Happy Halloween!

Shopping!

One of the nice things about Barb being here is that I finally have a partner in crime for shopping. :)

We spent part of yesterday and today picking out her new furniture and buying clothes for Cydney (and ourselves, ahem). Barb's new couch and dining room set will get here on Tuesday, so we'll have places to sit.

I've been staying at her place since she turned the rental car back in. It's interesting to be living apres femmes after all the years where I've been the only chick in the house. It also seems a bit noisier here since she lives closer in to the office, so we have some street traffic noises as well as the sounds of the neighbors in the next building over.

Jodie and Rich hosted game night on Friday at their new place, but I had to stay around to make sure some stuff was working before Barb and I could leave the office, and thus we ended up missing it. That's a real shame! I want to see their new house and I soooooo miss game night and Barb was really looking forward to attending her first one, too.

Where she so would have been the werewolf.

Pod People

Our latest podcast is available, including a short interview with yours truly. :)

Isn't it interesting that an odd word like "podcast" is now part of our relatively everyday vocabulary now? I haven't got an iPod, but I know what it is. So odd, how words spring into use.

We're working late hours this week, so I'm glad I took most of the weekend off. The wine tasting on Saturday went fairly well, though that's such a long drive to make. I'm guessing it seems even further because the landscape is so unrelentingly dull. After a half hour of driving through sage and brown, I really miss the evergeens in Washington.

Can't wait to see them again...and it's only about a month away! Yay!

Sadness and Song

The news is finally out. Naturally, sharing an office with Steve, I've known his news for some time. When I came into the office the other day to see that he'd packed up half of his toy collection, I stood in the doorway and just felt so, so sad.

Yeah, I threw an owl at him. Yeah, we swear at each other almost every day. Yeah, I'm totally going to miss him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ooh. The Soundtrack thing! (Clever segue, eh?) I'd been meaning to put this up ever since I got it from someone on MySpace a couple weeks ago, but haven't had time. Now that Melissa has also put up a soundtrack of her life, I'm inspired to do mine! And so, here we go:

Opening Credits:
"Better People"- India.Arie

Waking Up:
"Bad Connection" Yaz

First Day At School:
"Ebudae" Enya

Falling In Love:
"Going Out of My Head" Queen Latifah

Fight Song:
"Ecstasy" George Fenton

Breaking Up:
"Don't Stop" The Brazilian Girls

Prom:
"Rockin' After Midnight" Marvin Gaye

Life is Good:
"Do You Remember" Jack Johnson

Mental Breakdown:
"That's Why I'm Here" James Taylor

Driving:
"Let's Groove" Earth, Wind and Fire

Flashback:
"New Kid in Town" The Eagles

Getting Back Together:
"Keep the Fire" Kenny Loggins

Wedding:
"More of the Night" The Whispers

Final Battle:
"A Love Song" Loggins and Messina

Death Scene:
"That's What A Fae Can Be" I kid you not...sometime I'll put the mp3 of just the song on my website...Steve Danuser, Ryan Shwayder and me

Funeral Song:
"On My Way Home" Enya

End Credits:
"Bailero" Sarah Brightman

Dating Exposes!

I've been signed up for three different dating websites. Match.com and Yahoo are pretty similar: you go shopping for dates and the sites will email you lists of dudes (or dudettes) they think are compatible with the profile you've put on file. You can subscribe or not, but obviously have more options if you subscribe.

eHarmony is ubiquitous, so I filled out their questionnaire and chose a three month subscription. You cannot see anyone's profile other than the ones that they send directly to you. That makes it feel less of a meat market, and you can't see the "competition" (the other women in your age bracket).

Rather than sending you a match and leaving you on your own, eHarmony offers a guided communication process. You have lists of questions with preset answers (with room for one freeform response per question) that you and your match send back and forth once you review their basic profile and decide to explore the potential. There are lists of "must have" and "can't stand" criteria that you also share with your match, so you can each see some of those things that you really want to have or avoid.

So far, I've met two of the eHarmony dudes and find that those 29 dimensions aren't all they're cracked up to be. In the end, it still comes down to whether you and that match have chemistry in person and can communicate verbally what you're really about. I mean, I am all for moonlit walks in Del Mar along the beach; I am not about having my date jump me once we've stepped out of the street lights just because he's been wanting kiss me since we got there. Hello?! Show some respect!

This week, I have lined up two potential "victims." Tomorrow, I'm having lunch with someone who sent me a message through the Yahoo personals section. Saturday, I'm going to Temecula to visit a winery with a different eHarmony guy.

I feel like I'm in a reality TV show...Project Boyfriend maybe? Any suggestions for a title?

Murder, She Wrote

Or more like, "JOHN!!" she hollered.

She being me and John being the werewolf who surreptitiously unhooked my monitor from my PC as I was too busy playtesting to chat with him and SteveD was telling John to leave me alone so I would be able to concentrate on my job as healer.

It took me a good fifteen minutes to restore my computer to its fully functional form. Steve didn't die in my absence as fortunately, we were grouped with the dudes in the office next door. The moment I yelped about my monitor going completely dark, Steve yelled out the door for Kramer (our group's other healer) to focus on him. The world revolves around Moorgard, that's for sure. :)

I miss our regularly scheduled game nights. Through my MySpaced account, Burnsie's girlfriend Shienna keeps in touch with me and expressed an interest in a book I mentioned. I took it to Burns to take to her and we talked about needing to do something for a Halloween-related game night so that we can play Betrayal at House on the Hill.

This is one of my favorite game night games because each time you play, you potentially have a different scenario. We've played it for two years and I personally can only remember two times where we had the same situation come up...but even then, the way the tiles are laid and the players involved make it a different game entirely.

I actually ordered a copy of the game for myself because I like it so much. So come Halloween, I'm really hoping that some of us will be able to get together to enjoy Betrayal, Gloom or just plain old werewolf. Especially the last one, as I know who is so a werewolf!

Poetry and Prose

In order to meet menfolk beyond the gaming gene pool, I put up little dating profiles at Match and Yahoo, signed up for a couple of months of eHarmony and attended a speed dating event.

Dating has always been a mysterious process. I find myself second-guessing the profiles of the supposed matches...he still seems bitter...surely he's adding on an extra bit of height...and subtracting some girth...this profile isn't what I'd actually meet. So far, including the time that Melani and I went through this all those years ago, I've been right.

The men I've met (whether face to face or not) through these dating adventures are mostly prose. They're nice enough but I kept hoping there'd be poetry somewhere. A song, a spark...something.

I'm still optimistic. Poetry is on the horizon, perhaps it is in my life even now. That's the beauty of being a hopeless romantic! Romance is always a possibility!

Could it already be here? :)

Why I Don't Group in Games

After all this time, I've realized why I don't group up in games. I'm just not a grouping kind of girl!

Before I left for the VO studio in Burbank, we had a playtest in an area that requires grouping. I begged SteveD to let me be in his group since not only had he designed the area, with him in the same room, he could just tell me what to do.

I was a healer. Steve's instruction consisted of, "Just keep up with me and heal me." Well, I could certainly do that!

We had a full group and we traversed dungeon. It was very exciting! I can see now why folks enjoy this sort of adventure!

As per his instruction, I kept Steve's character in my target window, healing him the moment he pulled anything (he was our tank). He would holler over at me, "Hello? That orc is hitting me." and "Geeze, all you have to do is press a key...how hard can it be?" And of course, "I need healing, for crying out loud!" After a while, it got on my nerves.

"I am healing you, you bastard," I hissed. Followed a while later by, "You f***tard, I am so totally healing you! Have you ever died yet because I haven't? I want to kill you myself!"

He was, of course, baiting me. And I, of course, had no idea. Until after we were done testing and I had finished using up my stock of profanity on him.

Which is why I don't group. You can't trust anyone! Least of all the tank!

WTB A Hearing Test

Each day, we internally play through a different area and send some feedback about what we encountered.

SteveD and I will sometimes read aloud the things we see as we're running through areas. We also do that with our daily emails about typos and things, especially when the report is funny. Let it be known that we read all these reports. We do enjoy a well-written, amusing report much more than the ones calling us names, though!

This afternoon, I read to him several passages from various quests as I had gotten into the zone before him and had already begun testing. A few minutes later, Steve began reading to me, but I was only allowing him half an ear as I was getting whomped on by something twice my size.

"A milk man has killed three ..." Steve began.

"What quest is that?" I asked.

It's not a funny subject at all once I realized that he was reading me the news and not a quest file. :/ But that's kind of how our little office is...peculiar.

See Tracy Travel!

Photos from Russia are up now! I still have some on my disposable camera, mainly of Red Square at night.