Still here
Sep. 5th, 2007 01:26 pmThere's a whole entry by
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columbina that's pretty much All About Me, anyway! Or more correctly, it's about the two of us and how we interface in game situations. (Interestingly, I proceeded to melt down rather spectacularly last night. But I recovered and life - and gaming - went on.)I have spent the last two weekends playing GuildWars pretty extensively. The first weekend was the Sneak Preview and I took Rima the Elementalist and played mostly with her. I got her most of the way through the Norn series of quests. I took some of the other characters into the beginning of the new game (which is called Eye of the North, or GW:EN - it's also an in-joke, because Gwen is also the name of a character who's been around in GuildWars from the very beginning), but nobody else went far into it. Then this Friday (the 31st) was the go-live date and so Col and I played all weekend, with his main character Kaeleen and my dervish Sharzad, mostly because Sharzad was the one who was in the right place to join up with Kaeleen at the time we started playing. (And leading indirectly to the problems described in Col's entry.) Despite the occasional clashes and fits of temper on both sides, we enjoyed it. It's not an easy game and it's not meant to be. But it's fun. It has some great bits of comedy in it, too. In-jokes, Monty Python jokes, Pinky and the Brain jokes, you name it.
Other than that, well, life goes on as normal. The top floor of my mother's house is empty except for some furniture. (I am keeping some of this furniture but at some point fairly soon, I'm going to have to figure out how I'm disposing of the stuff that nobody else wants.) We have finally got the last piece of her investments transferred over, which is something I was beginning to think was never going to happen. Now - there is always a catch - I have to decide how to invest it. I think I am over-thinking the investment question, and that in turn is sort of immobilizing me. It's an important decision, yes, but it's not a life-and-death decision. I need to relax about it, a bit.
Oh, I don't think I ever said here that we booked a trip to Las Vegas at Christmas. This will be our long-delayed 20th anniversary trip. We are leaving Christmas night - so we won't have to miss the family celebration - and staying 3 nights, I think it is. That's as long as I could persuade Rob to stay. It's long enough, especially since we're not coming back until really late Friday so we essentially have that whole day to fool around in Vegas, too. I booked us at Treasure Island but I might possibly change that if I find a good deal somewhere else. I had it in mind to stay somewhere that's sort of in the middle of the Strip, though. Years ago when I came the first time we stayed at the north end (at the Riviera), and a few years ago with the TUS group we stayed at the very south end (the Luxor). So the middle is the part I've never really explored. (Rob has no opinion on this, since he's never been before. His only opinions so far are that five days is too long, and that he wants to see topless girls. Men.)
Old pictures
Nov. 19th, 2006 12:26 am
my mom & me, 1984
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.
There was a meme-ish thing floating around that said to post old pictures of yourself, and it reminded me that I had been intending to post this picture anyway - not because I'm in it but because my mom is. This was taken in Las Vegas in 1984. It was in our hotel room, I think - which was at the Riviera, if you really want to know. This was probably taken by my grandmother. I don't know why I decided to put my head on my mother's shoulder like that - it's rather unlike me, really.
Let's see, in the summer 1984 I would have been 24, and she was - well, actually, she was almost exactly the age I am now. (That's a slightly eerie coincidence, to my mind.) I don't know why, exactly, but my grandparents took my mother and me to Las Vegas that summer. I was broke as usual, but they paid for everything. Seems to me they even gave me a little bit of money to gamble with - sort of embarrassing, really, to be that broke.
Anyway. That's not the point. The point, I guess, is that my mother and I were closer than most mothers and daughters are. We probably weren't as close at this point, in the early 80s, as we became later, but the seeds of it had already been sewn. At some point when I was an undergraduate, she started coming up to Austin every few months to visit me, and I discovered that I actually enjoyed her company. (Although frankly, I think that part of the attraction of those trips for her was getting away from my father.) We would go shopping and out to eat and to movies, nothing terribly exciting, normally, but we would have fun.
I can't say that this trip to Las Vegas with my mother and grandparents was wildly fun, but I enjoyed it, on the whole. I think we stayed 3 or 4 days, and we went to two shows - Charo, and the Folies Bergere. (I did not get to pick the shows.) We must've stayed 3 nights, because I remember that on the 3rd night we went downtown rather than going to a show. I didn't gamble much, on the whole - I rarely do - but I remember playing roulette at some downtown casino, and winning, at least for a little while. Mostly I watched people. Las Vegas 20 years ago was a good bit different than it is now - a little grittier, more working-class, I guess. I've never been to other gambling places to compare, but I imagine that it's more like someplace like Reno or Laughlin is today than the Las Vegas of today. I still enjoyed the people watching when I went back to Las Vegas 20 years later, but the people were very different.
(I wrote several very long entries about the trip to Las Vegas in 2004, all of which were of course lost in the wreckage of Diary-X - so maybe I will get around to writing about it again before the end of next month. I have never yet run out of things to write about during Holidailies, but I always worry that I will! - so there's one day covered.)
(no subject)
Jan. 23rd, 2006 02:06 pmYesterday we met my mother and Art at Casey's, which is a nice-but-not-ridiculously-expensive seafood restaurant (actually it's ajacent to and owned by the same family as the very-much-ridiculously-expensive one both of us used to work at - it's where we met) and they bought us lunch. (I had chicken. Rob had a gigantic grilled seafood platter.) So that was nice. Then after they had left, we decided to go up to Fry's and let Rob pick out a couple of movies for his birthday. Technically, staying in the fancy hotel in Houston last week was his main birthday present. But I usually get him some more stuff anyway. I had bought a couple of little things but I felt like he was getting shafted a little bit. So, movies. We ended up spending a hundred freaking dollars, of course. That place is a black pit that sucks in your money! He got several movies, though, and the new version of Combat Flight Simulator, which he had never gotten, and I got a couple of small things myself, so I guess that wasn't bad for all of that.
What I got was a quilting magazine and year-before-last's copy of The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas (hey, it was on sale), because somewhere in my head I want to go back to Vegas again. I've been sort of halfway keeping an eye out for cheap tickets to Vegas for a while now. Really, if we go, it ought to be later this year rather than earlier, though.
Anyway, I had a Foley's gift card (from my dad) that I never had used, so while we were up that way we went and I bought a couple of pairs of shoes (a pair of black Naturalizer loafers and a pair of clunky brown Clark's). I needed them.
I spent most of the rest of the day playing Dofus - and quizzing
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columbina about what the heck I was supposed to be doing, because I was sort of lost. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it a little bit, though. I also seem to be hooked. I stayed up until midnight collecting arachnee legs for my next quest. Damn these addicting games!!
TUS-Con 2 is this weekend, and even though I'm not really particularly upset that I couldn't go, it still made me nostalgic for TUS-Con 1, in Las Vegas a year ago, which was an awful lot of fun. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the fountains, and this is my favorite one. (The pictures are especially nice because you can't hear the Celine Dion song that they were blasting at you at the time.)
I keep getting e-mails from Expedia touting great 100th-anniversary specials to Las Vegas, and I am so, so tempted to get us tickets. But Rob would kill me. Besides, I spent almost $300 on my car today. (It wouldn't start, which turned out to have something to do with some kind of safety switch under the pedals, or something like that, so that was a very cheap fix. But I also got a C/V joint replaced while I was there - something I'd been putting off - and that was the expensive part.)
(More Las Vegas pictures here. Mostly of buildings and not of people, though, because I kept forgetting my camera at the times that the most people were around. Or turning unaccountably shy. One or the other. The back of Jette's and Debby's heads are in a few pictures, though. And maybe a sliver of Columbine here & there.)
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