The Troll Cave

Any day now...

2009-08-05T04:43:00.003-04:00

I'm a terrible blogger, it seems. It's been something like six weeks since I've put virtual pen to paper. Let me make another cliche'd claim to try to do better in the future.

ANYwho...

- It's almost time! Alarra's at 39 weeks as of this morning. She's been having her Braxton-Hicks contractions for a couple of weeks now and at any moment I could get the call to come home from work because they're regular and painful now. Most people know that I've been not so secretly hoping that our little pudding troll waits a few extra days to come home so that he'll share a birthday with Bele. It's just four days past the due date, it's not like I'm asking much, right?

- I'm bored with my job. I like the company I work for. I like the people I work with. I'm sick of doing the same thing day in and day out. I've stagnated here and stopped learning new things relevant to my career field. I should move on. The thing is, I don't want to lose the benefits that I've got where I am. I feel stuck.

- I'm apprehensive about next week. Not because of the baby, but because of my mother in law. Don't get me wrong, she's a wonderful woman and can be a blast to spend time with under normal circumstances. But she's a worrier. Oh my word is she a worrier. She's going to be spending about a week with us after the baby's born and I'm afraid that she won't let us parent like we want and need to parent. When Alarra says "I don't feel good" out of the blue, mom wants me to rush her to the ER. I fear she's going to think every little whimper from the baby will evoke a similar reaction and I fear it will drive me, and possibly Alarra, batsh*t crazy. Maybe it won't be that bad. Here's hoping.

- Our house is trying to fall down around our ears. It seems every day something new goes wrong. Today it was the dryer. I mean, the dryer has been problematic since we moved in. It won't dry an entire washer load of clothes. We have to pull stuff out so that the load is light enough for the drum to turn. We've gotten used to that and it taking two dryer loads to dry one washer load of clothes. Only last night it was worse. Alarra tells me that she was washing some stuff in our new "Free and Clear" type laundry detergent to put in the hospital bag (I know, we were supposed to have this packed weeks ago) and she finally had to pull out so much that there's only a pair of pajamas, the baby outfit, and a couple of baby blankets in the dryer before it would spin. This is unacceptable. Fortunately we have this insurance policy for homeowners that's supposed to cover this kind of thing. I hope they cover this. We're (I'm) going to be calling on this later today.

- Our alliance in WAR recently struggled through some, err, drama that caused one of the guilds to feel they needed to leave. Why? Because they didn't use Ventrilo as a communications venue during RvR (see my last post for what RvR is). Okay, that's not quite true. It's just the guild leader and his wife that didn't use it, and they had their reasons. Only, instead of just saying "We can't use Vent for personal reasons I don't care to share," they kept saying "We won't use Vent and I don't need to explain myself to you." This lead to much questioning of their sanity and they took it personally, even so far as attacking another guild leader who was trying to stand up for them. It's too bad. They are a good guild and we are disappointed that they had to be so immature as to resort to what is essentially taking their ball and going home.

- In other WAR news, however, our guild, Dark Watch, is doing very well. Since the server merge from Magnus to Badlands we've been able to really establish ourselves as a group of folks that can be counted on for dungeons and battles both, and both at a high level of play. Moreover, our guild is in an alliance full of other guilds who are equally successful at all levels of play and still somehow manage to keep the atmosphere casual enough that we don't feel like like we need to be hardcore in order to fit in with them. This makes Zeb a happy, happy Troll.

Until next time,

Zeb, Out

WAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHH!!!

2009-06-18T00:47:00.006-04:00

For those of you who don't know, that's the standard battle cry in my current chosen MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online), Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (a.k.a. WAR). This will be my topic for today.

First, a little background.

WAR is an online game based (loosely, I'm told) on the Warhammer Fantasy tabletop strategy game universe. The sides are divided up into Order and Destruction. Each side has three playable races. Order consists of High Elves, Dwarves, and humans loyal to the Empire. The Destruction side is made up of Greenskins (Orcs and Goblins), Dark Elves, and humans loyal to the powers of Chaos. These are further broken down into pairings. These pairings are supposed to represent the opposing races which suffer the most hatred for each other. Dwarves and Greenskins battle for common lands, as do High and Dark Elves, and Empire and Chaos.

The game map is further broken down into Tiers 1 through 4. The purpose of the tiers is to make it easier to put players of similar levels into combat with and against each other. The tiers are broken down roughly into ten rank (WAR for level) increments. So a Rank 1 through 10 player would participate in Tier 1 events, 11 through 20 in Tier 2, et cetera up through Tier 4 which is end game content.

The game is Realm Versus Realm (RvR) which is similar to Player Versus Player (PvP) but there are some important, fundamental differences. These differences don't matter much to a lot of people, including players, but they matter to me so I'll briefly outline them as I see it. First, this isn't every Elf for themselves and anyone's a target. There are distinct sides in the combat. (There are PvP servers setup that remove this particular distinction, but I don't play there and what I'm describing is how it works on a Normal server.) Second, this isn't just a battle to rack up numbers and see who can list the most kills. There is a purpose to it. The outcome of every open field skirmish, keep capture or defense, and claim of a battle objective has a direct effect on the overall state of the war at large. If these battles are going well enough, the winning side can actually invade the capitol city of the losing side and capture their ruler!

With that out of the way, let's talk about why any of this is important to me.

I'm a guild leader in the game. No big deal, right? Any yahoo with a credit card and a couple of friends can start a guild in this game. It's true. We're not the biggest guild in the game and we don't have the largest RvR presence in the game, but we're far from a non-entity too. Our guild currently weighs in at over 200 characters* and in our alliance, our guild is the only one over Guild Rank 20 (more on this later) or over 100 characters. People recognize us on the battlefield and I like to think that we get a little bit of respect for being a presence in the game on our server (Magnus).

This makes my position as a guild leader a bit more daunting. There's too much at stake now for me to see this as some kind of a lark. Now I have to worry about who's getting to be officers, and what officer ranks can do what, and what criteria I use to determine who gets to be what rank of officer. I don't just need to worry about what kind of impression I make on people, I need to worry about the impression my people make on people. So far it's been a good one, I'm told, and this makes me happy.

"Oh, Zeb, it's just a game. People don't care what you do with it, right?" Yes, it's a game. But it's a game that people buy, and then subscribe to so that they can enjoy their spare time with other like minded people. It's immersive. And because it's immersive, there is politics! We saw an example of that just today when an allied guild's leader made a rather lengthy and empassioned speech about why he's taking his guild and leaving the alliance. Apparently there was some friction between him and one or two of the other big players in our alliance.

On the bright side, I am really pleased with the way our guild is shaping up and the way our alliance is coming together. We have a good core of people who are working their way through our officer ranks and we have seven to ten people online on most days during prime time. We have people who are involved in the guild and the alliance. Our alliance is regularly running events for everyone and often (though I'd like to see more of this) the guilds will show up to other guild's events.

Hmmm, I think I had more that I wanted to say but this has run on long enough. Maybe I'll do more later.

Until then,

Zeb, Out

Busy Prepositions, Always On The Go!

2009-06-09T02:33:00.003-04:00

Yeah, we've been busy. Seems every weekend now we have something coming up that demands our attention. This is both good and bad.

For instance, this weekend was Alarra's (2nd) baby shower for people in our neck of the woods. It was nice to have all those people over and it was a lot of fun, but our house is kind of small for it. We have about 500 square feet on the main floor and we had something like 12 people and 2 overly excited dogs in attendance.

Next weekend we're going to try to have a game night and we're hoping to have 8-10 show up for that as well. Again, it'll be nice to have people over and spend some time getting to know some of our newer friends as well as just spending time with some of our less knew but longer distance friends. But really, how many games are there that are suitable for 8 or more people? Not to worry! We have LOTS of games and if we happen to have two of them going at once, so much the better.

It does take some effort to get the place ready for company, though, and it detracts from my valuable WAR playing time. Even for that, I normally wouldn't worry too much except that I'm a guild leader and we've just revived our guild from a crushing disappearnce of players (for a while it was only me, Alarra, Bele, and Gorag). So I feel a need to make sure that we stay engaged in the guild and not let it get away from us again. (Side note - if anyone is interested in trying it out, please let me know because I would love to get the referral bonuses if you decide you like it.)

The weekend after that we're heading down to Suffolk, VA to visit with the couple who are going to be our little Pudding Troll's godparents. He's Navy and they're getting ready to leave soon(ish) and we're regretting not spending more time with them before they get even further away from us.

After that, of course, is the Southeast Trogland Meetup in Johnson City. Since that's both a whole ton of fun and the place where Alarra and I met, there's no way we're skipping that. We've already got our hotel reservations and are getting giddy with excitement. It's been SO much fun the last two years. I must say, however, that I'm more than a little bummed that Trog and Shadow have had to pass it up this year.

Moving down the calendar, the next weekend is not only the 4th of July (woohoo!) but it's also our First Anniversary (woohoo-er!). We really aren't sure what we're going to do that weekend yet, but it's sure nice of work to give me a three day weekend every year for it. I think after that we have some breathing room, but by then we'll be only 5 weeks away from expecting little Jared to come home.

Anyway, I need to get back to getting ready for the next big weekend so...

Until next time,

Zeb, Out

More on Friends...

2009-06-03T23:56:00.003-04:00

I've been feeling a bit left out on this front lately. You see, I'm a fairly social person at heart, despite my natural inertia to be the quiet guy in the corner. What this means is that I really want to have a lot of friends around, but I'm terrible at going out and making them. I'd been okay for a while because I had my D&D group headed by my boat friends, Dave and Natalie. Only, Dave and I had it out a while back and now I'm persona non-grata with that whole group. I had hopes that it would blow over, but it's been months now and it hasn't. Dave unfriended me on Facebook. I think Natalie may have too since I haven't seen an update from her in a while. This makes me sad, too. Anyway, the group seems to have sided with Dave, though I suspect that it has more to do with not wanting to lose their gaming session and access to the boat more than it does agreeing with Dave. That and Dave is great at spin and made sure he got the last word in before cutting me out of the discussion group and not giving me a chance for rebuttal.

Meh, whatever. Dave had been a real sheiskopf for the last year anyway and more anyway. I don't miss him. I miss the boat and I miss "friends". Even the rest of the group was actually more like acquaintances than friends. They never came to my place when invited, they never helped me move, you know, any of the things you'd call on friends to do.

Amanda's got this neat group of people she's recently met as a result of participating in NaNoWriMo. She got in with this writing group full of neat people. There is one girl there that, with her husband, even seems to have quite a bit in common with us. She writes, he's an IT guy, she was military, he works for No Such Agency, they both play WAR, et cetera. We went to their son's birthday party and they just seem like they'd be good people for us to hang out with. Only, we don't seem to be able to make that work and I'm not sure why. Ah well, there's still time for them.

But that still leaves me with "why don't I have any friends?" I used to have lots of friends. And I suppose if I were to count all of the people on GitP that I enjoy meeting when I get the chance, I guess I still do. The thing is that most of them don't live even remotely close to us, and the ones that are kind of close are still 90 minutes or more away so we can't just pick up and go bowling or whatever.

At this point it seems like my best bet is to do something like what Amanda did and join a hobby club of some sort. Only, I have no idea what it would be. On top of that, I'm feeling a little gun shy about the whole "close friends" thing right now anyway. You see, in the last four or so years, I seem to have lost every close friend I had. The common link here appears to be me and I'm worried that I shouldn't inflict myself on others anymore.

Well, that seemed overly melodramatic, didn't it? I think that's a sign that I should stop now before I really get to dwelling on it.

Zeb, Out

Revisited...

2009-06-02T00:56:00.004-04:00

Well, I suppose since Alarra's posting again, I should maybe too.

Since my last entry I'm two semesters under my belt towards my master's degree. I could have taken a class this summer, but there are a lot of things going on this summer that made it a good idea to wait until the fall semester before starting up again. Like...

Alarra's pregnant with a healthy baby boy to be named Jared Alan on or about August 12th. That's only 4 days before Bele's 21st birthday. We're all kind of hoping, some of us secretly some of us not so much, that Jared hangs on until the 16th. I think that would be awesome and so does Bele. Alarra's not so sure about it.

Alarra's finally getting ramped up on a new job! Her getting hired this spring was a very welcome bit of news. I've managed to get us piled up in a bit of debt these last couple of years and, while we're making it, having a few extra bucks to help knock those bills back down will sure be nice.

And speaking of knocking down bills, Chase recently bought out Washington Mutual, where I had a credit card account. I thought nothing of this until I realized that they'd changed my interest rate from 6.99% to 24.24%. What!? That's right. When I called and tried to get it lowered, they told me that my account has not been flagged for any offers. When I asked for an explanation, they told me that it had been "a business decision". Bear in mind that I have been a customer in good standing. I paid my bills on time, always paid more than the minimum, used my card, and last month, even had it paid off to a $0 balance. Why then was I being raked over the coals like this? The best answer I could get was "You're welcome to take your business elsewhere." Again, What!? In these economic times you're willing to give up a good customer who's not willing to pay 24% interest? Yes, sir. So I did. I called up Citi that same hour and they offered me a 9.99% rate with 12 months no interest on balance transfers. Oh, and a $4000 higher credit limit, thankyouverymuch.

Now I just have all of these other bills to get lowered. At least most of these are short term loans. I have three that are all due to be paid off within the next 12 months. One of those is my car, which will free up $400 per month to apply to other bills. Or, maybe even to be applied to a retirement plan. Yeah, there's a novel idea. Of course, there's the fact that Alarra *needs* a new(er) car.

We've been talking about what to get for her when the time comes. We know that we want something that gets good gas mileage without being TOO small. We also would like to have something that has a reasonable amount of cargo space for large objects/long trips. I'm thinking something like the Jetta Wagon. She's not so sure. I can't say I blame her.

And on the topic of retirements and vehicles, this leads to another string of conversations we've had about what we want to do when we retire. I think we're pretty much settled on the "buy an RV and drive around the country" idea. We're not really sure how that's going to work, since I'll want to take motorcycle(s) AND a car if we do this. We would need to have both, too. You can't take a motorcycle grocery shopping and you're not going to convince me to give up my bike either. Decisions, decisions.

Ah well, that's enough rambling for now. I'll have more later.

Until then,

Zeb, Out

News and updates....

2008-07-30T06:01:00.003-04:00

Yeah, there hasn't really been much going on for the last couple of weeks. A few points of interest, however...

1.) Alarra's getting job interviews! We're pretty excited about this. She had one with a residential treatment center for adolescent girls that sounds like it could be good work for her. The problem with this job is that, like many many others in the area, she needs to be licensed in order to be able to do it. There's a preliminary license she can get once she takes a couple of tests, but she's not eligible to even schedule the tests until after she's finished with two more classes from school. Why would a school let you graduate without making sure you met all of the requirements for employment first? Oh well. Yesterday she had an interview with Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center for a similar type of position, only they said that she didn't need to have her license yet, she'd just get a raise once she gets it. Hooray! We have to wait a little bit to see if she's going to be able to get the job or not, but if she does, she'll start the day after we get back from GenCon. Heh, that'll be fun. She's a trooper, though and she'll be able to pull it off just fine. It's only orientation anyway, if I understand it right.

This job, for her, would have a few benefits the other one won't provide, too. The biggest of which is that she'd be able to get her Art Therapy supervision for free, which is great. Once she gets that checkbox filled, she'll have a lot more opportunities open up for her.

But enough about her, she has her own blog where she can talk about this more and better.

2.) GenCon is coming up in the middle of August. I went to my first one last year and it was fantastic fun. I can't wait to do it again. Rich is supposed to have copies of his new book available there, which I hope to pick up. I also hope to check out the Warhammer: Age of Reckoning booth. She and I have both preordered the game, but there's no release date yet so we're hoping to get a little taste of what the gameplay will be like. We're also hoping to be able to find some more new games to stock the house with. That was where we spent the most time last year, looking through all the vendor booths for fun games we'd never seen before.

As an added bonus to GenCon, there are going to be quite a few of our Playground friends there to hang out with. And it looks like we're going to get to meet a few more this year. How cool is that? I love meeting these people. I've yet to not have fun at one of these meetups and this one will be no different. We're going to have a few of our closest Playground friends staying in our room this year too, which will up the fun level quite a bit.

3.) I've decided to work on my education some more. Alarra's inspired me to go on for a Masters degree of my own. I did a lot of looking around and have decided on getting a Masters in Information Technology with a focus on Information Assurance from the University of Maryland, University College. Now I just need to work out how I'm going to pay for it, but I think that'll work itself out okay between Tuition Assistance from work and what remains of my GI Bill. I've gotten a little bit of grief on my choice for the course work, but in relooking it, I think it's still what I want to do. I need to get some paperwork through to people in order to get it going though. And I'm kind of running low on time. Guh. Why am I always running low on time?

4.) And least importantly, Alarra and I are doing this simple little game on MySpace called Mafia/Dragon Wars and we can use all of the allies we can get. So if you happen to have a MySpace page and want to help us out, we'd sure be okay with adding you to our friends!

Okay, that's all for now.

Zeb, Out

Withdrawal symptoms

2008-07-16T02:51:00.004-04:00

Well, it's a darned good thing that many of you I care about read my blog and have blogs of your own. The forums where I tend to spend a LOT of time (the Giant in the Playground place that I have linked right over there ->) have been down for a few days and it's driving me crazy.

I mean, at first Alarra and I thought it would be funny to come back and say "Haha, thanks, Rich, for taking down the forums while we're on our honeymoon so that we didn't miss anything!" But now I just want my threads back. I feel a need to keep in touch with this Playground, MY playground. Because even the people I don't care for, I care about.

Besides, I have a couple of other jokes I've been working on that I'm dying to play on them all. (mwa ha ha ha haaaa). Okay, they're not mean or anything, but Alarra and I find them amusing and I think my friends over there will too.

It's nice that I have a little bit of inside knowledge as to why the boards are down right now, but that's not helping me to understand why they aren't back up. As an IT person myself, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where the disaster recovery tools implemented by the crack staff over there wouldn't have had the server back online within 24 hours. It's my understanding that the previous server was hacked and those whose accounts were compromised were let know right away, and that this is what led to the unplanned server move. And as a part of this attack some more stringent security measures are going to be employed. I understand that enabling these measures will take some additional time on top of simply restoring the forum software on a new box. I just can't imagine what's taking so-o-o-o-o-o-o long.

I also wish that I could help. I'm a smart guy with a not insignificant amount of knowledge about servers in general and disaster recovery in particular and I'm confident that if I were given the opportunity I could help to speed the process. I'd be willing to be that there's no shortage of other Playgrounders that can/would/do say the same thing.

So, if any of you Playgrounders are reading this, HI! I miss you! For anyone else reading this that has no idea what I'm talking aboot, I apologize for this seemingly senseless interlude. I love you guys too.

Zeb, Out

I'm a married man

2008-07-10T00:39:00.004-04:00

It's the first time in my life I've been able to say that. My last marriage wasn't declared to be one until it was over. I've been engaged a couple of times before but it hadn't worked out. I've even had a very long term live-in relationship. I've never actually been able to say "my wife" before.

What a great feeling!

The wedding and the reception were fantastic. I can't believe how well things went for as quickly as it got put together. The photographer was great. The DJ was great. The food and the cake were great. The guests were plentiful and all had a good time, so far as I can tell.

It was a bit of a bummer that my family had to leave so early but it comes with the territory when you have that many little guys to take care of. But we did have a lot of good friends around that stuck with us having a great time until the wee hours.

I can't believe how crazy this last month has been. I had some family in town for a week in the middle, then the Johnson City meetup (I can't even begin to comment on how fun that was), a one day break hanging out with Midnight Son (too short, if you ask me), and then off to South Dakota to get married. Now we've still got the honeymoon in Pennsylvania coming up and I kind of thought things would slow down a bit but they're not for some reason.

All those things we needed to do to get ready for the wedding? Now we have to do a million more things to make it a marriage. At least we've managed to find a little time to just be happy together, if only for a few moments at a time. Although, Skylar, our cat, has made that a little more challenging that it need have been. On Tuesday when we brought Athena home, apparently he was mad at us for leaving him alone for so long because, while I was taking the dog food downstairs to put it away, he managed to trip me up near the top of the stairs.

I went ass over tea kettle all the way down. Thank goodness for the food bin to keep me from hitting my head on the concrete instead of it. My left side hurts like hell now, especially the knee. It originally hurt to even bend it. Now I can do that okay, but I still can't really put any pressure on it. Did I mention I live in a three story house? That's been fun. Today a knock at the door came while we were downstairs and I raced upstairs to try to answer it. BAD idea. I've been paying for it ever since.

Anyway, I'd better get back to earning that vacation time I like so much.

Be good, people!

Zeb, Out

Ooooo, shiny!

2008-06-25T02:24:00.004-04:00

Okay, so after my last post, fate continued to beat me up. Only it was being more mean about it sometimes. For example, we dropped by Best Buy on Sunday to pick up a cross cut shredder for Alarra's wedding centerpiece project. While walking over to where I thought they would be I stopped to drool over some refrigerators they had on display that are like what we've been wanting to buy to replace our intermittently failing one. They're cool, with the french style doors and the freezer drawer on the bottom and the water and ice dispenser on the side.

We walked around for a bit noticing the prices and thinking about which one we'd choose since we're going to need one soon but we are on kind of a budget. They're all really expensive so we weren't thinking about getting one right then. Then we rounded a corner and saw a bunch of them in the style we wanted that were all on sale for being open box items. We decided to scope them out and see if we could get ourselves a really good deal on what we wanted and found one that is perfect. And it was $700 off of the "new" price. We called the sales associate over and asked her about it and she said that the only thing wrong with this particular fridge was that it was their floor model and so couldn't be sold as new. We talked a bit decided that it wasn't being too spontaneous to try to get this good deal while it was staring us in the face. I filled out paperwork and waited a few minutes to get approved. We were giddy. Then BAM! Nosir, thankyouverymuch. Your credit application has been declined. "Was it even close?" I asked? Maybe we could make up the difference or something? She didn't know. She said she wasn't privilege to that information.

So we headed home, disappointed, and came up with a plan to apply online for whatever credit they'd give us and then see for ourselves if we could make up the difference. Only, no dice. The application page asked me a bunch of verification questions about people and places I didn't know. So even an open ended credit app was turned down because I couldn't prove I was who I said I was. We decided to go in to the store the next day and try the same plan, only in person. We weren't really expecting much. What with all the stuff from my last post weighing in on the equation, we were prepared for another disappointment.

But wait! No? They need to talk to me. They need to talk to her! We got approved! And for much more than we needed to be able to buy the fridge we wanted. Wait. Something must have gone wrong. Our fridge must be gone or something. Let's go check. It's still here! And better yet, it's $200 cheaper than it was yesterday! All is good in the world for now. Our fridge is being delivered on Thursday and will have the water line installed next Tuesday. We're pretty jazzed about it.

In other news, we're going to get to shake hands with some of our Playground friends for the first time in a couple days and we're really excited about that too. Midnight Son and Shadow, if you're reading, we can't wait. It's going to be a blast. I hope you guys don't mind if we hang out in your hotel room into the wee hours before we head back to the hippie hut. 8-D

B-deep B-deep, that's all for now.

Zeb, Out

And the hits just keep on coming...

2008-06-19T05:29:00.004-04:00

Okay, so we spent a good bit of today working on the drainage issue. We scooped out, disassembled, removed, and cleaned the utility sink where the icky water's been accumulating. While it was out of the way, we also took a 25' pipe snake to the line under the house. We managed to clear up a couple of troublesome problems but the darned lines still weren't draining. It was more than a little disheartening. So I broke down and called the plumber. He came out and charged me $240 dollars to run his professional pipe cleaner tool through the main line beyond what my 25'-er could reach. The news ... is not good. He ran into roots about 30' in. Thankfully, he stayed and cleared out the roots for us so that the pipes work as intended but the problem is that still means we have roots in the main line and that's not good. And he doesn't think it's far enough out to be the city's problem instead of mine.

We're going to buy some rock salt in the morning and see if an occasional brine solution into the ol' main line will keep the roots at bay for a few extra weeks, but in the end we're really going to have to break down and pay them to dig up our yard and replace the 50 year old pipes there. He quoted me $4300 to do this. Ouch! In case you're wondering, no, he's not pulling one over on me. I watched the roots come out of the line. A *lot* of roots. I'm not sure how we ever got any water to flow out of the house, even slowly. It's no wonder that no amount of pipe cleaning solution I tried, to include sulphuric acid, was doing any good. Anyway, now to start planning for it.

On the brother front, his command came down and said "No". He can't go to the wedding. I'm more than a little disappointed. Not just because they said he couldn't go, but also because they took so friggin' long to make up their minds. We've got a wedding to plan, jerks! Two and a half weeks before the wedding is w-a-a-a-a-y too late to be telling me that I need to change them. Have some friggin' courtesy, eh? We've resolved the mess this blow made, but it's still damned rude.

And just because I'm in a whiny mood, I still haven't completely repaired my computer from my niece's unintentional poisoning earlier this week. I've got the magic pop-ups stopped and my desktop background isn't the "You've got issues" web page anymore, but it's still not what it's supposed to be and I still can't launch any installers to try to run any of my utilities to clean it up. When I have my task manager open I can see the new process start and immediately stop whenever I try to launch one. I'm running into walls everywhere I look to try to figure this one out.

Ahhhh. I feel better having vented a bit. Now I can more easily focus on the positive things. The Tennessee meetup is in a week and I'm going to meet a lot of people that I've been forum'ing with for a while now. The wedding is the weekend after that and things are mostly in place now. We finally found a place to spend a weekend being newlyweds after the wedding, and it looks really nice and the specific room we wanted was available. It's gonna be great.

Gotta keep this one short today. Hope to see everyone soon. Stay safe out there.

Zeb, Out

Just when you thought it was safe...

2008-06-17T01:55:00.004-04:00

So, things were calming down a bit, right? Now I have some family in town making the visit to the east coast for the summer, just shortly before the wedding. My folks and four kids. So there're eight people in the house for a week. It's a little bit busy. And I think it's stressing my sweetie a little more than she's letting on. Though probably that has a lot to do with the fact that this is her first time meeting them. An understandable concern for someone who's less than three weeks away from marrying into the family you're just meeting. Anyway...

Thankfully, we'd planned on being able to host a lot of people from day one. We have plenty of sleeping space. And it's been fun having them here. Until now. Now, the pipes in my house decided they were upset about not being consulted about this additional strain for a week.

Once again my plumbing is jammed and pushing back into the utility sink in the basement. I've taken some measures to try to free the blockage under the house, but for the time being we're on a "no flush" rule until further notice. I'm really, really hoping that it will have been resolved by the time I get home from work in the morning. Before I left I poured denatured sulfuric acid down the toilet and flushed in order to get it closer to where the blockage is. In addition I had to apply some industrial strength drain cleaner to the utility sink so that it could actually drain once the major blockage gets freed up.

Thankfully, my family is taking it in stride. It's just one of those things that goes along with owning and older home, apparently. I'm still just shy of mortified about it. Of course, there are also offsetting penalties involved. On the second day here, I told my niece that it was okay with me if she got on the internet to check her MySpace if it was okay with Grandma and Grandpa. She got the go ahead. Now I'm dealing with a plethora of malware that's being a bit of a struggle to get rid of. And that's for a guy with eight years of desktop and enterprise support experience. I can totally see why the average citizen, even a savvy one, would give up after a couple of days and reformat the hard drive. I'm not yet willing to go to that extreme, but I will if I have to. I did manage to get most of the annoying pop-ups gone but I've still got something that's preventing me from easily opening my task manager and it's not letting me install/update some additional spyware/malware/virus tools I have, so we're not quite done yet. My niece has been warned that next week when they're visiting my brother, she's not allowed on the internet at all.

Speaking of my brother. As I've mentioned, we're two and a half weeks away from getting married, he's supposed to be my best man, and he's still not sure if he's even going to be able to go. He's military and apparently his command is being wishy-washy on whether or not they'll grant him the time off. So involved in this means that there's also not been any plane ticket purchased and we're already too late for the best "advance purchase" deals. Unfortunately, that also means that his son, who was supposed to be the ring bearer for the ceremony, is definitely out. We can't afford to get them both to the wedding.

This leaves us needing a replacement. We decided to go a little non-traditional for it and we have one of my nieces doing it instead. We think she'll be adorable for it. We're a little worried about the concern that there's more of my family in the ceremony that Alarra's, but in the end it's got to be our wedding and this is what we've decided. Besides, by our count I'll only have one more person from "my side" than she does. So if we change things around, that just unbalances it the other way. Frankly, we have bigger things to worry about at this point.

Well, this is rambling enough for one day. Should probably save some for another day, eh?

Until next time.

Zeb, Out

It's been such a long time...

2008-06-11T03:57:00.003-04:00

I haven't been as attentive to this as I'd originally planned. I'll try to do better.

In the meantime, things are starting to calm down a bit.

Alarra's finally come home to stay. She'd gone to South Dakota right after graduation to help out with the wedding planning and I went and picked her up last weekend. It was a good trip for me and she got a lot done. We're both ready to move past the wedding and be a happy couple though. Not that we're not looking forward to the wedding, but we are looking forward to not having to worry about the little details anymore.

We're finally figuring out ways to make it so that Athena isn't as hard on us when we're gone. We keep the trash cans up. We keep the recycle bin attached to the deck with a bungee cord so she can't tip it over (though she can still pull stuff off the top). We have a gate in the basement that keeps her from terrorizing the house while we're away but lets her go in and out as she pleases so she can play in the yard, sun herself on the deck, or come inside out of the rain, whichever she pleases. We only do this when there's not going to be anyone at home because she's typically much better behaved while at least one of us is there.

We're getting closer to having our stuff unpacked. We aren't expecting too many more shipments of stuff to have to find places for. Don't get me wrong, we still have work to do, but at least it's looking like a home now instead of a storage facility.

Even with the stuff that's settling, we still have a lot to do.

She's got two more classes to complete. They're not for her degree but she needs them in order to eventually get licensed. She has to tweak her thesis a little bit in order to get her official diploma and then she has to work on getting it published. She's been reassured that getting it published is something that will happen, but it needs to be right. I can't tell you how proud I am of her for the work she's done.

I have some classes I'd like to take. I'm not sure what, but she's inspired me to at least look into getting my own masters degree. It's a bit daunting for me right now. I'm not sure where I'd like to focus my learning and I'm not sure where I'd like to go to get smartified. I should probably also look into getting more/newer certifications for my job. It's been a while since I've done any and what I have is starting to become dated.

We need to organize our finances in order to start paying off all the loans we have. Things have really come together so that we shouldn't have any trouble paying the bills, but we've agreed that before we make any new bills we need to work to get rid of some of the ones we have. Our most recent conquest is that I've finally paid off Bele's motorcycle. We're turning that payment around and sending it to Grandma DeDe to start paying her back for all of the help she's given us towards the wedding going smoothly (Have I mentioned how grateful we are, DeDe? Because we really, really are!). I have another short term loan that will be paid off at the end of July. We're going to roll that payment into something else and get that paid off, et cetera. We haven't really sat down and figured out the exact order of paying down our debts, but we have the plan in place and we're both itching to get going on it in earnest. We should really make some mad progress on it once she gets a job. (Not that I'm rushing you, honey!)

Don't worry, we have some fun things on the "To Do" list too.

We've decided to go ahead and pre-order the new Warhammer MMO. So have my brother, my sister-in-law, and her brother and a few of his friends. Right now we're all playing WoW and we're all kind scattered hither and yon on different servers but we've all agreed that we're going to go to the same place for this one and try to consolidate so the we can all play together without having to feel like we're choosing one over another or feel like we're not making the progress we could because we're splitting our time.

We're also going to get a Wii at some point, and probably the Wii Fit, among other things, to go with it. PhoeKun brought a Wii to the Cleveland meetup we went to and it was sooooo much fun we decided we needed to put it on our wish list. We registered for it but we really aren't expecting anyone to spend that much on one gift.

Shamefully, we still need to settle on a plan for our honeymoon too. It's not going to be anything grandiose like Paris or anything, but we feel we really should go somewhere, even if it's only to a quaint little B&B a couple of hours away. I think she may have found something like that nearby in Pennsylvania that sounds enchanting. I need to ask her about that.

Well, that's about all for now. Hopefully I'll have something more interesting next time, which hopefully won't take as long as this update did.

Zeb, Out

Old Friends, Bad Friends

2008-04-15T06:31:00.004-04:00

I'm horrible at maintaining friendships across distances. I don't know why. I kept in touch with my best friend from high school for a little while after I joined the Army but I've long since been out of touch with him. Likewise I've got a great friend that I made while I was in the Army and since he's been stationed elsewhere I've been horrible about staying in touch with him even though we were thick as thieves for years while we were stationed together.

Every once in a while I'll get a contact from some old friend that I promised to stay up with and feel like an asshole for never being the one to think about getting in touch with them first to let them know how things are going in my life.

To those friends, and you know who you are, this blog is my meager attempt to try to keep everyone up to date on what's going on in my little world. This post is my attempt at an apology for always being the one to let the ball drop when it comes to staying in touch.

I swear, it's not that I don't value your friendship. I do, and very much. If any of you happen to have a blog or something similar that I can thumb through every once in a while to keep up with what's going on in your life, feel free to send it to me and I promise I'll read it. I'll even post a comment on occasion so you can know that I'm still around.

I'm running a little short on time as of late, but I just felt like I needed to get this out there.

I'll see you guys around, huh?

Zeb, Out

Hell hound

2008-04-03T03:23:00.003-04:00

Wow! I didn't honestly think anyone would read this outside of Alarra. I feel all warm and fuzzy now.

Okay, tonight's topic is my demon dog. She's actually a really sweet basset hound named Athena. She's three years old and just as loving as anything. She has a couple of problems that I wish she didn't, though.

She hates being alone. I mean, most dogs would rather their people be around, but this girl, man oh man. The first time we left for a few hours to spend some time with our friends, this was a week after getting her from my brother, my neighbors said she sat out in the back yard and just bayed for hours. One of our neighbors even left an anonymous note saying that it sounded like she was being tortured. We felt horrible. And more than a little nervous. You see, I work the midnight shift and I was afraid that she was going to be doing that all night in the middle of the night. In order to help a little bit I locked her doggie door so that she couldn't go outside and bay. That way it'd at least be muffled by being inside.

The problem is that she couldn't "hold it" for the whole time I was gone and she kept making messes in the house. This lasted for a week before I needed to make a weekend trip to VA to visit Alarra. I couldn't leave her for a whole weekend so I took her with me. She was fine for that. She actually likes the car ride so it was cool. When I got back after the weekend I asked a neighbor if she'd been getting any better about being loud and obnoxious while I'm gone. She said it was better so I started leaving the doggie door open again. This helped with the messes inside but it didn't help with her missing me when I'm gone. At least she doesn't bay anymore, or so I'm told.

I've tried a couple of things to help out, and they seem to be helping a little. I leave the TV on for her when I leave and I give her a "treat" which is a calming tablet that I got over the counter from PetCo. She loves those. She gobbles them up as quickly as she does the real treats I give her for being good. But this leads to the second big problem.

She likes to chew on stuff. She chews on clothes, bags, books, boxes, you name it. Last weekend we came home to find that she'd actually eaten the first 70 pages of a book Alarra was reading. 70 pages, just, gone. The only thing left was a tattered cover. Fortunately, Alarra had already read all of those pages. Anyway, this week she's gotten into a deck of cards, rolls of toilet paper, rolls of paper towels, the trash that was waiting to go out to the curb, and a coveted package of flat bread (That's a different story. I was actually at home when she got that one.) I keep trying to keep stuff out of her reach but every day when I get home she's torn apart something else. It's not like I don't feed her either. She has one of those food dispenser things with like a week of food in it and I know she knows where it is. She can eat as much as she wants to. I'm really concerned that one of these times she's going to get a hold of something important.

Whenever I see that she's gotten into something, I take her to it, put her nose on it, and then swat her on the nose. Only, I really don't like swatting her every day when I get home. I'm afraid she might be misconstruing it is me just habitually swatting her when I get home instead of actually learning anything by it. She's not a smart dog, as far as I can tell.

Well, that's my tale of woe for tonight. Any helpful ideas would certainly be welcome here. I was kind of hoping I'd be able to leave her alone for a weekend once in a while but it doesn't look like she's going to make that possible.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Zeb, Out

Welcome to my blog...

2008-04-02T00:46:00.001-04:00

Hmmm... what's this button do?

*ploink*

Ah ha! I get to vent my frustrations and sing about the good life all in the comfort of this little cobweb on the Big Web. Nice.

In all seriousness, inspired by the inimitable Trog and encouraged by the lovely Alarra, I've decided to take a shot at carving out my own space in the blogosphere, for good or ill.

Today I think I'll talk a bit about finances. Mine are a bit of a mess right now. Going way back I made a few bad decisions in my youth and really jacked up my credit. I've been working hard for the last five years or so to try to get that back in check. It's been a bit of a struggle. It seems like unexpected expenses come from all over the place that I can almost but not quite cover and I end up barely treading water or falling behind again.

Now I've bought a house. In almost all respects, this is a good thing financially. You get to have more house for less money in most instances. Okay, okay, in this case it's a lot more house for a little more money. Here's the kicker, though. All my life rental contracts have asked me to provide 30 days notice that I'm not going to be renewing my lease and moving out. Apparently out here on the east coast that's sixty days. The catch is that 60 sixty before my lease ended, I wasn't even looking for a house. I gave my thirty days notice and got told that I'll be held responsible for 60 days worth of rent. Well bugger. This means that now, for April, I'm going to owe both mortgage AND rent. This I cannot afford. Even if I forego food and bills for the month, I don't even make enough money to pay for them both. Okay, okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's true that there's no way I can afford both. If I could've, I'd have bought a bigger/newer house.

But wait, there's more. Let's talk taxes, shall we? For the last 19 years I've been filing as Head of Household. That's a pretty significant standard deduction, apparently. I can't do that this year because my daughter up and got herself married and isn't my dependant anymore. Well, it didn't occur to me that this would drastically affect the amount of withholdings I'd need to have through the year. When I went to file for 2007, I checked the HoH box like I have for years and years and got a prompt (I use TurboTax) saying I need to have a qualifying dependant for that. What!? I says to myself. Well crap. So I uncheck the box and I go from getting a moderate return of a couple of hundred dollars to owing. A lot. No, more than that. A tidy sum just over $2,100.

Toss this in the "more out than in" salad I've got going and I'm starting to stress a bit. But wait, there's more. "More?" you say? Yes. You see, also in the last year I've fallen in love (yay!) and in due accord with that we're planning to get married in July in South Dakota. We're doing it very low budget and we're getting a lot of help with the expenses there, but it's still feeding into my worries about being able to stay afloat.

There're other things too. Little things here and there that keep popping up. Minor house repairs and upgrades that we need to make, moving her stuff into the house from VA, diesel costing $4 a gallon, that kind of thing. It all just makes me tweak. At times I just sit in a dark room in a near panic wondering how I'm going to pull all of this together.

Thank heavens for Alarra. She's been my rock these last couple of months. She's been really good at pinching a few pennies and keeping me in check and reassuring me that, while it might get ugly, we'll pull through it and everything will be fine. And likely in just a few months too. She's set to graduate from Eastern Virginia Medical School with her MS in Art Therapy here in the middle of May. She's holding off looking for work until after the wedding, but once that's behind us and we're living in wedded bliss, her income, no matter how much it is, will greatly ease the amount of stress on our combined pocket books.

And this year has been flying by, so that should be even sooner than it sounds like it would be. It'll be okay. It'll be okay. It'll be okay.

Okay. Well, thanks for tuning in to this first edition of Zeb's Life in the Troll Cave. Leave me a note and let me know you were here, okay?

Zeb, Out.