comments around town. :) And it's funny in a twisted way to note that Broos is updating very frequently since we're all so worried about him and California right now.

What I wonder about is how much denial we can put ourselves into concerning the way the world works around us. I read an article about a local family who lost their home in the fires. Apparently dad looked at the fires about 25 miles away at midnight, shrugged it off, and went to sleep, then they were woken at 2AM and given 2 minutes to get out of their house. I'm thinking that if I thought for a moment that there is the possibility of danger, I'd have at least made a point of gathering my important stuff by the door before I went to sleep...but I guess that's not something everyone does. And I don't know if it's really denial, or something else. I look around my place now and try to think of what I'd grab, and frankly most of it's in the fire safe anyway, but there's some photo albums I'd likely scoop up. And my laptop :) I'm not sure that I'd try to grab Maggie and Mittens, which seems rather insensitive...but I honestly can't conceive trying to chase down two cats who hate each other and packing them into separate boxes in two minutes. I'd have to entrust their fate to the gods.

Which means that Mittens is going to poop on the floor later, and Maggie will hurl into my boots again to pay me back for abandoning them in my mind. :/ What would y'all do?

I'm very glad that John's okay. Sorry about the car, but he's okay. And so practical, too. I'm not sure I would have the courage to get back into the car I wrapped around a telephone pole, much less think about selling it on eBay (car, not pole). Although I did read an article some time back about a guy who was arrested for insurance fraud for collecting on the total loss of his motorcycle, then parting it out slowly over the internet. :)

This morning's paper had a photo of one of the fires in California, but didn't mention San Diego. A glance at Broos' website shows that he has a dark cloud hovering over the new 'hood, which is pretty alarming. I recall when I'd gone down to San Diego several years ago to meet a handful of GS3 players and GMs, one of the GMs took me for a walk through his neighborhood down to where a wildfire had stopped, within two blocks of his home. Scary stuff :/ Keep us posted, Broos...my worry genes are worrying for you.

Rob and I are not feeling well. He says he's feeling nauseated. I have a aches and a sore throat. Bleech.

May the week bring us good health and good fortune.

And I thought my job was difficult. :)

I've noticed a trend in the spam emails I receive. The subject line reads something like, "Saw you in church, loved what I saw."

Well, then why'd they wait 7 or 8 years to tell me? :)

In the middle of the night, I heard Maggie hacking up a furball. So I tossed her off the bed and fell back asleep. This morning I got dressed and looked around on the floor, wondering where the furball was but didn't see one. I guessed she'd swallowed it back down, or tossed it up in the hallway or something. Until I put on my boots.

Maggie had cleverly hacked up her soggy furball into my boot, then contrived to slide it into the toe so I couldn't see it (and I did glance into them, since they were on the side of the bed where I'd thrown her off). She was probably somewhere snickering, "Bitch... shove me off the bed...I'll get you."

It's pouring buckets of rain today, apparently breaking the old record of 3.3 inches in 24 hours. At about 18 hours, we had gone to like 3.4+ inches, and it's still coming down.

Indeed, on the way to school I drive up the same road Rob drives us home from Seattle on, through a nice little area called Redondo. Tonight as I headed back to school, not more than a half hour after we had come home on this stretch, something on a construction site had apparently given way to the rain and let loose a flood across the road. So witness Tracy suddenly driving in the dark through a pool of water that is flowing up and over her hood -- and she's at the top of a hill. Very scary.

This weekend I spent some time playing in the little game (as my cherub was hogging my desktop to play EQ) and took up the threads of a long-running storyline that started off with a different GM who'd played the female lead and had a particular player as her "love interest." Which is rather amusing as he is now, but wasn't back then, a GM, so we're sitting there comparing notes on how some of the scripts she used work and stuff, as I've only rarely used her old character as an NPC. Anyway, the male character carries a torch for the female character and always has even though she's not been around pretty much since the first GM who used her quit. On Saturday, despite this character's quirks (she's kind of...well, a tortured soul, shall we say ;>), he and she finally exchanged tokens of love. Aw, how sweet.

Which led to some funny stuff, as we had no idea what sort of verbs worked for "bonded" couples. We both vaguely know there's some cool interactions, but couldn't think how to get them to work. Comes along another GM: "Too bad ::insert girlfriend's name here:: isn't online, or we could show you." Followed by: "Wait. Let me get my notes."

It's bad enough that we had to be fed information on how to kiss by other GMs watching us, but later on when we chatted about it, it was weird because I'm like, his boss, and we're discussing the mechanics of kissing deeply. Now I see why fraternization is discouraged :) I don't know that I can look at him at SimuCon next year now without remembering how this whole thing went and probably turning beet red :D Hehehe!

I'd so much rather play a male NPC because it's totally not me and when my NPC flirts with the other characters, it's all goofy to me anyway. But somehow, being a girl and playing a female NPC knowing that the other character is really a male seemed too much like cheating on Rob. Even though I was giving Rob a blow by blow (so to speak) account of what we were doing in the little game as things progressed.

Is that weird or what?

Comments are working again :)

I spent yesterday doing research for my computer science paper, in which we get to talk about any computer related topic we want. I chose to do a brief history of online games and started digging around on the internet for information. It's kind of interesting to read all this stuff and think about how so many folks now days only see graphical games as computer games, because of the popularity of console games.

But when you look at all these other games, there's still that text box where most of the stuff goes on. The pictures are just fluff :) Although I do admit that I like to pull back out of my Twi'lek and observe her running around and hunting. When she's sitting down, I look at her and admire how cool she looks. But when I'm doing stuff, my eyes go straight to the text window to see what's happening. So in a sense, games haven't really changed all that much, at least as far as the text-based games go.

Chatting with one of my GMs and found out he had a Duke Nukem level issued on one of their CDs. I had no idea :) The things you find out about people. Heh.

Now I'm kind of righteously wroth. I decided that rather than try to figure out any new commenting system, I'd just pay for the Squawkbox one, but it still says I haven't paid and so my comments are still disabled. How freaking annoying is that? And they wonder why people only want the free stuff -- at least when it was free, it worked!

Well, foo. My comments are full and they want me to pay ransom to get them out. How rude :)

My cherub Chris is doing his senior project on "violence and computer games." He asks me who I know who might work in computer games. I'm like, "Uh, me?" :) hehehe! (so be forewarned, people I know who work in computer games -- I may be forwarding an email from an impressionable cherub who wants to know how violent you are, or something like that; please try not to scare him)

I am trying to download DiskKeeper and it simply won't download.

In our last episode, we attempted to defrag the desktop and found that while we could use quite a bit of defragging, the little defragger that comes with XP doesn't like me. So I went on a hunt for a new disk defrag program and the reviews seemed in favor of DiskKeeper.

Anyone have any suggestions for a different program, in the event I just can't get it to work? :/

Meanwhile, it's been a pretty busy week. I had the beginnings of a migraine Tuesday night which thankfully didn't go full blown. A quiet sitting on the couch for a few hours settled me down. Rob has a tummy ache tonight and so I'm going to be braving the elements in a few to find him some Pepto. I often wonder, does Pepto really work, or do we just think it does because that's the stuff our moms gave us when we were little? Kinda like comfort food, only it's comfort medicine.

I have noticed one thing which comforts me. The newest paralegal in the office has tons of experience, but she is not a tidy person :) She's very nice, but the desktop is covered in piles of papers. At least during my short tenure, I kept the place neat. Although, that could be because I wasn't getting the job done. Hmm. But it was tidy! So there! :)

I am cleaning off my hard drive in preparation for an all-out defrag. I used to, pre-Robert, defrag almost every week. Part of the fun is watching the little bars and boxes rearrange themselves into neat bars and boxes, and part of it is seeing if it will really make a difference in performance -- as in, a difference even I can notice and appreciate.

Files full of stuff are now residing on CDs, with back ups for the ones I think are really good to keep in two places (like the 50 copies of my resumes for various jobs). Later on, I'm going to find a place to put up the screen shots of me and Rob from SWG :) You can vote on whether you liked his 'ho look better than the prettifying I did with image designer :)

Weekends sans cherubs are very laid back. I sleep in, do some laundry on Sunday, putter around looking up things for the little game, or playing one of the many games I have in half-finished mode. The other night I tried out Rachet and Clank on my upstairs PS2 and remembered why I'd paused -- there's this big boss-type creature that I haven't figured out how to beat yet. One thing that annoys me about R&C is that even when you save the game before entering something dicey, when you load your game up, it starts you back from the moment you landed on that planet or whatever. Which, to my mind, defeats the purpose of allowing you to save the game anywhere along the way in the first place.

There's so many things I want to do now that I'm only taking one class in school, that I can't decide what to do first. There's still some TV shows I want to watch on Tivo, besides the games on PS2 and XBox. I want to get Metroid Prime, but with all the other fun stuff to do, when will I have time to half-finish a game on GameCube too? :)

A big hug to my 'ster who is not feeling well (or feeling entirely too well, given the drugs of choice she's currently mainlining). Also, kudos to my niece Cydney, who made her stage debut Friday night as Tiger Lily in a production of Peter Pan! Wheeee!

Waaaaaah! The cinerama is sold out for December 16th :(

This can't be good. I bought another PS2. For my bedroom. :(

Now I can work on FFX before FFX2 and FFXI come out :)

Someone seems to have put mooville out to pasture. Where did y'all go? :(

I started playing Knights of the Old Republic this weekend, with my cherub Philip guiding me. Sometimes he guides a little too intensely, as in grabbing the controller when I wandered down a hallway he didn't think I should be wandering down, but I bit him and then he kept his hands to himself. Men.

The thing with having every gaming system known to man is that these systems are all plugged and wired into the same big screen TV as is wired to Tivo, which means I can't play anything if Rob is already watching TV. If I want to play SWG, I have to stay downstairs on the PC, which disturbs Rob's Force (ie, when he falls asleep on the couch he will smack me when I walk by if I've made too much noise playing a game...such as screaming when a vrobalet smites me). Anyway.

It seems a bit of overkill to have two of everything, even though I long for he-tivo and she-tivo. His shows fill up the capacity and he goes around deleting things he thinks I don't want to watch. I was quite animatedly upset when he, thinking it was a diet program, deleted "After the Thin Man," which I had recorded on purpose, knowing it's a movie. He thinks I go around deleting shows I don't think he wants to watch. Which I might, but not on purpose.

How many of y'all have redundant entertainment systems so the He's and the She's of your homes can play games or watch movies in peace?

Got up at 4AM and my mind was whirling through all the things to do. Gotta move the rest of my stuff from one desk to another again, as my attorney's latest (and more experienced) paralegal starts today. I've already swiped the good chair :) After all, she's a petite thing and this chair is the only one in the office that rises up high enough for me. Many people coveted the chair after the last paralegal left and I'm the lucky recipient.

Then there's some filing and other general cleaning up. I don't want her coming in to a backlog, but over the last week it's been so hectic that I haven't been able to keep up.

Makes me wonder if I'm meant for this type of life. It's so stressful. But also, some of the stress should die down when the partner has an assistant who can do his work and his alone, and I can do what I'd been doing for the other attorneys without having to drop everything when he needs something. He's been real nice and understanding, but it'll be good to not have to worry about him anymore :)

I cannot believe I am so hooked on SWG that after I got ready this morning, I sat here and dashed off a couple of little missions. I've never really liked EQ, and still don't know why I don't, but SWG got me from the scrolling words up the screen. Hehehe. And the fact that you can resize your female attributes which I really appreciate. The other day I was reading a forum for women game developers and noticed almost all the posts are by men, who were wondering why they can't seem to hire any women. When I went to the GDC a couple years ago, one of them from Blizzard came up and asked me. I told him to take a look at the average game box and the massive, pointy breasts on every woman and tell me why a woman would want to work for a company that sold a product like that :)

Anyway, Rob is fretting so I need to leave. Have a great day!