Maybe too much O.T. but for a good cause...ME!

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Tired.

I worked 18 hours in a 26 hour span. I went to work Friday night from 11pm to 7am. I got home about 7:30am and went to bed pretty quick. Got up at 3:45pm and headed back to work at 4:30pm to get there for 5pm. Then I worked 5pm to 3am. My grand plan was to get home and crash by 5am and get up for noon to have a decent rest for the Easter holiday. I got home and was in bed by 3:40am. Not sure when I feel asleep but I think it was a little after 4am. The cat knocked something over around 6 am forcing me to inspect what it was. Luckily it was tuperwere. But my sleep wasn’t restful. I had a million small dreams as I seemed to wake up every 15 minutes. I thought I was would crash hard after work but it wasn’t so. After about 4 hours of sleep and not that great of sleep I’m weary but not enough to fall back asleep. I just feel all sluggish and uninspired. That’s exactly what I was trying to avoid.

My mouse for my computer shot the shitter. I guess I used the left button to much. I noticed I was having trouble in Call of Duty 2 for awhile now but I thought it was bad ping. When I went to work on Photoshop the mouse wouldn’t click and drag to make selections. It would barely click. I can’t really complain since I beat the hell out of it but it does suck having to buy a new one. I’m currently using my Wacom Pad and the mouse that comes with it in the meantime to navigate my desktop. I’ll probably buy a mouse tomorrow.

My baseball draft is tonight. I let the computer do most of the drafting for me. I’ll never get the mainstays of my team back that eventually got me to a 3rd place finish. Two of my former players are listed as top 6 picks in most drafts and my best pitcher should also go in the first round. This year we also have 12 teams instead of 10. I have pick #10 in the first round because of my strong finish last year. I’m not sure who’ll I end up with. I usually dump at least a third of the computer picks during the season anyways and grab new guys.

I worked over-time the past two Saturdays because ConnCon is this coming weekend and I’ll be attending. The over-time was needed to compensate for missing this coming Friday and to help pay for going to ConnCon. This is girl there every year. I’m sure she’s on of the co-ordinator’s kids. She brings a huge cart of Girl Scout cookies every year and makes a killing. A lot of gamers are,…large people to be polite. And cookies, better yet good cookies, are a calling they can’t resist. The kid usually charges a buck more than they normal cost though the little wretch. Still, I haven’t seen anyone around my parts selling them so I’m budgeting $30 to go towards Girl Scout cookies.

I’ve eeked by in the first two rounds of CBR’s Project Runway 2008. So far two votes each round have been enough for me to slip by to the next round. A couple of people survive by voting for themselves. I haven’t done that yet. And some people have friends at the board vote for them. None of the people that have voted for me are people I really know at the board which is cool. This week was create a costumed character based on a state from the U.S. When were randomly assigned states and I got Louisiana. So I’ve created The Lousisann’ Swamp Rat. Basically, she sort of looks like a Dukes of Hazard girl but I think she’s kind of cool. We’ll see if she can carry me through to the next round. If I do make it I’ll have a touch schedule. You get the assignment on Thursday roughly noon. You then have to have the completed entry, including character write up and colored picture up by Monday around noon, I think. I leave late Friday morning for ConnCon and return home around Sunday night around 8pm. Not a lot of time to draw and color a decent picture and create a history. We’ll see what happens.

Found a new comic book site to post at. It helps a creator possibly get noticed by other professionals and or publishers. There’s no reason not to do it.

I drew a new picture of Jania for The Necropolis Chronicles issue 3 but it’s all out of proportion so I’ll have to do it again. This time I’m going to print the reference picture instead of trying to go from memory. In drawing from reference I usually do a better technical job on the art piece but it also tends to lose some ‘energy’ to the feel of the pic. I prefer energy over technical skill when I draw. Strangely though, I absolutely worship artist, painters mostly, that can create a photograph level portrait.

I finished watching season two of Rome recently. HBO series are great. Well, the Sorpranos and Rome are. Rome got great reaction out of me from squirming in discomfort to borderline cheering from my couch. The last episode or two was a little slow as they wrapped up the year’s plots but the middle episodes were really awesome.

I finished Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or whatever the third book was titles. It was my favorite movie and my favorite of the three Potter books I’ve read. So I’m continuing this reading trend of mine for this year. My buddy was able to locate two more Dark Horse Universal Movie monster books for me. So now I have Frankenstein and also the Wolfman. The Frankenstein book has him met Jack the Ripper so I’m a little hesitant on that one. The Wolfman sounds more self contained so I’m planning to read that one next. I also have another 600+ Anita Blake novel from Christmas and the 4th Harry Potter book to read also. I’m actually looking forward to when I get to the Potter books that haven’t been made into movies yet. Those might actually surprise me. The movies follow the books pretty closely so when I read the books I’ve seen as movies there are no good surprises. Also on the horizon to read are the 4th edition D&D rules books. I believe they are due in June.

Heading off to spend most of Easter at the parents in a short while so I’ll end this here.

Time Warp and money embarrassments

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Had some trouble sleeping this weekend. Saturdays are tough for me and I think I’ll have to change my routine for them. Currently I get home about 7:30am, stay up until 10:30 or 11am, sleep until 4 or 5pm and then do whatever until around midnight and go back to bed. I usually try and sleep 8 hours Saturday night to Sunday. But the past two weekends have left me feeling pretty tired and I haven’t done that much during them. Worse, because I start doing these sort of long naps of 4 or 5 hours I tend to wake up after that even if I have the opportunity to sleep longer.

Sunday was a bit of a time warp. I changed all the clocks correctly in the house except for the ones in my bedroom. Those I changed back instead of forward. So I woke up at 4am which was really probably about 6am. I said ‘hell no’, and wrestled with trying to get back to sleep. I eventually did but my nephew and brother got up so the thudding bass of video games and the constant yammering of my nephew to the computer screen forced me up. The clock in the kitchen read 10:30am while my bedroom clock read 8:30am. Whoops! So I’m not really sure how much sleep I actually got Saturday night. I did sleep for an hour later before heading out to D&D because I felt drained regardless of how much sleep I had.

D&D was fun if for no other reason than I hadn’t played since September of last year. That’s almost 6 months of not playing. Ugh. Mostly that was due to me working 6 or 7 days a week for the past 4 months. Our DM was a little late so we played some cribbage. I came in last. I hadn’t played that game for a few months either. It also didn’t help that I couldn’t add. When I first get up I’m either really pumped or like a zombie. Usually I’m like a grumpy zombie and I was after the hour nap. I couldn’t even do simple math. Yikes. I missed a lot of points but my friends were cool and pointed them out to me. I was okay once I fully woke up.

I got to play my deep Halfling at the gaming session. Browyn is my favorite character for role-playing. She’s a former slave to evil humans and tends to resent the vast majority of humans and their gods. She also swears like a sailor. She has a slight mean streak to her but otherwise is a decent person doing the right thing. She would make a terrific novel character because she has character. However, I slip up her classes so much that she’s really rather useless in the campaign we play in. The campaign leans towards power gaming. That means by the rules things are legal but tend to be stupid if thought out. An example is a creature we fought yesterday that was very tough. It was half crocodile half lizard man. Essentially it was a reptilian centaur. It was also a character class mixture of barbarian and monk. Now this is REALLY stupid considering we were out in some deep and thick swamp and there were multiples of this same creature. Someone had to train these things in a monastery which they then ditched to live like Conan the Barbarian. Like I said, all legal in game terms and it was done so that the creatures would be tough. They dropped one of our fighters in one round and dropped the other to half hitpoints and knocked him down prone in the same round.

Back to Brownie. I made her so have the weapon style of using a sword and a spiked shield. She would swing her sword and shield bash with her shield. Nifty visual but rather weak in combat. She is also a rogue with the ability to ‘sneak attack’ if the situation allows. So at my best, Brownie could dish out about 35 points of damage in one round. The dwarf fighter had upward of 5 attacks and dished out 90+ points of damage in the same amount of time. Huge difference. So unfortunately, in game, Brownie is actually a party liability. But like I said, she is my most fun LG character to role-play.

Felt like an ass the other day. My co-worker’s father passed away last week and he had to fly down to Porte Rico for the funeral. Another co-worker took up a collection for him. I had my grocery money. A ten and two twenties. So I give a ten because the guy’s really cool. I go grocery shopping really intent on my costs and I still went over. Gah. How embarrassing. I got snagged on Cheez-It’s that were buy one get one free and for whatever reason, my second one wasn’t free. I went over by $2.50. So I had to charge my groceries. Not a big deal but my balance had just gotten back to zero and I wasn’t sure how to charge my groceries. My grocery store doesn’t have people sign if you use their club card and the tally is under $50 so that threw me too. And I use to be a cashier a lot at Toys R Us. So it was really embarrassing. The only good thing was because it was so early in the morning I was the only person in line.

I’ll be registering to head down to the gaming con ConnCon at the end of the month. I hadn’t really planned on going because I was expecting to still be in my 6 days a week mandatory department but I successfully bid out. It’s nice having my weekends off. The whole weekend of Friday, Saturday and Sunday should be under $150 total. Unless you count the lost of Friday’s wages from work. Then it shoots up to like $290. I should be playing D&D all weekend and mostly with friends so it should be a good time.

I joined a designing contest on the comic book forum I hang out on. It’s the same one as last year and it’s called CBR’s Project Runway 2008. The administrator posts a challenge and you design a costume and post your creation by a certain day or you’re out. Once the time limit is done people have a few days to vote and possibly multiple participants can be voted out. Participants that miss the deadline are out of the contest. I think something like 15 people have posted entries for week one so far. Last year I was always at the bottom of voting but managed to last into the early middle rounds of the contest. I do it for fun. I can’t even remember what the prize package is. It’s something like a couple of comics worth maybe a total of $50. It’s really probably just comics the administrator has hanging around that he doesn’t want any more. But at least there’s a prize besides bragging rights.

The first contest was to design a super-hero based on yourself. It’s about the designing and not artwork so there are some very good artists and some weaker ones but good designers. I can of fall in the middle.

I’ve been working on some ideas for a Shadowdancer solo arc of comics. I have four main support characters to make about 12 issues of comics. Lots of drama and romance. I didn’t really come up with villains so far because I like to have my crew in order before writing stories. Shadowdancer’s support crew are two potential boyfriends, a confidant, and a mentor. The characters are fairly well thought out I like to think with motives and actions that hopefully fit them and do not seem forced.

I think I finally solved my tech problem with the artwork for issue three of The Necropolis Chronicles. So now I’m eyeing at getting all the tech stuff done so it can be printed finally. And the funding for printing will come from my tax returns that I haven’t budgeted yet.

Overall, other than some sleep issues, and when don’t I have those, things are pretty upbeat and rosey.

Dreams and various things.

Blog 030308

A decent weekend.

Saturday I got off work and played some Call of Duty 2 before bed. Slept, bought some great comics and later went to my buddy’s surprise birthday party. We sort of weren’t paying attention and he walked in on us while we were sort of just standing there. We hurriedly yelled,’ surprise!’ and tossed quarter sized rubber balls at him. I can’t remember what we use to call the balls as kids. Super balls I think.

My buddy lives in an apartment complex so we had to sort of hide our cars. I picked a lousy spot and needed to go back out and hide my car because it was in plain sight. I couldn’t find a decent parking spot and drove around the whole complex three times. Complicating matters was the birthday boy was due any minute. So I’m blasting around and finally found a spot about as far away as possible from his apartment not really by choice. I then hustled it back to the apartment not wanting to be caught by him if he pulled in. I really must have looked fairly stupid to any on-looker.

I think I heard one of my long time friends say he was getting divorced which is really to bad. I’ve always thought he was one of the most honorable and stand up guys I’ve ever known. I look up to him. To hear that he and his wife are most likely breaking up saddens me. They have two year old twins to complicate matters. And another friend apparently has a son. I thought from previous snippets of this child that it had died in it’s infancy or something. Then I found out another friend had been fired from a company we both worked at. And his wife is his immediate boss. I know virtually nothing of this story but he had been working there for at least four or more like 5+ years. I was rather shocked. Something about improper use of a computer. I know he use to burn disks for himself and print things out too. Never saw him do anything with porn though. But overall, the party was decent.

Sunday was fairly laid back. I did a couple of drawings and spent more time on Call of Duty 2. My brother has recently starting playing Civilization 3 again. It’s my all-time favorite game and a HUGE time killer. Games can often take 20 or more hours to play through. And I just found my disks for it as I was looking for something else.

Dinner at mom’s was pretty awesome. A roast, green beans, mashed potatoes, fresh bread and corn on the cob. Yum! I spent about 2 and ½ hours there since I hadn’t seen them in two weeks.

Today is chores day. Finally cashed two paycheck I had kicking around. One is paying for my room for DragonCon later this year and the other is paying for most of next month’s mortgage. So other than some petty cash to spend the money was only going into bank accounts and not really to me.

I bought new ink cartridges for my printer. $55 freaking bucks for all 4. I might as well just buy a new printer. It’s almost as cheap too. I also bought 3 more of this new type of t-shirt. It’s an athletic material that I LOVE! It’s so comfortable. Some materials don’t agree with me if/when I sweat. This material doesn’t. I’ve had to ‘put down’ a couple of awesome shirts because the least bit of sweat and I stink to high heaven no matter how much deodorant I use. It should be noted that I shower regularly and don’t stink except for certain situations. I’m very paranoid about stinking.

I had a dream a few months back and was wondering if it would come true. And it did to a tee. I had just started in the Dual Core area at my job and had a dream about being out of the area but checking back in to see if I was needed. The first night I was back at my old area the Dual Core area called for my services. I walked down and spoke to the supervisor and she told me I wasn’t needed and could go back to Custom. Exactly as it happened in the dream down to the very same words she said.

I called today to finally make an appointment for my taxes. The lady on the phone offered me tomorrow night! Yowza! I was expecting something like a month’s wait. Someone cancelled their appointment and I’m the beneficiary of it. So my appointment is tomorrow night at 7pm. She did offer me something next week though when I was hesitant about it.

I don’t think I have much else at the moment and I have to do my last chore still – the dishes. Yuck.