Wow...

I have completely fallen off with posting here. So you get the super quick recap.

1) Our trip to St. Louis went very well. Mom was utterly thrilled with her birthday present, which I can now tell you all about. :) We're flying her to Seattle in August. Jeremy and I will take her to Portland for the weekend to go to the spa at the Edgefield and Powell's Books. Then we come back to meet up with her friend who will be accompanying her on a cruise to Alaska. :)

2) My conference in Portland was about as could be expected from such. Good parts, boring parts, and Jeremy coming down for the weekend portion of the conference. More than anything, I now take this conference as an opportunity to chat with someone else who knew my former boss, who planned the mini-conference last October in his honor. One of these years, I am hoping that I can present at said mini-conference. So I gotta keep the communication flowing with those folks. :)

3) Been reasonably busy this past week, mainly with the Cassie-cat, who took a slight turn for the worse. She is improving now, I think, but we were notably concerned about her when we got back from Portland. She has now been to a cat opthamologist. How many other cats can say the same? :)

4) Getting geared up for Ambercon US is the other major factor in our busy-ness. I'm really looking forward to seeing some folks I haven't seen since last year (and some I've seen more recently), and actually staying in the convention hotel this time. :)

5) Work continues apace. I haven't heard anything about my next travel dates, but I'm sure they're lurking in the wings... as always...

ZOMG busy...

Yeah, except busy barely describes it. I had to put "posting to my blog" on my to do list for the writer's group or it wasn't gonna happen today.

It doesn't help matters any that I spent 6 days only checking the internet with my phone, which meant E-mail and Facebook, and little else. But since I was in the midst of Ambercon US, I wasn't complaining too much, as I was having an utter blast. I haven't finished my write-up of the gaming yet, but when I do, I'll cross-post it over here, for all those people who are interested in gaming stuffs. :)

In crafty news, I've been getting some crocheting done finally, in preparation for a small show that I'm doing on May 7, at Comedy Underground, from 6-9 p.m. I'll mostly have Decapitated Dollies and other silly stuff that I make. There's a comedy show after the craft show, so you can stick around afterwards if you're interested. And there will be a few other local artists with amusing stuff selling there as well.

We've also got an EtsyRain show coming up on May 9, at SodoPop! This is the day before Mother's Day, so it's a great opportunity to pick up a last minute gift for your mom. We'll have about 30 EtsyRain artists selling at this event, so there are lots of options for gift giving.

More media consumption!

Although not as much as last week. We watched Brazil on Sunday, in preparation for a Paranoia game that we were going to play. The game was cancelled, but the movie still happened. And the movie hurt my brain a bit. I think I need to re-watch Time Bandits now, to see if it has a similarly totally crazy, epic ending. Cuz seriously, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are both so over the top, I'd be shocked if Time Bandits was not. :)

In other news, I have been ridiculously busy lately, and I don't think it stops until May, maybe. I spent all but one day of last week out of the office. I'm here for 3 days this week, then off to Rhode Island. Next week, I won't be in the office at all, though I'll still be in town. The following week, I work 2 days, and then head out on vacation. I get back from that to a 4 day work week, and then I may be traveling the last week of April. On the few and far-between days that I am in the office, there's tons for me to work on. Whee!

In the meantime, I've been working on my characters for Ambercon, which has been an interesting process. I'm used to convention games with pre-generated characters. In the 8 games that I'm in for Ambercon, I get to make the characters for 7 of the games. I'm done with 6 of those 7, and hopefully will finish the last tonight.

Of course, I also need to make a new character for Exalted, as Laine (my Night caste archer-sorceress-tomb raider) died in the game on Saturday. So I'm going to play a Lunar now, since everyone else who shows up to the game regularly plays Lunars. Laine's demise was pretty unsurprising, as I decided to have her go out in a tiny rowboat on a lake in the middle of the Temple of Elemental Evil. Yes, there are many bad decisions there. :)

Home again!

So I spent the past two days driving to and from Eastern Washington, with a bit of taking photographs while there. Of course, these were photographs for work, which means they aren't of anything terribly exciting. I didn't even take my own camera, and I only saw one thing I wanted it for. The sunrise yesterday morning was pretty spectacular. I was going to use my iPhone to get a picture, but oddly, the touch screen doesn't work when you're wearing gloves, and it was WAY too cold to take the gloves off. :)

I've still been slacking off when it comes to getting new things done for my Etsy shops, but I'm trying. I actually have a few things stacked up for photography, when I have some time. Luckily the sun doesn't set till 7ish now, so I do have time in the evenings, if I don't jam pack my schedule. I'm really good at that jam packing my schedule, though, especially on the weekends. This might have something to do with having a boyfriend who is also off work on the weekends. :)

Aside from all of the local games, I'm now really getting excited for Ambercon US, which is just over a month away. The game book came out yesterday, so I got to choose all the games I want to play while I'm there. I should get my list of what I actually get to play in about a week and a half, I think, so more about the games when I know what I get to play! :) It's funny, though, that there are probably a good chunk of games I signed up for that aren't Amber. And then it's odd that I will get to make the characters for I think every single game I want to play in. This is not the normal convention going experience. I'm sure it will be interesting, though! :)

Where to begin?

I have a great number of things that I could post about today. This may actually mean that I will post regularly this week. :) Being in Everett most of last week for work, with longer than usual commutes on either end, was awesome for getting crocheting done, but made internet use a little more difficult.

So I guess we'll work through this logically, in order. :)

Friday night, Jeremy ran a one-shot of Amber for myself and three other friends. The main reason for the one-shot was so that I could play the game before going to AmberCon US in April. Yay for signing up for a convention based around a game and world that I knew NOTHING about. :)

Now I have read at least some of the novels that the game/world are based on now, so I was one step ahead of two of the other players. The third had played before, and knew what he was doing, so his character was sort of the guide for the rest of us. And the rest of us, we were silly. :) We decided that we would all play characters from or based out of existing fictional works, so we had Sailor Moon, a Sith lord, and Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks (yeah, that was me). :) Much silliness, of course, but it was a lot of fun.

The thing that I like most about Amber is that it's a diceless system. Meaning no rolling dice for combat! (Among other things.) The system is also set up to not dictate your character's social or mental abilities with numbers, so that the character's social and mental acumen are based on the player's actual ability in those areas. I like this lots, because a) I hate having to make a character dumb when she needs to be good at other stuff, and b) I hate the idea of rolling dice to see whether or not you can convince someone else of something (for example--replace with any social type roll).

I also went into this without having touched the game book, and that actually didn't bother me. Now granted, when I did get to look at the book, everything clicked better in my head. The "tell me what you want to be able to do and I'll help you make your character" system worked for this character creation, but I'll be very happy to make my next character on my own. And I'm really looking forward to getting to select my games for ACUS now. :)

On a slightly tangental note (though related in my brain): garlic fries sound like they would be made of awesome, but the reality is that they aren't. My car still smells like garlic, after a 10 minute drive with garlic fries in it. :(