everything will be alright

It was a pretty sedate long weekend for me, and not what I'd planned to do at all, but it still turned out to be an awesome one. Our plan was to stay with friends of ours at their cabin, which is about a 3.5 hour drive or so away, but that got scrapped when the forecast Saturday morning projected 30-35cm of snow there overnight with another 10cm the next day. There were supposed to be 16 of us there, and almost everyone pulled out aside from the 2 owners, who went out Friday night, and I think 3 other people. I feel bad because they're great friends of ours and it would've been a blast, but damn, that much snow is something to fear. Especially now, with snow tires having to be removed by April 30th (ours were off just before that), and given the remote location of the cabin (downhill and a few minutes' drive off the paved road = near impassable if we did get the snow) and the fact that Sara sadly didn't have today off like I did, we just couldn't do it. Most of the other people canceled too, but there's talk of going back for Labour Day weekend so I hope that works out. I really do love going out there, and have a blast every time I do, but it just wasn't meant to be this time round. The kicker is that while they did get some snow it wasn't really all that bad, haha. Oh well.

Instead we both stayed at home all day Saturday and relaxed. Having passed out at a decent hour on Friday night I was up by 9am and, once the cabin plans were off, I called my cousin. He'd offered a day in the city on Sunday after I helped him with some stuff, all expenses paid, to see a movie and grab a bite to eat, but we'd put it on hold after I told him I'd be gone this weekend. That was able to happen now, and we made plans for Sunday, with Saturday being a completely found day. I managed to get in some reading, along with a lot of Neverwinter playing (some with writteninsable and econ_cat, holla~!), and all in all it was a fantastic, relaxing day, just what I needed. On top of that, my uncle was in town from Ontario and he took us all out for supper, which was awesome, to celebrate my late grandmother's birthday. We did this the previous two years, with my mother's siblings making a concerted effort to gather for Nan's birthday on May 5th and to enjoy the time we have together after my Aunt Marilyn's unexpected passing at 54 in late 2010. Nan passed away in March so there wasn't a big, formal supper or anything, of course, but when my uncle came back this time we still rounded up everyone who was around to celebrate her memory. There were, gosh, maybe 14 of us I think? A big crowd, to be sure, and it was an awesome meal with my family, even if some of the food was mreh. The company was great, but some of the food was great and some not-so-great, and the service was pretty slow and lackluster; taking 10m to deliver drinks, when a lot of it was just plain beer and scotch on the rocks (for me :D) was odd, and forgetting glasses for those who asked, lime for one drink, etc. Things like that were common, and then the main meal was hit and miss, as my meat was fine but the side was small and not the best. Just a weird experience, but being there with family meant it didn't matter as much. After that I came home and played Neverwinter until I passed out, essentially, haha.

Sunday I got up early-ish, even after my late night of gaming, and drove to my cousin's house for 10am. He then drove us into the city from there - he lives about 15m away so I met him there, as the city is going the opposite way from us - and we spent most of the day in there. That was nice, because even just getting to chat with Terry is fun, and we haven't done that in ages. He's been sick, having had back surgery not too long ago and might have more in the near future, but he's able to at least get around more now. We hit up Chapters, where I picked up my only purchase of the day, the first book in a Neverwinter series that ties into the aforesaid MMO hehe, and then we had lunch together at Montana's. I forewent my usual steak dinner, partly because it seemed like they only had a lunch menu on and there was virtually no steak options on it as opposed to their supper menu, and partly because I wanted to try their ribs. I'd had a small portion of ribs with my supper the previous night, so I wanted to give Montana's a shot, and Terry had the same, and man. Deeeeeeeeelish, omg. That was a fabulous meal, then we hit up Best Buy and Staples so Terry could pick up some things before returning to the mall to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. No spoilers, but I liked it a lot. Maybe not quite as much as the first one, to be honest, but I'll see how I feel after seeing it a few more times. Definitely one I'll be buying once it comes out. The only bad thing about the movie experience was the renovations to the theatre, which left only one long ass line for food, and maybe they weren't expecting many people because of the long weekend (usually people go camping for May 24th but not us XD) but dang, it was slammed. So much so that even though we got there ~15-20m before the movie started, normally plenty of time for food, there was no earthly way we were getting popcorn without missing some of the movie. So we capitulated and went to the local drug store in the mall, picking up some chips, chocolate, and pop there, which was much cheaper of course but dammit, I love me some movie popcorn. Ah well. We left for home after the movie and I caught the 3rd period of the Bruins/Rangers game at Terry's place (go Bruins, woo!) before heading back home. Sara and I made an early night of it, kind of, going to bed between the 2nd and 3rd periods of the Pens/Sens game, and I stopped fighting it and quickly fell asleep after the first overtime of that one.

Today I was up early again, around 9am, and it's been a pretty sedate day. I mainly watched hockey when it was on, read some more of the recent Neverwinter book I picked up, and messed around with the Goodreads app, adding a bunch of friends and a ton of books into my library there. Tomorrow or later on this week I may try and unpack a bunch of boxes I've had packed for ages, both to try and clean up a little and to get them added into my library as well. We'll see that goes, no huge hurry for that, but it'd be nice to find some of my old things again. I meant to do some writing and a bunch of other things but alas, I was lazy. It was a nice, relaxing day though so I'm grateful for that, and now it's off to bed to catch the end of the game and maybe read a bit before sleeping.

Last but certainly not least, Happy Anniversary to my amazing wife and best friend, believeitup! Love you and here's to spending many, many more together. ♥

Big Brother is in full swing now, which has been pretty much the only tv show we watch regularly now, aside from the ever present Storage Wars / Love It or List It / Pawn Stars etc. that's almost always on otherwise. It's been entertaining this year, better than last year, and it's nice to actually have someone here watching it with me instead of just texting my sister about it. We still do text and e-mail, of course, but sharing it with my wife makes it much better. :)

Other than that, I've mainly entertained myself by reading and messing about with various mini games, namely Marvel Avengers Alliance on Facebook and The Simpsons: Tapped Out on the iPad. There's also been some MMO playing again, with the Guild Wars 2 headstart having gone live as of Saturday. That's been pretty fun, especially because I picked up a couple of novels set in the Guild Wars universe that's gone a long way towards familiarizing myself with the lore of the game. When I played the beta ages ago I felt a little overwhelmed and lost in the game, both with its setting and its lore being so unfamiliar to me, but having just about read one of those books when I started playing on Saturday it was way more familiar to me which helped a ton. I still need to find a strategy guide or something for it as I still have a lot of questions about the mechanics of the game but that'll come in time; the game has a Wiki but it's down right now, and an online "manual" which is a bunch of videos, so I need something more than that.

I finally watched The Hunger Games last night too, having picked it up on Blu-Ray when it came out last week. Thankfully watching it at home didn't make me sick unlike the IMAX experience where I had to leave and ask for a refund. I enjoyed it, though I hope I didn't bug Sara too much with my "it's different in the book..." and "instead of that, in the book..." comments throughout. XD

Randomly, I need some How I Met Your Mother icons, hmm. I have seriously become a bona fide bigtime fan of the show, haha, and am anxiously awaiting the arrival of Season 6 on DVD so I can catch up; I've mainlined 1-5 in the last several weeks or so.

Anyway! What's up with me, besides my newfound love of HIMYM (as us fans are oft to abbreviate said show), you ask? Quite a lot, actually! I'll put this behind a cut because lord knows there's likely very few of you who will find all of it interesting, maybe a few who will find parts of it, but that's about it. XD

( Snip snip! )

That's about it off the top of my head, I should hit the hay since I've work in the morning, an unexpected return to court but what can you do? I'm sure there was more I meant to say but it's slipping my mind now, ah well. I can always post again later if I think of anything. :)

Haven't posted all week, oops. Lots of goings on, I suppose, but nothing major really. It's also late and I am le tired so I'll try to summarize with bullet points!

· Still reading Game of Thrones and really digging it, only ~150 pages left, may go and try to read another few chapters before sleeping now in a few.

· Finished up with Elvis Costello: Spectacle season 1 over the weekend, which was pretty awesome. It's also got me back into jazz and am consequently watching Diana Krall: Live in Rio which I caught coming on tonight, so awesome. With an amazing band too; Anthony Wilson on guitar, John Clayton on bass, and Jeff Hamilton on drums. Such talented musicians, omg.

· Still mucking about in MMOs; picked up Guild Wars for cheap (it has no monthly fee) and played that a bit, and a good friend of mine got me a 21 day trial of EVE Online that I've been trying with him too. The latter is very different from what I'm used to but it's interesting, and I like getting to play a game with him again.

· Go Bruins omg. My team made the Stanley Cup Finals, which start on Wednesday. It's a completely alien feeling to me, they've never gotten this far since I've been seriously following hockey, and I'm very very excited. :D

· Work continues to be insane, ugh. I won't go into it here because omg it'll just get me worked up again, but suffice it to say people have been infuriatingly unreasonable lately, more so than usual. :(

· RP has been going well, I've been involved in some plots lately, though I still don't feel as if I'm doing as much as I want/should. I've just been so so busy though, so I don't know what to do here.

· Speaking of writing, found out there's a local short story competition I can enter, where you can enter up to twice (1,200 word max story) and I've been seriously thinking about it. I don't have anything in mind, really, but the deadline's not until July so I have some time. I'd love to try, so we'll see.

· Lastly, speaking of writing, due to some boneheadedness on my part I lost a bunch of journals at Insanejournal, most of which were old RP ones that I don't mind losing (one or two I would've liked to have saved for posterity's sake but mreh), but one was my writing journal. :/ Which, well, I didn't have all that much in there, really, but I know off the top of my head of a few little ficlets I'd stored there that I don't think I saved somewhere else. Not a huge loss, just more of a kicking-myself-for-being-lazy-and-letting-it-lapse thing. :/

Feeling a bit lost tonight for some reason, and I'm not sure why. A little restless too, just weird. Can't really put my finger on it, but it's not a bad thing, really, just don't know what to do with myself. I've had a good day, though I slept way more than I wanted - I guess that just shows how draining and exhausting the week was, ugh - and now my team's getting their asses handed to them by the effing Maple Leafs, wtf, but other than that it was a good day.

I caught up on my summarizing duties for X-Project, listened to music, even picked up some lunch and got some Bowmore 12 year old scotch while I was out. Even listened to The Very Best of Frank Sinatra and then the entire Franz Ferdinand catalog, the latter because they came next alphabetically and I was too lazy to change things up, heh, all while playing some LOTRO. I even met a few new people randomly, both from the southern hemisphere, and we grouped up to level a bit. They were really nice, one even made me some jewellery for my toon near the end of the night, though there was too much idling for my liking, heh. What can I say, I'm used to leveling alone I think, though I do like grouping, just not all the time. I dunno, I am a fussy MMO player, what can I say? XD

Speaking of which, huge new update to LOTRO coming on the 21st and it's got me... not worried, it's not going to be a bad thing, per se, but it's going to change so much. There are three big class changes coming with the update, and two of those are the two main classes I play. I've researched them a little but it's going to be a whole 'nother ball game to actually play and learn the changes, and really there's no safe quarter for me since all of my main characters will be affected. Heck, even on the server where I don't play anymore, three of the four capped characters I have are the three classes being radically overhauled. x.x It's just a little scary, I guess, that and the new instances and raids they're adding, because I'm basically a weekend warrior now on the server I play the most due to time zone differences. I guess maybe I am a little worried after all, about being left behind as everyone else is able to play more during the week when I just can't do it. Or, well, I could but then work suffers and that affects me (and others) way, way more than when I can't play the game, so it's an easy choice there.

Then there's the new MMO I've started to play, which I haven't played since ... Tuesday or so, maybe? Not really sure, and I do like it - a lot - and have the advantage of having one of my best friends playing it as well, but mreh. I think I just need to put some more time into it and work past the area I'm in now, which has been a little blah, and it doesn't help that my buddy has blown past me and we don't play together any more when we're both on, which has been rare due to both of our work schedules too.

I'm hoping to write more, too, and may even give it a shot pre-raid now (one starts in ~40m or so as I type this). beanarie's upcoming birthday and talk of fic has got me excited, though I don't really have any concrete ideas for the same. Today, though, omg, Kristen Bell and Zooey Deschanel had a nice, long back and forth on Twitter that just made me so, so happy to read, haha. :D That may be a little sad or something, I dunno, but seeing the interaction of two PBs that I've used in the past for two of my favourite characters to play (and who "existed" in the same RP universe) like that? It was awesome, and made me want to write, which is a good thing at least, yes? Yes. XD

Have also been thinking about table top gaming and wishing I had somewhere to give that a shot. I actually sent an e-mail out over a week ago now to an ad posted at a gaming store in the city, looking for players in a new D&D-type setting (Deathwatch, a Warhammer 40k table top setting), but I haven't got a single reply to say they're full, or not doing it, or what. Mreh. Flashback to PAX East last year and being shunned by some of the D&D players there and yeah, not a good feeling. But it is what it is, I guess. One of these days, maybe.

Anyway, not much else to add right now, there's just a lot bouncing around the old cranium at the moment. Sorry for the stream of consciousness-type post but, well, that's where my head's at right about now. Kudos to anyone who was actually able to read all of that. XD

Been meaning to share some pics here but keep forgetting, but not tonight. Here's a few pics from the most recent MMO I've been spending time with:

( Rift screenshots +11! )

Will make an actual post again some day soon, promise. :) Now, though, well past my bedtime!

So, a lot of changes to cover, it would seem! Starting with the obvious, I finally went and got a new layout, inspired into action over talk by my lovely wife's example. I still want to change my userinfo page too but, well, baby steps. Plus I've been busy with other things too, which is a good thing.

Let's see... well, I've started rping again, which is a very nice feeling, gotta say, I've missed it a lot. It's on an LJ game too *waves to the XP people on his flist!* which is pretty neat, and I'm having a lot of fun there so far! Still trying to make my way through it all, there's so much to take in but it's all good stuff, and I'm in the middle of a log there at the moment and that's helping to settle me in too. :)

Other than that, I've been playing a new MMO that opened its headstart doors for pre-order people on Thursday, called Rift, which for some reason is way more fun now than it was in the beta testing I did. I think it has to do with the classes - there are four basic ones (Warrior, Mage, Rogue, and Cleric) and you can customize the heck out of each of those with 9 sub-classes, without getting into too much detail, which is neat. But I pulled a Classic Jeff™ and bit off more than I could chew, talking to an EQ2 guild that was forming up (in EST which was great as my LOTRO kin is more PST oriented) and deciding I'd play a Cleric. I did not like my Cleric all that much, haha. But Thursday I rolled a Rogue and am loving it, so much, and today my buddy Brad, who caved and got the game last night, made a Rogue and I'm swapping to my Mage to play with him. Server is down for a little fix up but we'll hopefully play more this afternoon, I miss that. :)

LOTRO is still going well, our kin is raiding on its own for the most part now, which is awesome, and we've beaten the toughest raid in the game several times now, even in Hard Mode, so that's great. :D I've been working on an alt there who is now 52 (cap is 65) but Rift may interfere with that plan, heh, we'll see. But it's going well, mostly, and last night we even managed to get a special item for a very special person omg. :D

I'm still reading a lot too, though again the recent increase in rp/MMO time has affected that, but I'm still better than I was before Christmas, which is nice. Writing too, though that's now 100% rp and I haven't worked on any fic or anything recently, though there are a few bouncing around in my head.

Music-wise, completely head over heels for She & Him, which has also reignited my interest in all things Zooey Deschanel. Note to self, get more icons of her, hmm. But yeah, loving her music! Also got The Essential Leonard Cohen which I don't know why I didn't have before, shame on me, but I can has now. :)

Annnnnnnd that's about it. How's that for an all-over-the-place update? :D? Also, yes, I use too many emoticons, don't I? Now back to enjoying my coffee (on a weekend? The devil you say!) and trying to get back into Rift!

What a glorious, glorious weekend it has been, indeed. And it's still Sunday! Ok, I do have to go to work and prep for a trial in the morning, which isn't going to be a long one but still have to get ready, however I'm still all :D from yesterday.

Friday wasn't that bad, really, work was a pain - I got sucked into a much longer court appearance than I thought I'd have, eating up all of my morning and requiring a quick after lunch appearance for a decision, then the afternoon was just mreh - but the night was alright. My sister came home for the night so we got to hang out a little, then we had a raid in LOTRO on E which was a bit messy but we got the job done. Key to note here, we did the first 2 of 3 raid bosses, as it was super late by the time we finished those two, and left the last (and hardest) for Saturday night, which is what we always do.

Saturday started off very well too. I woke up and called my cousin, who'd called me Friday after work to see if I wanted to hang out, and made arrangements to meet up. We hung out last Friday night and played some co-op Left 4 Dead which omg we have so much fun, it's ridiculous. And we play on our huge new TV at the house in Salmon Cove, which is nice to visit every now and then on top of it, hehe. But yes, he called me this time which rocked, and he picked me up around 1:30pm. First we popped into a local high school to watch a bit of a junior high girls basketball tournament - Terry used to coach basketball (he's a teacher) and one of his friends has a daughters who was playing yesterday, and he said he's stop by to see her play. It was kinda neat, I haven't done that kinda thing in ages, getting out in that kind of an environment I mean, so I enjoyed it too. We only stayed for a half hour or so, and then we called to order a pizza, picked it up (the high school is about a 10m drive away so we had time), then after a quick pop into Wal-Mart where I picked up two new 360 games - Borderlands and Kane & Lynch 2, since we were almost done with Left 4 Dead, was looking for L4D2 but alas - we headed to Salmon Cove. Where, after eating the pizza and getting ready to game, we found out I'd left the Xbox 360 adapter at home in Carbonear, whoops. >.> So there was a quick jaunt back here to get that, then back again, haha, and then we gamed!

We played some Left 4 Dead, doing the last episode we'd never tried before - each episode is like a mini movie, complete with a poster of your characters and rolling credits when you're done XD - and after about 2 hours we'd done all five chapters in it, and we survived! The goal is to make your way through zombie infested areas and, at the end of the last chapter, survive a massive surge until your rescue arrives and then gtfo. Terry never did finish the first two of the four episodes, dying after I was already on the helicopter/boat (the boat one omg, he was literally jumping for the boat when he got nom-nom'd, we aww'd and then we lol'd), but he made the last two on the airplane/AMV. Such a fun game, and I need to find Left 4 Dead 2 sometime so we can play that too. Not having that, though, we moved on to Borderlands yesterday, which we started around 5:30pm yesterday, and before we knew it, it was 7:30pm. We're playing it in co-op split screen mode and just, wow. It's a shooter/RPG hybrid, where you choose from 4 basic classes and level your character, there's even a skill tree to invest points in after you hit level 5 (had a hard time explaining the concept to Terry, kinda, but it's something I live and breath in MMOs and was so happy to see it there!). We chose the same class, the Hunter, as we both wanted to snipe and such, and we had it down pat - we'd see hostiles off in the distance and synchronize our sniping to take them down before they knew we were there. XD So much fun, omg, though I'm considering hopping on this week some time to level another class, maybe a melee one, because when we get into the thick of it up close we're running about and strafing and it gets kinda chaotic. XDDDD We'll see though, having a lot of fun with it, and it looks like this game is going to hold our interests for awhile.

After that, I came home and picked up some supper with Dad, and then settled in online for the night. We had the last raid boss to take out, if you'll remember, and I had to make some food before the same. It was a rough start, kind of - we didn't have nearly enough kin members signed up to do it. This has been a real problem of late, and last weekend there was lots of talk about throwing in the towel, or changing things a lot at least - recruiting more, canceling things if people don't sign up in advance, that kind of thing. But we decided to stick it out last night and scraped together enough people (12 needed) to run the raid, and away we went! It was also rough starting off, since some of the play styles of the non-kin players didn't mesh that well with ours, but eventually we fought our way to the top of the tower and started the boss fight.

Now, I'll pause here to talk about the raid a little bit. Yes, it's only a game, I know, but this raid... this raid has been around for, let's see, I think it's over a year now. It's been a pretty frustrating one, to say the least, and I've been trying to beat it since, oh, last January or February, I reckon, back on Silverlode on my characters there. No one really expected to beat it on the day it came out or anytime too, too soon, really; these things take time, as you learn strategies, teach them to people, etc. But yeah, we never, ever came that close in my other kin, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and... you get the drift. To the point that, even after having a static group of 12 people to give it their all week in, week out we still couldn't get it down, it lead to some of us breaking away and moving to another server. I didn't move, not completely, but it's pretty fair to say I raid on the new server now and hardly, if ever, on the first. My wife and I rolled completely new characters on this new server, leveled them to the cap (65 currently), geared them out, and started running this same raid on the new toons.

So, last night, there we were, fighting the good fight once again. We had a rough time at first, mainly with people not paying attention after we wiped and releasing themselves - there's a way to have one person revive and rez all of us without having to release and run allllllll the way back up, which is a 5m+ run, but we just could not do that for some reason, which was frustrating. We have it 4 or 5 tries, with a few actually coming close - the fight is basically the Lt. of Dol Guldur riding a nazgul, and you hit them both together until the nazgul hits 150k morale, then the Lt. hops off and you deal with them both. A few times we got the nazgul down but died fighting just the Lt. Each and every time we effed up the quick rez thing, and some people were going to leave, but we tried it one more time. And... omg, we won. We beat the Lt. Which probably doesn't mean that much to most of you reading this, but it's just... wow. Such a monkey on my back for so long, for a lot of us, and it's now lifted. It took over a year of trying, leaving (effectively, anyway) our kin, making entirely new characters, leveling and gearing them, and... it's done. Words cannot express how happy I felt when the boss went down, omg, they should've sent a poet. ;_; And, not only that, but my toon ended up with some armour loot; I rolled 2nd highest, actually, but the person who rolled highest was out of kin, and when he heard it was our kin's first kill, he passed on the armour for me so it stayed in kin. Such a gracious, amazing thing to do, can't thank him enough and told him I'd help him with whatever I could anytime, because yeah, wow. So not only did we take him down, which was more than enough to make me :D all night, but I got some gear out of it too, holy crap. It was just such a thorn in my side for so long, but yeah, so so SO glad to have it gone now, you can't imagine. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Alright, I just had to get that out there, and woo, yay! What a weekend, seriously, just amazing. And still have today to let that all sink in, once I finish with work anyway. Speaking of which, need to get showered and head out and do that before it gets too much later, but yeah, just had to type all this out first. I was going to last night but after the post mortem chat and hanging out it was after 4am my time and I was just too tired, happy but tired, so I elected to just pass out for 8-9 hours and now here I am. Yay, great weekend! :D Hope everyone else had a great one too!

So, after googling about a bit in reminiscing the good ol' SWG days, I stumbled across this site, which recreates the Character Builder for the original SWG. This was literally the exact same site (not sure if it's the same url, but it could be, and is definitely the same info/layout) that I used to build my little Rifleman/Ranger combo (with Medic/First Aid I for minor self heals!) way back when, before I had a PC that could run the game, before I even owned a copy of the game. Just look at how wonderfully varied and complex that set up is, just... wow. Memoriiiiiiiiiiiies~

I promise that some day I'll stop talking about this, sorry. XD

Also, just got a tweet while I was writing this out, and now I want to go to PAX East even more to see what the SWTOR announcement there is going to be about. Hopefully a release date! :D

Warning: this is gonna be a big ol' post about MMOs and my thoughts on the ones I used to play, the ones I do play, and the ones I want to play. Feel free to skip it if you're so inclined; I'll even tuck it all behind a nice little cut for y'all. :) I know, I know, I owe everyone a big post on my Christmas trip and I still need to finish that 10 day meme that got cut off by my flight back home, and I will, soon. But for now, this is what's on my mind.

( MMOs ahoy! )

So yeah, that's all I have to say about that. Wow, if anyone (myself included) is able to actually read all of that, I'll be surprised. XD tl;dr: I have spent a LOT of time playing MMOs and am conflicted with my present situation, and am looking forward to a change in the future. :)

Wow, I spent over an hour on that and still have so much more I could add/change about that, haha, but no, need sleep. Didn't mean to be ranting on this long, whoops. *hops into bed!*