The Changeling 20 Kickstarter has kicked off.

Got a trim. Now I love my hair again.

I no longer owe anything on my student loans!  My new year is already off to a flying start!!!

I published another book on Amazon the other day and it went live on Smashwords today.

That feeling you get as a GM when you finish updating all your games and you go back to the main rPoL page and there are no red/blue/purple numbers just calling to you to start all over again...yet...!

I feel like I'm doing alright for a middle-aged guy.  Had a big snowstorm that started Friday night and lasted into the mid-afternoon yesterday.  I spent an hour and a half shoveling the front walks of my fourplex (I'm no longer the only able-bodied resident, but the twenty-something guy who moved in next door to me is rarely home and when he is, he never shovels)...went back inside for something to eat and to let that settle for a bit...then went back outside and spent another two and a half hours shoveling the drive and the parking area, as well as the back walks.

I'm almost 48, and I can still shovel snow for four hours (granted, it was only about 3-4", but we're talking about a lot of square footage to be cleared, too!)  I even had enough energy to go to my friend's gig (she sings in an 80's band) and dance for a couple of hours.

I'm paying for it today, though.  Everything is sore...in a good way.

Finally, after a full year of complete unemployment (and a failed school enrollment,) I have a job that I not only utterly love doing, but is for an amazing company that actually appreciates the people who work for them (it's actually insane how much they value people opposed to most previous employers I've worked for, where you're just another cog moving the machine of Assumed Entitlement.)

I still owe a bunch of money to a bunch of different places, and I'm still just a temp at this new job, but there are some huge vacancies with this company and I'm hoping I'll have the option to learn other things that I'd love to do with them. I won't go back to being a Phone Slave again. Never again!

Also, Katatonia's "Onward Into Battle" is a great song, and even my art sketches have been pretty good lately! Something's bound to go wrong! lol :D

Having true friends is a gift. Thankfully, I have several locally, and try hard to be one. I've been on both sides this week, between my well dying and the mother of one of my best friends (and pretty much my adopted aunt/foster mother for the last 25+ years) going into hospice with her body failing part by part.

This week, I visited my dying friend and said my farewell to her; she was unaware of it, but the family, whom I've been so much a part of for so long, greatly appreciated it. I covered feeding my friend's livestock, so she could spend more time with her dying mother.

In her turn, my friend loaned me her water trailer and water account to go to the commercial well company and get water for my livestock.

When I needed back up to get the rig safely back where it belonged last night (like all old farm trucks, this one has many issues -- the relevant one here being a tendency for the lights to go out while driving...), I called another friend to swing by on her way home, after a 14-hr shift, to follow me while I returned the rig.

And while it's always very hard to lose a friend, it's also good to know she's been freed of the painful prison her body had become. Go in peace, Mrs. Flanagan, and say "hi" to my dad for me.

I have no idea why, but seeing bigbadron's 15000th post made me smile just now. Not because of the content or anything, just because he has 15000 posts.

I think it comes down to wanting to celebrate milestones, especially when it's for other people. Who knows though? Maybe I'm just a fan of all the zeroes. Either way, congrats to bbr on 15k posts.

Fift.... wait... what?  When did that happen.  It's only been about ten minutes since I hit 10k.  :)

Ron has always been a prolific poster.  Before he was a mod, he was so often the first to post answering any questions that some of us thought he never slept, and I'm sure his diligence was one of several reasons he was asked to be a mod.  :-)

Ron, I'm not sure whether congrats on your landmark post are called for, or whether we should still be telling you to get more sleep, but congrats anyway, you're a great mod, and still often the first on the scene when moderation is needed.

I have been abandoned by my wife, who is spending a week in Florida with her Mom and sister.  While I will certainly miss her, this means the next few days are ALL MINE!!!

Once upon a time I would have been bar-hopping, but now I'm an old fart, so I come home, crank up some metal and get some serious work done on RPoL.  Not as party oriented, but still a week I have been looking forward to.
This message was last edited by the user at 00:13, Tue 16 Feb 2016.

So... w-a-a-a-a-y back in January 2013, I signed up for a Kickstarter with an expected delivery date for the project of February 2013.

And I've been waiting, and waiting.  And waiting some more.  People involved in the project got sick and couldn't work, and there were all manner of complications along the way.

But today I finally got my copy of Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls.  And it is a gorgeous book, made all the more awesome by having the name BigBadRon in the acknowledgements.

So happy right now that I could hop a flight to Australia and hug Skald.  :)

That dentistry has gotten to the point that what major pain I am feeling now, is probably a mere shadow of what it was had I had this done a mere hundred years ago.

So we started with a new dentist end of last year.  Need a lot of work done, insurance only covers 80%, cap per calendar year, so I hadn't been back yet.  But then I broke a back tooth, lacerating my tongue and leaving a rough spot, making it very painful to swallow and no hope of getting better until the sharp bit was gone.  I tried to call them Friday and Saturday, when I did have a way to get there, but they didn't get back to me till Monday.  I told them I had transportation so they sent one of the girls to pick me up and bring me back home after my tooth was fixed, and another filling done while she had me there.  Tongue is still sore, but at least it's getting better now.  But what kind of service is that?!?

That's awesome that your dentist will pick you up and bring you there/back for treatment! :)

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 662):

Yes, I was very surprised.  They even offered to do the same if we set up a series of appointments to get the rest of the work done.  But it's already almost March, my husband's fair-weather car will be out of storage the first second weather allows.

Spent my afternoon and part of my evening judging the Regional Drama competition for the high schools in my state.  I went into it half-fearing that I'd have to sit through some truly dreadful monologues or agonizingly off-key musical theater pieces...

Couldn't have been more wrong.  There were a couple of people who could really have used some more work on their pieces...but even those were still enjoyable.  And the REALLY good ones?  WOW!!!  I had a great time watching these kids at work!

I always tell people there's an incredible amount of talent in this area.  Nice to spend a day having my words proven true...

A few weeks ago I survived a Pulmonary embolism, now that I have a child it is proof that since my biological imperative is satisfied, my own body is trying to kill me.

As the saying goes, I love it when a plan comes together. :)

Bypassing an indifferent, lazy tech, I hit up someone at District Office to find out who I should contact regarding our discards, to see if a part could be scavenged from something there, to fix something here. The District guy stepped up and checked himself -- then extended his check to the other sites (which had been the next step in my own plan). Lo, another site had what I needed! He's sending it over.

Now I can fix something that can't currently be simply replaced. Problem solved without any additional expense.

Even nicer, after the last couple days, is knowing there are still a few other folks in this department willing to be helpful. That's an exotic treasure, these days. Wish I could send the District guy a beer in inter-office mail. He deserves a toast in acknowledgement of his efforts. :)

So, my long-standing TT group that meets every Monday started a Victorian era steampunk game about six, seven, maybe even eight months ago. Not really sure as it's been a blast from the start. It started off with our mercenary group being contacted by the Queen's daughter to investigate missing dignitaries who were on their way to the new world.

We get there, do some exploring, find this Druid conclave who help us out with some things and point us on some leads. We find one town with all the inhabitants dead at some altar in the center of the place, then another town where everyone is infected with brain slugs. So after taking care of that we discover that everything is part of some elaborate plan that someone is trying to control the elemental Monoliths (essentially the gods of the elementals, for those who don't know). Well, after finding more dead towns, and dealing with some of the Monoliths' avatars, we discover that the group behind everything is...wait for it...the Druids! Their plan has been to use the Monoliths to draw down the Elder Gods.

After restoring order to the four Monoliths and calling in favors they gave us, the Elder God Ragnora has been called down, destroyed a town and everything within a thousand miles of it and new we're on our way to take her out.

Here's where it gets interesting. Since the game started, one of our players left b/c of a new teaching position he took and I'm leaving at the end of the month. The other guy's character was some freaky Air Elemental descended Unchained Monk. I WAS a normal Human Fighter until I called in the boon from the Fire Monolith. I asked to be imbued with his essence. So he obliged. So now I possess elemental traits as well as some other nifty abilities.

Point being, now that our characters are within vicinity, the GM told me that since our two characters are elemental in nature, we're going to be controlled by Ragnora, the mother of all monsters. Next game our characters are gonna turn on the group and probably wipe them out.

Much as I miss my old mechanic (he's been down for almost 2 years for a back injury), my friends and I have lucked into finding another trustworthy, reliable, and competent mechanic -- who's right in our neighborhood. Our old mechanic is up in the city, almost 50 miles away.

The new guy gave me a ride to my friend's -- only about 2 miles away (which is right next door, around here). And while here, put in a temp fix on her little truck so it'd start again (why she didn't pick me up as planned).

This morning, in and around my brake job, he installed the replacement part we brought him for the truck, replaced the alternator in my friend's van so it will now start reliably, and now has the battery from my truck charging. If my battery's still good, I could have my truck back on the road today. :)

So nice to have this all so very local, given not much is, when you live in the middle of nowhere!

Beautification, at least.

And how about this wonderful color scheme...simultaneously creative and soothing.

If you need some happy tears today.

http://aplus.com/a/david-beast...as-lindsay-ratcliffe

Weight lifter befriends 12 year old girl with progeria, a rare but serious condition.

So...Friday, I got home from work near the depths of despair, because a project I was working on had gone all sorts of wrong...I'm not an experienced carpenter, by any means, but I've done enough construction and set work to feel competent, at least...but several little things all compounded on each other and things were all out of kilter, and I felt totally defeated by it all.

Went home, vegged out in front of a few episodes of Doctor Who...and things started clicking together in my head...understanding where the problems had happened, how things had gotten so far off.  And understanding that it was just little stuff...a missed detail here, trying the wrong thing to correct for it there...I felt better.

I went to bed that night, still feeling a bit down, but at least not feeling like I'd totally failed.  And, sometime during the night, my brain kept chewing on those little errors.  I woke up knowing how to fix almost all of them.  Spent Monday correcting those errors...and all those little fixes that came to mind while I was sleeping did the trick.  There were still a few more errors that I couldn't bring myself to worry about when the rest of things were so out of whack, but with the big stuff straightened out, I went back to work yesterday, and spent a few more hours making a series of little fixes here and there.

And today, I painted.  And it works.  Works even better than I'd expected.  This was a project I wanted to do last year at this time (well...around this time. We didn't realize, a year ago, that we'd need this done.)  Our purchasing department kept bungling the purchase requests...they didn't order the lumber for months, and then they didn't order the hardware to go with it...it took them months longer to order the hardware, and by then all the lumber they'd ordered had been used on other projects, so we had to order it again.  Seriously, I started drawing up plans for this right around the end of April last year.

But it's a year later.  And the project is done.  And it's even better than I thought it would be.  And part of me just wants to bust a gut with pride over getting it done at all.

It's been a good week.