PocketWatch Romances

Archive for November, 2008

Have a happy one.

Specifically, I wish everyone a day of good cheer and pleasant bread; of being surrounded by the people they love best; and eating only those things that they like.

I’m grateful, as always, for my family — they have yet to leave me on a street corner in a cardboard box, with a sign saying ‘free to a home’, though God knows there are moments when I’d have deserved such a thing.

I’m grateful, too, that I live in a geographically amazing country. From my humble home in the snowy north to the tropical heat of Hawaii; from the geological weirdness of the Badlands to the giant Okefenokee swamp; from the Alaska range, Tetons and Rockies to the endless rolling Great Plains… Visiting all 50 states is something I really want to do, so I can see all of the variety of this place.

I’m grateful that the election is over at long long last. No more ads, no more biting my tongue to keep from swearing furiously in the presence of my mother, no more waiting. And while I know President-Elect Obama (whee!) is NOT going to magically turn everything into sunshine and polka-dots, I don’t care. He’s giving us, as a people, another chance and that’s all we need. And I’m grateful for that, too.

I’m grateful for all that I have, even if I don’t say it enough.

You all be good to yourselves and one another.

Ivan has been particularly annoying this morning. First, he wanted food (which he already had), and told me so by whacking me in the face. So I got up, went out to the kitchen, and poked the food in his bowl. He looked at it and complained some more. I thought maybe he wanted kitty treats; they haven’t had any for a couple of days, so… I gave him a few treats. Toulouse showed up, so I gave her a few, too.

That was okay, for a couple of minutes, then Ivan was yelling again. I dumped the food in his bowl back into the main container, then put his dish on the floor and put a “fresh” scoop of food into it… Which seemed to do the trick, because he started crunching away. I went back to bed, to try that whole sleeping thing again.

Five minutes later, Ivan’s back, pawing at the covers and yelling. So we go into the bathroom, where the water’s running in the sink, just the way he likes it. That’s not what he wants, either. I go back to bed, and he follows. This time, after wandering around for a couple of minutes, he finally settles down beside me. We get comfortable and I, at last, am allowed to go to sleep.

A couple of hours later, I wake up again — not sure why. I get a drink of water, and decide to do some email/poke around online. I rearrange my blankets, and Ivan hops onto the bed and immediately curls up in the nice flat spot I’d just made… I guess he was annoyed that when I got ready to go to sleep, most of my blankets got wadded up and pushed into a cat-unfriendly pile, and -that- what what he’d been whining about earlier.

Now, of course, he’s probably asleep out in the living room, lying on the floor… *Sigh* He really _is_ appropriately named, isn’t he.

“Wine depresses the hell out of people. Probably the flavor.”

Over at MMORPG.com, James Wood has written the first of what I’m guessing is a three-part series on the Rogue talent trees in World Of Warcraft. I gave it a look because my favorite WoW character is a Rogue and I always like to see Rogues getting some love… Except that what I found was mildly annoying. This is the first paragraph:

Rogue talents are divided into three trees: Assassination, Combat, and Subtlety. You don’t get your first talent point until level 10 and once you’re at 80, that’s 71 talent points to spend across the trees. This keeps Rogue builds unique and diverse, though your options could mean becoming a mace, dagger, sword, or fist weapon user. But don’t spend talents for two weapon specialization talents. It’s a waste of talent points.

It’s perfectly innocuous until he gets to the last two sentences (my emphasis), which is where my eyebrows go up into my hairline. You’ll notice that I don’t quote any of the following two paragraphs, wherein he explains why dual-wield “is a waste of talent points” — it’s not because I want you to go read the whole article and bump up their ad revenue. The reason I didn’t quote him? He didn’t explain why. He may, in the next two pieces (this one is all about the Assassination tree; Combat and Subtlety are next), particularly in Combat which is where Dual-Wield lives.

Since there ARE so many different ways to play a Rogue, I would never presume to tell someone who has sunk most/all of their talent points into the Subtlety/Assassination trees that they’re Doing It Wrong. Just because -I- suck at Stealthily Backstabbing a target doesn’t mean everyone does; and just because someone prefers to use one dagger over two swords doesn’t mean they’re an idiot.

There is one positive side to this, however, and that is the lovely little fact that he’s not sending me an unsolicited in-game message telling me I’m wasting my talent points. I don’t know that I could remain polite if he did.

I tried to email you at the addy you left me, but it bounced back. Can I use the gmail address, or…? You can leave a comment here, or drop me a line at birds eat bugs AT gmail-dot-com (no spaces in the username; you know the rest).

There, you’re updated. Stop complaining!

Gaaaah. I haven’t done ANYTHING for NaNo, yet. I’m still trying to decide if I want to take a desperate stab at participating or if I want to try again in January or what.

I’d try it in December, but between family and travel that’s just NOT going to happen… Well, actually, it might. *Snerk* Depending on how annoyed I am by my father’s wingnuttiness/the pastor at the church (yeah, there’s no way we’re going to a heathen Episcopal church with their smells and bells — hell, they’re almost Catholic*!)/various and sundry other people and/or events, I may actually churn out reams of stuff. Probably either rough stuff with Finch/Herbert or utterly sappy Kelvath/Avrath; possibly sweetly fumbling Pers/Cordialis, too.

But we’ll see. It’s not like I even have any idea what I’m going to write/work on even if I did decide to do NaNo with only two weeks left.

* NB: for those of you just tuning in, I tend to describe myself as a fringe Episcopalian… And that’s meant in a positive way, unlike the icky fringiness of, say, Jonah Goldberg.

So as I was finally feeling like I’d gotten over my cold to the point where I could hop back on my bike, my sinuses (sini? sinae?) staged a revolt and involved a tooth this time. Of course, when I managed to get an appointment with a dentist, everything stopped hurting, but I went anyhow. Turns out that I’d lost part of one the last upper molars, and then the filling fell out (which I had suspected) — and the ex-filling spot was now the happy home of a bunch of bacteria, who were busily eating away at the dentin over the nerve — hence the pain.

Good news: not an abcess. Bad news: I still have to go see an endodontist to see if it’s at all possible to save the tooth or if it will need to just come out. If it was a matter of doing a filling, my dentist said she’d happily do it, but it’s probably going to require sedation rather than a local and she doesn’t have the staff/equipment for that kind of thing.

On the plus side, the endo she recommended is in the building across the parking lot from hers, so it’s not like I have to go to the other side of town or anything.

Voted Obama/Biden, Begich, Berkowitz, the incumbents on the other legislative seats, yes on bonds and yes on all the judges. And that was it for voting — I was expecting a longer ballot, frankly.

To the polls, I mean.

And then it’s all over but the nail-biting and the obsessive reloading and the flipping back and forth between the sims and the web…