Yay · Me!

While we were getting hoshiadam ready to leave for Eclipse, SAM started telling him about KG - sounds like he's ready to monster! He said, "At King's Gate, I play the biggest bag guy! He can cast Ball of Flames! And he can burn you up to dust! And no one can defeat him ever!"

So I hope you are all ready for the November event, now you know what you're up against. :)

I'm not going to the KG event. It's paranoia, but this weekend I'll reach the point in this pregnancy where I miscarried last time. And anyway I'm still feeling moderately horrid most days. So, staying home. I keep having LARP dreams, though - for some reason, mostly with a Western theme. :)

For getting me to Eclipse, the plan as of this morning was for me to drive SAM to Memphis tomorrow (6 hours or more, depending on how much SAM had to stop), and spend the night there. Then Friday I would drive the 8 hours to the event. Yay playing Eclipse. Then Sunday I would drive back to Memphis, and stay there for an unspecified number of days, then come home with SAM. It's not quite as crazy a plan as it sounds; SAM has been wanting to go to my parents' house anyway, and they've kind of been wanting us to visit, but when they're here every two weeks, I have no incentive to drive SAM down there. *shrug* So the plan has merit - I get to play and SAM gets to visit, I just have to drive 28 hours, and hoshiadam has to drive to the event and back by himself.

Then when I called my mom this morning to tell her the plan, she suggested an alternative. She can cancel her plans for tomorrow and come meet me in Nashville, then take SAM back to her house. Then around Tuesday or so she'd head back up here (she was planning to come up next Thursday anyway). This saves me about 12 hours of driving, which is nice, and I get some extra alone time with hoshiadam, which is nicer. I have to be away from SAM longer, but he's getting old enough to be fine with it. He says he doesn't mind, anyway. The major drawback to this plan is that I feel bad about my mom having to cancel her stuff. She does a whole lot for us already, and I feel like I'm imposing. *sigh*

Blah, I don't like decisions lately.

How could they KEEL MY KHAN! Oh noes! *cry cry*

But yeah, amazing event. You horrible, horrible Plot people, you. :P

Must not discuss it too much OOP, too much important IP stuff.

In other news, I'm apparently officially old now. My ankles have always been flexible - I'll be running, the foot will flop sideways, I'll hop a few steps and keep on running. This time it didn't quite happen that way, for some reason. I'm not even sure what I stepped on, I think it was just some loose gravel. I shake a fist at the feral boar bonder I was chasing. Stand and fight, running makes it harder to kill you! :) So anyway, I sprained it. Thanks, lilisonna, for checking me out right afterwards, and to axel_kinori for helping me limp all the way back to the yurt, and for the wrappings! :) And thanks to firefeathers and the several other people who helped me too. :) I'm just slightly miffed that I needed any help. In the end, it was nothing major. It never really hurt a whole lot, it just kept feeling like it was going to start hurting if I didn't keep on limping. So I limped a lot. I'm glad I was still able to do the stuff that needed doing. This was no event to be slowed down. (And it was entirely silly, and amusing, that I was the first one to get to the pavilion from the Yurt, doing my shuffle-run all the way. lol...) It was a bit swollen when I got home, with a funny line of bruise that makes my foot look creased on the side, but it should be better soon. It's wrapped again and I'm being super lazy and mostly staying off of it today. The laundry is spread all around the house still, and there are still wet diapers in the wash... oh well. The real problem was keeping SAM and DAT off the ankle, grrrr!

Brrr, it's cold in here...

Koepkeb and gr8tmazinkaiser picked up their kitten today. :( The rest of them and Mama Kitty don't appear to have noticed yet. Phoeclipse is coming up this weekend to get his and aveareya's. We've claimed the biggest one as ours, I believe. He almost has a ruff around his neck, like a wild cat, I like it. :) So, does anyone want the last one? He's the one who started out fading to gray like Mama Kitty, I think he got the most Siamese genes of the bunch. He's the slimmest of the boys, and has the shortest fur. He has a cute little narrow face, very emotive. And though he isn't all gray on his hind end any more, he does have a salt-and-pepper thing going on back there. Very sweet and playful like they all are, of course, and he hasn't had any health problems since all their eyes cleared up. They're nine weeks old now. :) You know you want a kitten of cuteness!

I just figured I'd post once more on here to see if anyone wanted one, before I go to more public forums. Feel free to pass the info along if you know anyone who's looking for one. :)

I managed to gain only one pound this week, instead of my usual two on event weekends. It's still rather annoying. Two pounds away from my secondary goal. I ought to be able to get there this week. Just in time for Thanskgiving doom! I fully expect to gain at least seven pounds that week... :P

Time to brag on SAM! He's been extra awesome lately. He's had the talking down for a long time, but he's really starting to use his imagination and talk about the games he's playing. It's so fun to watch. :) At the start of the event he was in the Yurt with me while I got things ready, and he started plucking the string of my bow, saying he was making music. Then he gave me my horn and said we were in a band, and we had to go marching around. :) And on the way home I discovered that he can play a somewhat modified version of my childhood car-trip favorite, the Animal Guessing Game! :) Instead of asking yes or no questions, I started describing the animal, and he guessed them! I didn't know he was going to be old enough for that game, I just had to try something to keep him awake. (6 o'clock naptime bad!) He guessed all kinds of things, skunk, squirrel, giraffe, porcupine, greater kudu, tyrannosaurus rex, and even Puff the Magic Dragon (that was Dada's idea). :) He even tried thinking up his own animal for us to guess, and the first couple of times he managed to keep it a secret until we guessed it, too. His animals were a flat snake and then several Puff the Magic Dragons, IIRC. He is spiffy. :)

Oh, wow, it's almost 5, and SAM is still asleep... *zoom*

( My new plants. )

My uncle got on the news... in a bad way. :( http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/September-16-downtown-Houston/photo//080916/ids_photos_ts/r3453771358.jpg/

R. is taking firefighter training, which I find pretty neat. :) He's going to start going out on calls now, has the suit and everything!

Eclipse was awesome! :) I really am glad I decided to play, despite not wanting two games and not liking sci-fi as much as fantasy. I always have fun there. And I got my first death, go me. Or something. Heh, when I saw the chills walking in out of play as I was sitting on the floor with my armor halfway on, all alone, I knew things were going to be bad... Next time I'm filling my hand with packets as soon as the hold is called. It was sad that my lack of phys-reps kept me from throwing more arrows at them. And then I got to lie there and bleed while poor Corvus tried to find our healing patches in the minute or so we had left by the time he got back to us, and all the time I knew exactly where they were. Looks like we need red ribbon brews in Eclipse. :)

I need to get more in shape. I get out of breath way too easily. (Especially when sparring with lung-of-steel Shieldhaven.) :) The armor might have something to do with that (I ought to weigh it), but that's no excuse.

On the weight front, I managed to hold steady last week. I'm still two pounds up from my low point of a few weeks ago, but since I usually gain two pounds at events, that's pretty good. My parents have gone home now, and while it was nice going out to eat with them all the time, it will be easier to get back on track now. :)

I won a spider costume for SAM on eBay for $1 (plus $4 shipping). I was happy. When he wanted to be a ghost I was just going to sew it myself, but I didn't feel in the mood to figure out how to make a spider that would actually be cute. :)

The kittens were walking very unsteadily when we left, and when we came back they could scamper! Mama Kitty moved them behind the boxes in the corner of the downstairs room while we were gone. *shrug* We hardly got anything done today because we were playing with kittens the whole time. :) SAM is having all kinds of fun with them, but I have to watch every second, or he stuffs them in a tube or picks them up by the foot. For a two-year-old, he does very well, but they are going to be tough little kittens by the time they're grown up. I need to post some pictures, they're growing so fast, but I'm still trying to get our beach vacation ones all uploaded. :P

Apparently if one wishes to keep one's house clean, one cannot sit on the internet more than two or three hours a day. :P

But I will post today, at any rate!

On the weight front, haven't been doing so well the last few weeks. If I cheat and start weighing in the morning, then I am one more pound down after re-losing all the beach vacation weight (haven't actually lost any, but hey, it makes me feel better). That means thirteen pounds down, three more pounds to go, which is nice. It will be much easier to get rid of the rest of it once there are not parents taking us to dinner twice a day. :)

I had a cool dream last night - I used to have dreams like this all the time, but since SAM has been born they've been few and far between (go figure). It was a LARP, and you could play characters that were a cross between D&D Eberron shifters and totem bonders. There was no ferality stigma - some of us went on all fours, and some didn't, that was all. :) I had a pack that was me, phoeclipse, and aveareya. (We were awesome, of course.) Phoeclipse got involved with some shady characters at some point and ended up dead, but we were getting that fixed...

I don't remember much of the rest of it this late in the afternoon, but eventually I got woken up by SAM trying to get up for the day at 5:15. In my semi-lucid state of putting him back to bed, I came up with an armor system that seemed really cool at the time. The LARP universe in question was steampunk, Victorian era, but without many of the technological advances that had been seen at that time in history. If you have dragons to fly your stuff around, why invent trains? - that sort of thing. Plus physics didn't work the same - if you wanted to make a flying balloon, hot air just wouldn't cut it. You would have to fill the balloon with feathers, paint it with symbols of lightness and flight, things like that. So, in this universe, making your armor out of thick metal would be helpful, but it wasn't as important as the symbols you painted on. The more complex and artistic and appropriate the symbol, the better AC it would give you. So, painting just little icons like a shields would give you one point, painting small pictograms of people attacking and their swords getting broken would do more, and a full-size, elaborate picture of, say, you defeating an army of enemies, would give the most points. The style wasn't important - it could be done in Japanese samurai-painting style or pointillism, it just had to be well done. Also, the more ephemeral the medium and the more often it had to be redone, the better. Permanent dying of armor or tatooing directly on the skin would only add a little (or multiply? obviously we're getting into a high-point AC system here, not 5-point). Ink that could be rubbed off eventually would be worth more, chalk even better than that (the PC would have to redraw it after each combat), and for very high points, if you were skilled, you could use dust or water (if you had a flunky to follow you around and redraw during combat, heh). The great hero of legend from this world would be someone who wore stone armor, and had his armor-artist with him in the battle, constantly repainting an intricate, perfect battle scene - in water. This hero's greatest challenge, of course, would be when his artist got killed in the fighting.

:) Anyway, it was enough to keep me amused when not really at all awake.

P.S. Thanks for the book, aveareya! I quite enjoyed it! Interesting to have the main hero start out as mercenary scum, rather than fighting for truth and honor from the beginning. Have to get the other ones now. :)

I like the autosave ability on LJ, but when I'm short on time I tend to save up posts until I have time to finish them, and then they end up being super long. Here we go...

Yay event! I was unusually sore after this one - it must have been an unusually fun event! :) I had a great time. There was lots of fighting, which I always enjoy. Still not enough to be too much, of course. (The people who were trying to do business with me in the tavern might have gotten tired of me running off every time I got back inside...) I got my hand EATEN Friday night, GRRRR! and to make matters worse, we only got one of the Kezekhai responsible, in the end. During the first attack I knew they were too tough for us, and venturing out of the yurt was going to get us taken down, but hey, we couldn't leave Kino out there bleeding. Nasty sneaky pale elves. I have it in for them now.

Then there was the totem bonder adventure, which was great fun! (I just wish I had brought some water along...) I haven't often had the chance to really go out and do much with the other totem bonders, and I've NEVER had a teacher, feral or otherwise, so it was quite interesting to get some more idea of how bonders work. I need to post on Pierre's discussion, when I get a long enough time uninterrupted to let my thoughts get into a KG pattern again. Lots of food for thought...

I gained two pounds over the weekend, which was about what I expected. I don't even try to resist all the food at events, and with all the delicious wedding desserts just sitting there unguarded... It's going to be challenging fixing that with my parents here all this week giving me food, but I will try.

My loan at Kiva.org has just been repaid. Neat! For those who weren't around, it's a microlending thing that someone posted a while back. People can make loans to entrepreneurs in troubled areas, and when they have their business started up, they pay it back. Then you can get the money back or reloan it. I thought it was a pretty neat idea.

The baby song sparrows near our house grew up and flew away. They had all their feathers and were climbing around in the bush on Thursday, then when we came back they were gone. :) This morning I saw a baby Carolina wren too, I think they had a nest up in the little cedar tree. It was hopping along after its mother, acting like it was starving, and she was feeding it, but when the boys got too close the "baby" flew away. :)

( Buncha memes. )

I have bunches of stuff to post, but every time I open up the post window I forget all of it.

( KG talk, cut for slight IP knowledge. )

I have been losing weight, not steadily, but I'm down almost 6 pounds out of the 16. Yay, a third of the way there! I definitely feel leaner, which is pleasant.

The bunny chronicle continues. Several weeks ago I rousted one of the bunnies out of its hiding spot AGAIN. The rosebush on the side of the house has decided to lay over on the grass, and I was trying to lift it up and get it to grow on the fence, when one of the bunnies came shooting out from underneath. At least that time it picked a pretty good spot. I didn't see them after that, until this morning, when both babies and the mother were scampering around at the back of the yard, chasing each other in and out of the fence. :) They are pretty big now.

We also have a bird nest in one of the grills the previous owners left. It's on the back patio right next to the back door. There are only a couple of quite tiny holes in the grill cover. I would never have found the nest except that SAM decided to stick some chalk through one of the holes today. It's a big messy nest, with a tiny tunnel in the top and one white egg. It could just be a house sparrow nest, but my current theory is that it's a Carolina wren, since we get lots of those at the feeder and I haven't noticed any sparrows. I'll have to see if I can spot a parent.

I've been planting and planting since it warmed up. Wayferny brought me parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (heh), and lemon mint, and I also have dill and strawberries, and I put in some seeds for bell peppers, carrots, and turnips, but only the turnips have sprouted so far. It is fun. :) And my blueberry bush is blooming! That's not so good, though, since there is only one bush, and they aren't self-fertile. Dunno where I would get blueberry pollen. Maybe a helpful bee will go find another blueberry bush for me and bring some back. :)

Grrr... my Mothering message boards are never readable these days. I think they need a new server or something. If this keeps up I might actually break my addiction. :)

Yurchi-ing is a lot of work. I need to go make another post on the boards...

So, I've been really lucky having a mom who's willing to drive down and stay near site to watch SAM every event. V. v. nice. But this coming May Eclipse event she's going to a wedding instead. We were considering having wayferny and ikara_fox keep SAM, but it looks like that's not going to work out. And there's no JLC any more, so I will probably have to miss the event. :(

But anyway, it got me started thinking. What do the rest of you, who have kids and also LARP, do? I know most people don't have my mom. This KG event was the first time I've gone the whole weekend without visiting SAM (he did wonderfully, no problem at all, and I didn't even feel like I was going to explode from not nursing, though I was sad Saturday morning from missing him). When do the rest of you start leaving the baby for the whole weekend? How far away are you willing to be from the place the baby is? How do you keep in touch? And who do you leave the baby with - is it always the grandparents, or do you hire sitters or something?

I'm just looking for a poll here, wondering what other people have found that works. Hopefully this won't be a common thing anyway, but it would be good to figure out some kind of backup plan for when my mom can't make it.

( ETA: This really needed to be posted. Facts about hapersmion! )