Saturday Off, mothers in hospitals, and so on.

OK, taking today off from work, but I think I will make a blog post. WOW! Here it is!

My mom is improving rapidly, her blood clot has disolved and she s in rehab getting her strength back. She needs it because she really needs to be able to take care of herself. She is one of those people who need to be able to tend to her own needs.

Sue's mom had hip replacement surgery yesterday. It went well. Sue is up there right now. She is in a better hospital. Sue and I have no breathing troubles there. The rehab is also much better organized and than my Mother's hospital. *sigh* Some hospitals are better than others.

I am not managing to keep a regular work schedule, but I am lining up projects and completeing them one at a time. The DS website is reworked. The Travels of Kit are up to date. Basic work on Sue's new comic (Familiar Place) is underway.

Our "Food Plan" has been difficult to maintain, but both Sue and I are dropping weight slowly. It is about time.

Enough for today.

Good Morning! We started talking already.

Sue is relaxing, the foot rubs, breakfast in bed, forced exercise and more are having a positive effect. Mocha and Mac are assisting in their own ways. Mocha is taking Sue for walks and Mac is forcing Sue to sit by pinning her in a chair. It does not get any better than that.

We started talking about the publishing issues facing us. The only really firm thought we have is that some projects will have to be classified as "tinker" projects. That means giving them a very low priority and to avoid feeling bad if they do not get done. Good start. Next we need to create a full list of the projects and evaluate each.

Home Again, Home Again

We are safe and sound back in the Secret Clanhold. The quiet hallways and rooms seem, somehow, almost dangerous. Hopefully the Pylos Agents lost our scent and went off to Disney World. That should take care of them.

Taking today off, obviously the mind has not arrived back yet.

Ah, Saturday is here!

Dishes, scrub hall, wash clothes, basically catch up on cleaning. More CC Beta card sheets completed and posted for testing. May try to sneak some in today.

Tomorrow I will try to assemble the pieces of the rules. They are done, they just need assembly and tweaking. I will do a separate FAQ PDF. That way as people ask questions I can add to the FAQ and do a new version from time to time.

Trying to think out best communication to use for our gamers. Must research doing a Crypt Crawl Newsletter.

Back to work and trying to keep up

Well, we are back to work. After two weeks of just doing almost nothing it is a strain trying to get back into the swing of things.

I am keeping up with the basic housekeeping I started a while back. The kitchen is getting daily maintenance. You know, dishes done, garbage dealt with, counters etc. Getting this done, plus rousting and feeding Sue and Mocha. Walking the dog fits in here too, but in my groggy morning state I do make errors, and Sue reacts badly to the leash... but Mocha likes breakfast in bed... Anyway, the process takes 2.5 hours in the morning. The clean kitchen routine is helping Sue to get to work and it is worth it.



The second home routine I am establishing is to do laundry on saturday off. I am not sure this is a good way to do this. We travel a lot and once a week on laundry may not work out well. I may have to try to schedule laundry twice a week to cover the "on the road weeks". Maybe add it to the wednesday schedule.



In addition I am using the computers calendar to start scheduling so I get to everything, or at least don't forget anything. Today, tuesday, is aimed a working on the Crypt Crawl game with a long game in the evening.



I did routine maintenance on my portable and discovered the hard drive is showing signs of weakness. With all the data on it I decided to buy a new bigger Hard Drive. A 500 GB one is on the way. The current one is 320 GB and mostly full. I then checked the old portable and the Hard Drive in it is showing serious flaws in seek and temperature control. That baby is about gone. I am going to take the hurting drive and put it in the back-up machine, giving it a big boost in size (now a bad 120 GB, going to a weak 320 GB). It should be fine in the back-up computer.



OK, I'm going to close this out. I am running behind today, *sigh*, I am not sure this scheduling concept will work. My reliability is questionable.

Preparations for Home Con Visit

The preparations for the Home Con appearance on saturday has brought progress to a halt. I have several articles tumbling around in my mind wanting to get written, but I am spending my time packing, inventorying and getting set for the trip. Sunday I will be spending that work day unpacking, sorting and putting away the con supplies. Late Sunday night I will be Manufacturing the Monday shipments.

While I enjoy seeing people and doing these shows they do cost a lot of creative time. Thus I am faced with a quandary. If we travel and sell, we create less. If we do not go the creative work has a reduced value. The trick is to try to balance these. Somehow to get my full 60 hour work week in and spend 3 full days dealing with the trip. That amounts to doing four 15 hour days before the go-be-return three day trip. One of the tiring aspects is that saturday is our day off. Therefore we will have no day off for meditation and companionship this week. I do get an amazing recharge from having a day to share with Sue, and I will miss that very much this week.

A new year has begun and I'm behind

The truth is I'm going to enjoy my last couple of days as a free man and get back to work monday.

I can say that despite my many complaints about overwork, food experiences and the effects of age, I am thankful for the friends and fellow gamers that I have. I'm damn glad to be alive and to know all of you. I wish there were an easy way for all of us to see each other more.

I have been spending some cuddle time with Sue, Mocha and Mac, and enjoying the hell out of it.

I have also started putting information on Susan's new 2d6 role-playing system. Actually it is a tweaking of the DS system. The blog is here. I will get it on the main links page soon.

Christmas Eve is over

Sue and I spend the Christmas Eve day together. It is our holiday. Christmas Day is the family day. It gives us one private holiday and one public holiday.

We started the morning with the purchase of a new Nero Wolfe book to listen to and a wonderful french toast breakfast. The french toast had butter and confectioners sugar. It is amazing how good the food is when Sue cooks it and we eat it together. I know she and I have been together a long time, but I find myself fascinated by her. The book we got was Death of a Doxy and it is really a good one. The Nero Wolfe audio books are better than either the radio shows or the TV shows that show up. The TV shows are very pale imitations at best. Michael Prichard does the audio and he is true to the original Rex Stout stories.

As the day went on we spent a lot of the day simply relaxing together with our eyes closed listening to the audiobook. There is something special about spending quiet time with one you love. I think that because we spend so much time talking about projects, politics and plans that being able to share silence is romantic, but I think its best to leave that part out of the days pleasures.

We got an organic chicken to share and filled it with stuffing. The flavor of old fashioned chicken baked slowly is astounding. We will be eating chicken happily for the next couple of days. Mocha and Mac, our pack members/pets got a good portion of the leavings. Boy were they excited. Afterwards they both laid down on either side of us and slept. Fun stuff. A pack relaxes.

For desert we had home cooked brownies with vanilla ice cream and chocolate. The whole thing just melted in the mouth. It is the first time we tried this as a desert, and it will go on our regular menu as a food.

We spent most of the evening in quiet meditation together and I feel rested this morning, which is probably a good thing because soon we will be dashing madly from family house to family house today. We will be stopping at home to eat between trips. I'm afraid that we will be skipping the family meals and eating our food instead. I hope no ones feelings get too hurt, but the modern foods just don't measure up.

Well, off to the days activities.

Another Day in Flint

I just got Sue set up in the Flint Etsy Handmade show downtown Flint. I need to get Sue to take a couple of Pics of the event and her set-up. Hold on while I switch and e-mail her. Still there? Ah, good. Lets see if she picks up the message.

I know that our town has a reputation, but its not so bad, well, not for an aftermath city anyway. I was surprised at how many people had come out of their rubble piles to check out the show. They seemed to be a nice young, well armed group. It should be interesting.

Actually the crime rate has been dropping radically here in Flint for the past few years. Personally I think its because people stopped coming to our town and we are just short of targets. Which reminds me, whose coming to visit? This has nothing to do with anything, but I need to renew my hunting license.

OK, while Sue is at work I have a chance to really go wild. I think I'll start by catching up the dishes and then move on to a rousing round laundry. Now thats some crazy stuff. Maybe I'll get a chance to squeeze in a couple more pages of the Gatekeeper comic as well.

Getting Sue Ready

I'm getting Sue ready for Midwest Furfest, she leaves early tomorrow morning. By getting the DS card books trimmed down to something more manageable means she will have the entire DS line with her and available.

More thinking:
I have the Mark's Mysteries blog for the podcast, but since I have not found the time to keep the stories going (I will, somehow) I have started putting up stories, books and podcasts I have found worth noting. I know that few of you out there have given up the commercial airwaves the way we have, but you may find something here to interest you. I find that as I work I can listen to any number of shows and either get a smile or get some information, and maybe some news.

You have probably also noticed a lot of ad links showing up on our pages. These are all tied to us and we are hopeful that people will use them so we can get a kick-back from these people. We have Google Ads, Itunes, Pet Smart, Stevivia, RiffTrax and Amazon accounts at this point. The income is slow so far, but it is building slowly. Essentially it gives us a way to make alternate money from the content we put on line. Hopefully it will provide enough extra to keep our wild and crazy enterprise going forward.

Your thoughts are?

Unbelievable Food

Sue made two small entirely organic lasagna's today. It is extremely good that she froze one before cooking. It was unbelievably good. I've had a number of these in good resturants and none of them are even close to what Sue made. I'm not sure if I want Sue to have more time to cook or not....

She also made organic chocolate chip cookies. I ate every one I could get my hands on. Again, Sue put some of the batter away. OK, so I had Mild too. Right now I am typing this, drinking coffee and enjoying a relaxing day.

Still rather puny here.

I still have this congestion hanging on. Work is really going slow. We went out and bought groceries and I'm ready to sit and stare, maybe even back to sleep. Good thing I was a little ahead on Pentacon prep. Susan is pretty much back in gear. I'm glad I married a tough one.

Time Off

Sue got home last evening. I'm very glad to see her. Mocha seems to be very happy Sue is back. Mocha has been good this week, but with Trouble and Sue gone she was a little off. Things are getting back to normal for her now. Mac is hanging around a lot, but she is staying near me. I think she is irritated at Sue for not having been here.

Anyway, I pretty much took the day off, doing just my e-mails and a couple of blog posts.

Sue and I have been talking about everything that has been going on politically and economically. Quite the mess going on out there. I am surprised at how scummy one of the campaigns has gotten. The first election I have memories from was the Nixon/Kennedy campaign way back in 1960. I have never seen anything so disgusting as McCain's campaign. I am afraid the McCain I supported in the late 90's has left the building and been replaced by this disreputable/disgusting anti-American faker. Maybe he fooled me the first time.

In economics. Long ago there was an economic holiday that happened about once a century. It would be declared a "Jubilee" and all debts were cancelled and everything would start over at zero, the Pope declared it. Our current situation could be so bound up that a radical concept may be the only solution that would actually work. All this piecemeal squandering of my tax money just doesn't seem to be helping me, or anyone I know. On the other hand, I do not know any millionaire bankers, so I won't see the goodies.

Everything is fine in Flint

Well, saturday off started fine, then it headed downhill.

We had a chinese lunch at a place called Hong Kong Buffet in Flint. The service was good, the people were nice. OK, thats the high point. The buffet had a good selection, reasonable price, fresh food and rather bland taste. The Buffet was just OK. What you do not want to do is order off the menu. Sue ordered Almond Boneless Chicken. What she got was bland and did not even resemble Almond Boneless Chicken. Sue did not eat it and complained. They said they would just charge for the buffet. When we got the bill, it was not that way.
My feeling: Find somewhere else to try. Buffet average, service good, menu poor. I did find three glowing reviews of this place on-line. I do not know where those people ate, maybe the restaurant has gone downhill since those reviews.

We had rain all day saturday, 5 inches in all. I headed down the basement to be sure our dehumidifier was running. I found water, and not water I wanted. We bailed out a 100 gallons of water and called for sewer help. We moved out all of our equipment out of the basement and now the house is a mess. It is going to take a couple of days to get things in shape around here. The worst part is that it is still frakkin raining. Tonight it is supposed to rain. What a surprise. At least our sewer is working now.

Sue is down at the Flint Farmers Market selling today, so I'm on clean-up duty and I'm scheduled to get the new art pages for Sue's website done. With all of the copyright silliness going on I am having to tag every piece of artwork with a creative common license. For most we are using Non-commercial, attribution, no change copyright. That means people can use the images for personal use, but they have to attribute the work to Sue. I have about 130 pieces ready to go, now I need to make the pages.

Well, off to work.

Sue is Back

Sue has returned from a successful trip to San Diego, and I am glad she is here.

The dogs are glad she is back, they think that I have let her come back, that she has finished her punishment. I think I was the one punished.

We ordered her a new drawing tablet, the Wacom Cinitiq, where she can draw directly on the tablet. This should allow her to create even more art. So far it is working great.

I discovered, when Sue took over our portable computer, just how much my productivity dropped working just on the desktop computer, so I ordered one of the new/rebuilt MacBooks with 4 gig's of memory. It turns out that that extra memory makes her new tablet work better on the new portable than on the old Pro. The result is that Sue now has the new computer and I'm settling back into the old Pro...

And I've gotten an empty case for an ipod.... Why do I think that I'm coming out behind in this deal? I'm thinking that I'm in line for some rewards here.

OK, back to work.

Daily Life continues

It is colder than a *****'s *** up here. Poor Trouble is getting cold feet outside and having a tough time going to the bathroom. He just wants to get back inside or lay down in the snow. He will be 17 in May. Old, short hair dogs, just do not like this weather.

We had gamers over again last night. We played a bit, worked on the podcasts and had a good time. We spent the game time working out some details on character creation in the new game. It is slowly forming up. I'm hoping I can run it at StormCon. We will see.

I am getting some older DS cards printed, laminated and cut for BashCon and getting the layouts done for the new cards. I have two computers running to get it all done. In fact I'm printing as I do this. I'm doing that on the old Beast computer. It is a 10 year old tower that can run the up to date software still.

Sue is at her workstation doing art right this moment. 

I'm still looking for my download birthday gift. I'm thinking about picking up an Asimov Audio book. I got the Renaisance movie from itunes, love it, but it can be hard on the eyes until you get adjusted.

Now I need to head out and laminate etc. cards. So thats it for now.

Pizza Crust

My first attempt at a whole wheat pizza crust turned out OK. I made too much dough for the pan size and the breading kinda overwhelmed the toppings. I like a thinner crust pizza.

I think if I cut the size of the crust mix in almost half it should work good. I want to be able to get this down so I can make Sue a good pizza when she gets back.

I ate almost half the pizza. Trouble and Mocha seemed to think it was good. They got to split the other half and they kept coming back for more..... 

In fact, I think I'll go make one now. Bye for now....

Well, Sue is away....

Sue is snugged down in San Jose California. She is prepping and enjoying a bit of time down there. Me, I'm both enjoying my time alone and missing her at the same time.

I have a lot to catch up on, but I think I'll start with working on making a good home-made pizza crust.  I have gotten reasonably good at bread, so it is time to move onward.

The pets, Mocha, Trouble and Mac are looking at me like I'm a criminal for having sent Sue away. They don't seem to completely understand. It looks to them like the Alpha has punished Sue. I'm afraid I have a different idea of ways to do that. ummm, well, thats a different subject.

For now I'd better get to work.

Full Stop

It is Friday, I've been to my doctor and he gave me medicine. All I want to do now is stare or sleep.

oooops

I have come down with a serious case of stomach flu. So, updates and work on pages will be very slow. About the only thing I'm going to do is to manufacture the cards that people are ordering.