Another night in the big city. Went adventuring with Steph! I believe this was our virgin adventure experience :) One death, but otherwise a great night!

Except you know, I have no sense of direction using both my left hand and my right. :/ While I'm using the right clicker on the mouse to scroll side to side and the keypad to move, every time someone runs up something (like a fire escape ladder), I couldn't coordinate well enough to follow. So I spent some time going, "Where are you?" and they spent some time going, "We're over here. You dork." :)

Very much fun. Not feeling stressed. Well, maybe a little. I hope the class didn't take the mid-term too hard, it wasn't so difficult but I glanced over their answers and one or two students missed a couple things that I didn't think they would. But there, it's a test, so they'll always remember it now, won't they?

And off to sleep. At least I get to just crawl upstairs. Poor Steph has to drive home.

Last night after a pretty much day-long event in the little game, I finally took out my City of Heroes pre-order and got into it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure out the entire how to convert your beta account thing, but on the bright side, I did get close enough to the name I'd reserved to not mind. Played for a nice little bit, up to level 4.65 now, and died many good deaths with a happy gang of adventurers. Some of them, it occurred to me, I haven't adventured with ever; others, not since GEnie. It was cool.

Now I'm off to administer a mid-term exam. It's supposed to get up to the 80's today in Seattle. Oy!

Heidi (one of the attorneys here) and I discovered that one of our programs comes with instant messaging, so we sent each other messages. Very exciting! Now we can let each other know when something exciting is going on without having to get up from our chairs and walk the five steps to each other's desks. It's those little things in life that are cool. :)

I still don't want to reinstall AIM or ICQ at home, though, even though my staff wishes I had it. I think about it, and I know how I operate, and that would be too interesting to me and I wouldn't get anything else done. I had had ICQ when Rob was in Virginia; we spent a lot of time chatting on that before we got married. Now, however, when I'm online doing something I don't want to have someone pestering me, no matter how worthy the cause. I'm not sure when I developed this kind of desire to be hidden. Perhaps I have a latent Howard Hughes gene coming to the fore?

Excuse me while I change my kleenex box shoes for the drive home.

My husband is a sweetheart. :) Last week, I chanced to mention how I loooooove Kenny Loggins, but haven't seen him in concert in many years. The last time being when I worked occasionally for my sister in exchange for free tickets.

So he went out and looked for upcoming concerts and bought us tickets, which since Kenny isn't coming to Washington this year, meant a trip out of state. To San Diego. Unfortunately on the eve of my son's high school graduation.

Alas, we won't be seeing Kenny Loggins this year :( I'm bummed, but since my mother is planning to come up for Chris' graduation, I'd be too stressed to enjoy it. Even if it means we'd get to see Broos again. I hope John and Michelle go in our stead...but it's hard to know who might be a Kenny Loggins fan besides me. He's very cute. :)

Sushi rocks, Sushi rolls! She's the cause of a couple of hours of fun in my life and I am happy! :)

Of course, there were some odd moments for me. I spend considerable time (and a few choice unhappy words) wandering around Paragon City, trying to find the brawling trainer who was marked in one spot on my map and another by the in-game locator. A kind stupor hero took pity on me and led me to the trainer...who was surrounded by a huge crowd right outside the building. Heh!

It was really fun, though. I can see why Steph is hooked on it. And it also made me think of one reason why original EQ hasn't caught my eye like SWG did.

In my heart of RP hearts, I think of GSIII as my first medieval roleplaying game, so when I first entered EQ, it seemed to be a cheap knock off :) SWG and City of Heroes, though, are in such non-medieval settings that I don't have any game I liked before them to compare them against. It's kind of odd, considering I haven't even played GSIV. I had Skippy create me a player account because it dawned on me that I've never had one since Genie closed. :) All my characters are spread across my GM accounts.

So now I have something fun to remember from this weekend. I got to play a nifty game for a couple of hours today. Now I need to work on my lecture notes for Monday, followed by some work on crafting. Tomorrow will be a lot of crafting. But I am hoping to take Lael for another spin kicking session through the city.

Thanks, Sushi!

I Love My Job.com Homepage. For those who are wondering what drove them to get a job where they are currently employed, or for those who are damn happy with their workplace!

A Game Player's Prayer:

Please, please, don't invite Rob to beta test any more games. I don't know how many more swear words I can handle on this day without picking up an iron skillet and bashing in his computer to make it go away. I am a sweet, kind, patient woman but if I have to listen to more desk poundings and foul language I will have to smack him. With something heavy. Right upside the head.

ChrisWho asks if I've taken hiatus from posting to get to level 23 :) I totally wish! Last night after a long day (teaching, work, a stop at Ikea to order bookcases for the office), I dropped in at the little Thai restaurant around the corner from where we live. As I waited the usual five minutes for my dinner, all the stuff I'm doing just wafted over me and I felt so tired and so incredibly exhausted, I wanted to just sit there with my two star green curry and not move. Ever.

Of course, I didn't. I wandered on home with my take away supper. Rob worked late too, so the home was empty except for two cats, both anxious to know where I'd been. They followed me up the stairs as I sat on the bed with my dinner, curling up beside me and making it pretty darn hard to reach over to the TiVo controller. But it's nice to be loved, isn't it precious? Ah, yessss.

One of the games being shown at the Independent Game Festival was Fashion Cents, which I played yesterday while waiting for my wireless internet connection to stabilize. It's a really cute game that has an addictive quality to it that is similar to playing Bejeweled...you feel as though you can just get one more level! Just one more! And suddenly, your cherubs are laughing at you because you're telling the game, "That does too match!"

Today I played Champions of Norrath with Chris. It was much more relaxing than playing with Phil, who gets irritated when I need time to figure out what weapon is better than the next one. Chris and I played at the same leisurely pace, comparing armors and weapons and trying generally to buy or find the best stuff. After outfitting my character, I watched him trying out different combos and then checking his attack and defense numbers and I finally blurted out, "That like so does not match!" Guess who'd been playing too much Fashion Cents? :)

I don't know how much of Rob's jokes his coworkers believe, but I trust none of you think I really have spam marketers working on my behalf :P