2 month anniversary....
...of not posting.
So there's obv been a ton of stuff going on... I'll attempt to "sum up" but chances are I'll fail.
I've still managed to stay off of carbonated beverages and caffeine. I haven't had a coke since I quit it the week before my last post.
I had headaches for the over a month. Clearly this is not straight physical withdrawal symptoms. Well... pretty sure the withdrawal symptoms only stick with you for a few days. I think. So I presume that the headaches that plagued me all that time were probably stress related. I think I was medicating my self with caffeine, which is a great headache cure, from all the stress in my life. Anyway. That lasted some period of time over a month but it’s been better for a few weeks now. Here’s to hoping it stays that way.
Lindsey and I organized a cruise with a Magic the Gathering theme… maybe you heard of it http://www.legionevents.com/cruise/. It was a blast. We lost a couple thousand dollars on it due in some part to miscommunication with the travel agent we were working with, and due in other parts to us just not thinking about a few of the nuts and bolts that were involved. We’re doing it again, but this time we cut out ‘the middle man” Lindsey’s handling the liaison to Carnival lines part that was previously handled by someone else. We’re cruising out of Florida and the cruise is 1 day longer than the last one and to 3 ports which are all pretty cool AND it costs about the same as the last one. Evan Erwin of “the magic Show” came along on the first one and documented a bunch of stuff… check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QJiO1w5W80 He’ll be coming for the next one too: MC2. We’re really looking forward to it. We had MC2 set up days after getting back from the first one. Even though we lost money on it we knew we wanted to do it again.
The stores are holding their own at this point. Not accelerating, obviously, but doing ok. Our lease for the Madison store was going to be up at the end of July so we started looking/considering options. We found a new place not far from my house (like 4 or 5 blocks) and not too far from the store.. not much more than a mile… on Cottage Grove road in the little mall behind the Sentry. We went back and forth with our current landlord for a while as he tried to work out a deal he could live with that would allow us to stay. In the end we couldn’t really get there. So movin’ we are. He offered us a little deal if we could clear out earlier as he has another company lined up to go into the space already. So we went from moving late July to moving… NOW. I’ve been at the new place probably 20-25 hours in the last week clearing it out and getting it ready for our move in. There’s a LOT more work to go and I’ll probably be sending out a call for folks to come help with a few things I can’t handle without some extra hands.
The new place has some trade-offs. It’s quite a bit cheaper on rent/expenses. But we’ll not be setting up food. The strip mall has a DQ, Subway and dominos in the mall, and a Pizza hut and a Chinese place in the parking lot. No need for food, we wouldn’t make much at it in there anyway. So we’re going to lose a little revenue from food, unfortunately. The positive is that the mall is MUCH busier than the one we’re in now as far as other customers coming in. So our exposure will be much better. It’s also more residential, meaning it has a little better access from the neighborhood around it. So hopefully we can tap into that a little. While I’ve been there working I see a LOT of kids coming and going on bikes and walking around. I think I’m going to try bringing in some more inventory of main stream/learning/family games and see what happens there. I think we’ll have a better walk in crowd and I’ll need to do what I can to capitalize on that.
Lindsey is still job searching… though maybe has found something. She had a couple interviews at Borders and they seemed to like her. The pay sucks, but it’s better than a fork in the eye and the hours should be pretty flexible. Anything will help at this point. She’s also put in at epic for a couple jobs she’d do well at. Though obviously everyone and their brother is trying to get in there so that’ll be a tougher deal to land.
The initial ruling on my annulments came through last week. That ruling is in my favor (meaning they said yeah, you can have the annulments). Now it’s a little more waiting and it goes to the ratifying branch of the Tribunal where they will make a final determination. I’m PROBABLY good to go on that, but there’s a small chance that court will decide to throw it back to the beginning of the process again. If that happens… well I don’t know what we’ll do. But at this point I’m just hoping it doesn’t. Time is tight to pull off a fall wedding, even if the church is open. I’m not as worried about us being able to throw it together. It’s more about “everything will be booked” we’re looking LATE fall, possibly even early November, so that should help us as it’s less popular by then… but still. We’ll see. We need 6 months minimum to get a date set with the Catholic Church. That’s going to be the holdup. It’s GOT to be all done by end of April to have a chance at making that first weekend in Nov. So, like, 4 more weeks. Gonna be tight.
The pups are good. George is still fuzzy and Sammy hasn’t had an accident in forever. She finally grew some hair towards late winter so she wasn’t so cold All the time. Though she still curls up into a tight little ball every morning when I come upstairs, shoving her nose under her butt and not moving till Lindsey comes up.
Lindsey’s been watching all the west wing episodes in order. So I’m finally watching the series… sort of. She usually watches it while I’m doing something else. But I pay a little attention to it. It’s good… as I expected it would be. So many friends are/were fans.
Still WoWing … though I haven’t gotten an 80 yet.. .haven’t even touched the horde side in a month or 2. I like leveling mostly. And since I’d leveled so many guys on horde side I decided to try some ally guys. (it made me feel a little dirty) But Chris Boles and John and I are playing every Tuesday night for a few hours and leveling 3 night elves together. Only playing them when we’re all together and that’s been fun. A couple months of playing and they’re high teens. I started leveling a Human paladin too. He’s up to 31 or 32. Chris and I play other characters when john can’t be around (and usually a couple hours after John goes to bed on Tuesday nights… he’s a growing boy and needs his sleep… has to get up at about 6).
Been playing a lot of Magic lately too. I really like drafting Alara block. There’ve been weeks where I draft 10 times. I still had a bunch of RGD product on Magic Online leftover from when I was L3 and got a box given to me every set which I never used. I traded those packs for tix and traded the tix for new set packs, so I haven’t spent a dime and have been drafting online 4-6 times a week… mostly losing.
Bad Beat (™) story warning! (Non-MtG players should skip ahead a bit)
I really like drafting and playing but the online shuffling program just bones me. If the mana works out, I win. If it doesn’t I don’t. Very rarely are there games that were not determined by me either getting flooded or shorted. For instance: last night I drafted twice. In 6 games (lost both first matches) I had what I thought was a pretty good deck. 1 game I drew 1 creature, 2 pump spells, 1 call to heel, manaforce mace and 12 land. That creature was a 5 drop. I put 8 land into play because that’s the most anything I had cost me. I still only lost by a turn. He raced with exalted, I manaforce maced, pumped and smashed. Finishing totals he put me at 3 with 2 exalted critters, 1 being a flyer, in play. I needed to draw something… almost anything really. Any one of the 6 flyers I had in my deck would have bought me the turn and the game. I draw… a swamp. The last one in my deck. Sigh. I smash handily game 2. Game 3 sees me flood again. Land, land, land. In the meantime, he draws the most ridiculous agro hand I may have ever seen. I think he got me turn 4 or 5… and I had played only 1 creature because I kept drawing land OR obelisks/sphere. Maybe the moral here is I need to mulligan more aggressively. When I see that 4 land hand.. pitch it back! But Man that seems wrong….
So, next draft 2 mins after losing draft 1, I end up opening ANOTHER copy of the same mythic rare I opened draft 1 pack 1: Sphinx Sovereign (never drew him in 6 games btw, but would have been able to cast him in 4 of the 6 games). This time I lose G1 real quick on the “guess I’ll not draw any white”. 6 land in play. None of my 7 white sources. My grip full of saucy white goodness. (ew that sounds gross). Game 2 is a close one and I eek it out the turn before he’s gonna get me I get it in there. Then the last game I do the flood thing again. SO. Much. Mana. But I still almost get him. If I had not misplayed a call to heal (I didn’t wait for him to attack with his welkin guided spiritlinked rhox) I would have saved myself 3 pts of damage and I THINK that would have won me the game. That one was really on me. Despite being flooded I still had a chance.
Now.. I’ve been having SO much trouble with flooding lately that I’ve been playing 41 card decks with 16 land plus and obelisk or 2. 17-18 total mana sources in a 41 card deck…. And still repeated floodings. I’ve started experimenting with artifact mana sources and seeing how they affect the game. It seems I can go as short as 15 land with an obelisk or 2 and still not be short. The problem with that is that if you do end up a little short… you have zero recovery. Just scoop and go to next game.
In other news…
We ditched charter after some pretty awful customer service. My bill had taken a huge spike and when we tried to figure out why we just.. couldn’t. We couldn’t get info online (I had signed up for paperless billing and auto withdrawls) I tried to get my account opened up since I couldn’t seem to log in despite thinking I knew my pword and user name… online chat help told us to call. They couldn’t help us there. We called. The number was out of service. We told them that they told us to keep trying. An hour later we finally get through (truying every 5-10 mins) only to be told by the CSR there that they couldn’t reset my password without some special code that’s on….. the paper bill. Which I don’t get. Great. So we had to go to the office to do it. Turns out my rate had been “special” which no one told me when they were putting it in there for me… and the increase was due to the regular rates being applied. So we dropped cable to internet only (which they told us on the phone was $45, even when we asked specifically what the total cost was) and that’s $55 a month… cause the lady on the phone failed to mention the $10 up charge for not having any other cable services. We got Dish network for about $70 a month grand total is about $40 a month less than we were paying with charter straight. After we cancelled I was contacted by a guy through TWTTER believe it or not asking if there was anything he could do to try and save our account. It was too late. We hated their DVR anyway, it was not very good, couldn’t do alpha searches for programs and had constant problems of recording episodes it already had and/or not recording ones you didn’t. So Dish is in. DVR is better. Monthly bill reduced by $40. yay.
Well. That oughta catch you up :)
So there's obv been a ton of stuff going on... I'll attempt to "sum up" but chances are I'll fail.
I've still managed to stay off of carbonated beverages and caffeine. I haven't had a coke since I quit it the week before my last post.
I had headaches for the over a month. Clearly this is not straight physical withdrawal symptoms. Well... pretty sure the withdrawal symptoms only stick with you for a few days. I think. So I presume that the headaches that plagued me all that time were probably stress related. I think I was medicating my self with caffeine, which is a great headache cure, from all the stress in my life. Anyway. That lasted some period of time over a month but it’s been better for a few weeks now. Here’s to hoping it stays that way.
Lindsey and I organized a cruise with a Magic the Gathering theme… maybe you heard of it http://www.legionevents.com/cruise/. It was a blast. We lost a couple thousand dollars on it due in some part to miscommunication with the travel agent we were working with, and due in other parts to us just not thinking about a few of the nuts and bolts that were involved. We’re doing it again, but this time we cut out ‘the middle man” Lindsey’s handling the liaison to Carnival lines part that was previously handled by someone else. We’re cruising out of Florida and the cruise is 1 day longer than the last one and to 3 ports which are all pretty cool AND it costs about the same as the last one. Evan Erwin of “the magic Show” came along on the first one and documented a bunch of stuff… check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QJiO1w5W80 He’ll be coming for the next one too: MC2. We’re really looking forward to it. We had MC2 set up days after getting back from the first one. Even though we lost money on it we knew we wanted to do it again.
The stores are holding their own at this point. Not accelerating, obviously, but doing ok. Our lease for the Madison store was going to be up at the end of July so we started looking/considering options. We found a new place not far from my house (like 4 or 5 blocks) and not too far from the store.. not much more than a mile… on Cottage Grove road in the little mall behind the Sentry. We went back and forth with our current landlord for a while as he tried to work out a deal he could live with that would allow us to stay. In the end we couldn’t really get there. So movin’ we are. He offered us a little deal if we could clear out earlier as he has another company lined up to go into the space already. So we went from moving late July to moving… NOW. I’ve been at the new place probably 20-25 hours in the last week clearing it out and getting it ready for our move in. There’s a LOT more work to go and I’ll probably be sending out a call for folks to come help with a few things I can’t handle without some extra hands.
The new place has some trade-offs. It’s quite a bit cheaper on rent/expenses. But we’ll not be setting up food. The strip mall has a DQ, Subway and dominos in the mall, and a Pizza hut and a Chinese place in the parking lot. No need for food, we wouldn’t make much at it in there anyway. So we’re going to lose a little revenue from food, unfortunately. The positive is that the mall is MUCH busier than the one we’re in now as far as other customers coming in. So our exposure will be much better. It’s also more residential, meaning it has a little better access from the neighborhood around it. So hopefully we can tap into that a little. While I’ve been there working I see a LOT of kids coming and going on bikes and walking around. I think I’m going to try bringing in some more inventory of main stream/learning/family games and see what happens there. I think we’ll have a better walk in crowd and I’ll need to do what I can to capitalize on that.
Lindsey is still job searching… though maybe has found something. She had a couple interviews at Borders and they seemed to like her. The pay sucks, but it’s better than a fork in the eye and the hours should be pretty flexible. Anything will help at this point. She’s also put in at epic for a couple jobs she’d do well at. Though obviously everyone and their brother is trying to get in there so that’ll be a tougher deal to land.
The initial ruling on my annulments came through last week. That ruling is in my favor (meaning they said yeah, you can have the annulments). Now it’s a little more waiting and it goes to the ratifying branch of the Tribunal where they will make a final determination. I’m PROBABLY good to go on that, but there’s a small chance that court will decide to throw it back to the beginning of the process again. If that happens… well I don’t know what we’ll do. But at this point I’m just hoping it doesn’t. Time is tight to pull off a fall wedding, even if the church is open. I’m not as worried about us being able to throw it together. It’s more about “everything will be booked” we’re looking LATE fall, possibly even early November, so that should help us as it’s less popular by then… but still. We’ll see. We need 6 months minimum to get a date set with the Catholic Church. That’s going to be the holdup. It’s GOT to be all done by end of April to have a chance at making that first weekend in Nov. So, like, 4 more weeks. Gonna be tight.
The pups are good. George is still fuzzy and Sammy hasn’t had an accident in forever. She finally grew some hair towards late winter so she wasn’t so cold All the time. Though she still curls up into a tight little ball every morning when I come upstairs, shoving her nose under her butt and not moving till Lindsey comes up.
Lindsey’s been watching all the west wing episodes in order. So I’m finally watching the series… sort of. She usually watches it while I’m doing something else. But I pay a little attention to it. It’s good… as I expected it would be. So many friends are/were fans.
Still WoWing … though I haven’t gotten an 80 yet.. .haven’t even touched the horde side in a month or 2. I like leveling mostly. And since I’d leveled so many guys on horde side I decided to try some ally guys. (it made me feel a little dirty) But Chris Boles and John and I are playing every Tuesday night for a few hours and leveling 3 night elves together. Only playing them when we’re all together and that’s been fun. A couple months of playing and they’re high teens. I started leveling a Human paladin too. He’s up to 31 or 32. Chris and I play other characters when john can’t be around (and usually a couple hours after John goes to bed on Tuesday nights… he’s a growing boy and needs his sleep… has to get up at about 6).
Been playing a lot of Magic lately too. I really like drafting Alara block. There’ve been weeks where I draft 10 times. I still had a bunch of RGD product on Magic Online leftover from when I was L3 and got a box given to me every set which I never used. I traded those packs for tix and traded the tix for new set packs, so I haven’t spent a dime and have been drafting online 4-6 times a week… mostly losing.
Bad Beat (™) story warning! (Non-MtG players should skip ahead a bit)
I really like drafting and playing but the online shuffling program just bones me. If the mana works out, I win. If it doesn’t I don’t. Very rarely are there games that were not determined by me either getting flooded or shorted. For instance: last night I drafted twice. In 6 games (lost both first matches) I had what I thought was a pretty good deck. 1 game I drew 1 creature, 2 pump spells, 1 call to heel, manaforce mace and 12 land. That creature was a 5 drop. I put 8 land into play because that’s the most anything I had cost me. I still only lost by a turn. He raced with exalted, I manaforce maced, pumped and smashed. Finishing totals he put me at 3 with 2 exalted critters, 1 being a flyer, in play. I needed to draw something… almost anything really. Any one of the 6 flyers I had in my deck would have bought me the turn and the game. I draw… a swamp. The last one in my deck. Sigh. I smash handily game 2. Game 3 sees me flood again. Land, land, land. In the meantime, he draws the most ridiculous agro hand I may have ever seen. I think he got me turn 4 or 5… and I had played only 1 creature because I kept drawing land OR obelisks/sphere. Maybe the moral here is I need to mulligan more aggressively. When I see that 4 land hand.. pitch it back! But Man that seems wrong….
So, next draft 2 mins after losing draft 1, I end up opening ANOTHER copy of the same mythic rare I opened draft 1 pack 1: Sphinx Sovereign (never drew him in 6 games btw, but would have been able to cast him in 4 of the 6 games). This time I lose G1 real quick on the “guess I’ll not draw any white”. 6 land in play. None of my 7 white sources. My grip full of saucy white goodness. (ew that sounds gross). Game 2 is a close one and I eek it out the turn before he’s gonna get me I get it in there. Then the last game I do the flood thing again. SO. Much. Mana. But I still almost get him. If I had not misplayed a call to heal (I didn’t wait for him to attack with his welkin guided spiritlinked rhox) I would have saved myself 3 pts of damage and I THINK that would have won me the game. That one was really on me. Despite being flooded I still had a chance.
Now.. I’ve been having SO much trouble with flooding lately that I’ve been playing 41 card decks with 16 land plus and obelisk or 2. 17-18 total mana sources in a 41 card deck…. And still repeated floodings. I’ve started experimenting with artifact mana sources and seeing how they affect the game. It seems I can go as short as 15 land with an obelisk or 2 and still not be short. The problem with that is that if you do end up a little short… you have zero recovery. Just scoop and go to next game.
In other news…
We ditched charter after some pretty awful customer service. My bill had taken a huge spike and when we tried to figure out why we just.. couldn’t. We couldn’t get info online (I had signed up for paperless billing and auto withdrawls) I tried to get my account opened up since I couldn’t seem to log in despite thinking I knew my pword and user name… online chat help told us to call. They couldn’t help us there. We called. The number was out of service. We told them that they told us to keep trying. An hour later we finally get through (truying every 5-10 mins) only to be told by the CSR there that they couldn’t reset my password without some special code that’s on….. the paper bill. Which I don’t get. Great. So we had to go to the office to do it. Turns out my rate had been “special” which no one told me when they were putting it in there for me… and the increase was due to the regular rates being applied. So we dropped cable to internet only (which they told us on the phone was $45, even when we asked specifically what the total cost was) and that’s $55 a month… cause the lady on the phone failed to mention the $10 up charge for not having any other cable services. We got Dish network for about $70 a month grand total is about $40 a month less than we were paying with charter straight. After we cancelled I was contacted by a guy through TWTTER believe it or not asking if there was anything he could do to try and save our account. It was too late. We hated their DVR anyway, it was not very good, couldn’t do alpha searches for programs and had constant problems of recording episodes it already had and/or not recording ones you didn’t. So Dish is in. DVR is better. Monthly bill reduced by $40. yay.
Well. That oughta catch you up :)