I would have called this posting "Car Woes," except our car troubles have been a series of manageable problems that individually don't qualify as woes. But enduring one after another is wearing me down.

( Lose an old car, gain a new one )

Being sick with a cold is a good time for groggy thoughts, so I have been obsessing over min-maxing my Pathfinder (AKA Dungeons & Dragons 3.6) character. I am recovering now, though not before passing the cold to frostmuffin and xelona.

Remember my Livejournal post of May 24, 2010, Turtles and Pathfinder? I recorded the cliffhanger at the end of a module to ( Read more... )

Ever since we moved to Maryland back in 1992, we have been spending Christmas in Michigan. It led to an odd lack of Christmas decorations in our house, because we wouldn't see them on Christmas itself. We never purchased a Christmas tree and our presents were piled for easy packing into the minivan. And we were heavily involved in the December ( Read more... )

Sunday, May 23, was World Turtle Day. I started writing this entry then, but the exact day is not important because I mostly celebrated this event last week with a gift to my pet turtle, Peter. I replaced the filter on his aquarium with a new filter twice as large as the previous. The old one had worn out enough that I had attached a supplemental ( Read more... )

Today, frostmuffin and xelona took our dog Miko to the veterinarian to die by lethal injection. The alternative was to let Miko gradually die of dehydration after losing the ability to drink ( Read more... )

Both my father and my wife's father were engineers, and so are a good number of my in-laws. I dapple in boardgame design. My wife is a church musician who loves to plan out worship services. One daughter is an artist, and the other daughter majored in theater stagecraft, the building of sets and props for theater. Thus, our family indulges ( Read more... )

Next week in the evening I will be a storyteller at Vacation Bible School at our church. I am busy getting ready for it. The stories are set up as plays, with my character Old Storyteller as the narrator. These plays require one to four other actors. I don't have four assistants. On some days of the week, I won't even have one. On Wednesday, I won' ( Read more... )

This Christmas vacation has been more surprising than most. The biggest surprise is that we bought a car, a 2007 Kia Optima, to replace our 10-year-old minivan. The rest of the details are more ordinary, except for the great variety in the weather.

( My Christmas vacation )

My dwarven paladin Gardain reached 3rd level in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons this weekend. And I am retiring him. I start teaching Sunday School next week and I need the time I spend playing D&D to instead prepare my lessons ( Read more... )

I am in Freeville, NY. Visiting friends (amethyst_dancer, her husband John, and bythecards) in Freeville for the Fourth of July is typical. The unusual thing is that we had been here just a month ago, for John's birthday party. The birthday celebration was at Paddy's Pub in Cortland, with music by Irish singer Marty Brandon (Read more... )