Dark Alex's Really Long Post Thread.

[Alex]

The very hot and sunny weather finally broke today. Now it is raining.

But still hot.

The plan for today is to go up to Glasgow, leaving home around 12. I want to visit Static Games, take Kristi to the Transport Museum and possibly a few drinks at the Solid Rock before we meet up with friends at Meat Bread Meat.

At some point I'll update things and see how much of what I am hoping will happen actually takes place. I wonder if Sarah will be there? Me and her haven't spoken since she started slagging off the whole #Metoo movement. The last I heard of her she was complaining about the amount of help Stephen Hawking got compared to her (please note, that Sarah has difficulty moving around, but isn't wheelchair bound and is quite capable of talking without using electronic assistance). One of the reasons we have chosen Meat Bread Meat is because she is vegan and may not turn up just based on the name. She has annoyed most of our group in the comparitively short time we have known her. One of those people who thinks she is free thinking, but is just a facist in another outfit who would force everyone else to follow her beliefs if she had the power. Still she has quit politics. The party she was a member of invited the guy who raped her twice to join and told her they didn't believe her it had happened.

[Alex]

And back home again.

Still not managed to take Kristi to the transport museum. By the time we'd collected Tina and Anders we didn't really have time to get up there.

Still, I've only been trying for 7 years, there is still time.

Trains home were crowded, but without incident. I normally take a laptop, listen to music, read books... Anything to discourage random strangers from talking to me.

Kristi, however likes to talk to random strangers. Anyway, I didn't get the rest of King Solomans Mines read like I had been planning due to random stranger conversations. Still at least she didn't mention what I actually do for a living to said random strangers this time. As I have explained multiple times to her, that puts a risk I am not willing to take on her and Ash's safety.

Found an online copy of an old DOS game I used to play called Ascendency. The AI is a bit lacking but I still enjoyed the game, oh must be about 20 years ago I used to play it. Messing about on it just now. You start off with no technology on some planet and built up to having a galactic empire and compete with other space faring races. Finally got large ship hulls (which takes ages to get, and then quite quickly afterwards you get gigantic hulls). Anyway, my first large ship (a warship, Thug class) is moving to defend one of my systems from an incoming attack. Hopefully they don't have the same technologies yet and will get a nasty suprise when they (a race called the Occulons) arrive in my space. Not found any of the other species yet which is unusual, but I know they are out there... waiting in the cold darkness of space.

[Alex]

Went to the raft race with the family and our guests. Couldn't get anyone to go on any of the funfair rides with me as apparantly being spun round at high speeds makes them sick.

Or, secretly they are all big girls blouses and were scared. You decide.

Tina made an  A4 leather book cover for me with the D&D logo on it, Kristi got a personalised Kindle cover and they made Ash a mobile with knitted dice on it that I want for myself!

Played a round of Firefly tonight. It was supposed to be a two hour scenario, but we called it after four hours with no one near winning. But it had been a lot of fun still, so that was good. Back to work tomorrow. It has been a pleasent week off work and I wonder what rare delights await me tomorrow.

[Trevor]

It has been a pleasent week off work and I wonder what rare delights await me tomorrow.

You will have a certain South African at your front door, begging for the use of your washing machine to clean certain undergarments 

[Alex]

Just before I saw this message from you I set one of my passwords as "Pantsofdoom666" (hey it is something I will remember tomorrow, if a tad simpler than the passwords I use for my home stuff). Guess great minds think alike.

OK, so this is happening in my home town. Just let me know who I have to kill to get tickets!

http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/John-Carpenter-tickets/artist/1486823?awc=3589_1532973452_e43882b51030f4d82c8e38715db65063&camefrom=CFC_UK_BUYAT_378349

Saw a photo of someone on facebook and I thought it was someone in remarkably good Cosplay dressed as one of the frog people from Innsmouth in the middle of transforming from a human into the final stages of being a Deep One and I congratulated them on the make up job that truly invoked the correct feeling of eldrict horror.

Turned out it was their (now deceased) grandmother.

Bugger.

An update to this story is that Kristi has informed me that telling her family that "She isn't dead, she just swam out to join her other Deep One kin beneath the sea" will not engender a sense of wellbeing knowing that they haven't actually lost there somewhat bactrian relative, but will instead... well I am sure you can figure the rest out.

[Trevor]

Just before I saw this message from you I set one of my passwords as "Pantsofdoom666" (hey it is something I will remember tomorrow, if a tad simpler than the passwords I use for my home stuff). Guess great minds think alike. [\quote]

 

[Alex]

Having a late lunch today. Bally had to borrow my hat to go out, so now I need to wait until he gets back before I can leave. I don't mind as it means that I have less time in work this afternoon. Even if it works out as the same length of time on balance it still feels better.

Put on 'The Last Lovecraft' & 'Gamers: Dorkness Rising' for Tina and Anders last night while we played some Munchkin and Pandemic. Ash slept from about 21:00 until 05:00 at which point he wakes up all happy smiles and gurgles which wakes both of us up. I miss the days when I only used to sleep 4 hours a night and function perfectly well at those times. Oh well, I guess since that stopped when they put me on happy pills that should be a good thing.

Somehow I think Kristi would be happier if I could still happily get up at 4 am and go deal with everything. Mind you I don't think I am locking my body up when I sleep now either. Used to be when I went to sleep all my muscles just seemed to freeze in place. A few times Kristi woke up in the middle of the night wanting the toilet, but found that my arms were holding her tight and she couldn't get me to let go without waking me up. I also seem to have stopped throwing punches in my sleep, although that may have more to do with Kristi being told that trying to wake me up when I am in the middle of a nightmare is the worst thing she can do and she needed to let them run through.

Pay day today. I am considering backing a game on Kickstarter called 'Moonshiners Of The Apocalypse'. Sounds fun. Would cost $60 to back high enough to get a copy of the game, but I'd also need to pay for the shipping and shipping stuff from the US is expensive. We've discovered it is much cheaper to send things to there rather than the other way.

There has been a persistant rumour at work that one of the women working here is a lesbian. Can't really say I'd bothered one way or the other, but on Sunday I did see her at the raft race with another woman. She completely blanked me and walked past as quickly as possible while her friend referred to her as "Darling". If she is and didn't want anyone to know it seems a bit silly to attend something with your partner  when you know there is a high chance of bumping into workmates. Still there are many other reasons she could have been there with just a friend and calling her that could I guess just be a term of endearment. I mean people from Cornwall refer to people as "my lover". Came as a bit of a shock to me the first time Big Tony called me that I can tell you!

Wonder what he is doing now? After he got kicked out of the mob he moved back to Cornwall to marry a woman who hated him being in our job then two years later was divorced and I've not really heard anything since. Got him on FB. Maybe when I get home I'll check up on him. Although I did recently do a clear out of people on FB that I don't really talk to. For some reason I like to keep my friends list short and went from somewhere around 250 contacts to 160ish. I see some people with over 3000 contacts and wonder how the hell they manage to keep tract of any noticeable percentage of that number of people.

Harley Davidson have announced they are going to be making electric bikes. Hmmm, can't form a mental image on any of my biker friends on one of them. Not that most of them would ride a Harley if you paid them. They tend to come down on the side of some other touring bike whose name escapes me at this moment.

Went to go for lunch yesterday. It was a hot day and I left my jacket at work. Alas I also left my keys in the house. Kristi had went shopping and so I was locked out. One of the windows had been left open so I broke into the house by climbing in the window. This quite surprised Anders who was wandering around the house in a tee shirt and his underwear. Kristi texted me to ask if I could just take the afternoon off and watch Ash so she could go shopping. Had to let her no that absolutely this was not an option. I can't just up and abandon work on a whim. Well I could, but you get to go to a place called The Glasshouse when you do things like that in my line of work, and well that just doesn't seem a fun place to go to if you ask me. I've attended someone else's court marshal and I have no wish to go through one all of my very own.

Although I am some days impressed that I've managed to avoid one of them for this length of time. Maybe I should go for one on my last day?

[Alex]

One of the party in my D&D game died tonight. But you'll have to read my D&D thread later when I've updated it to find out whom.

[Alex]

So, the second party death has occurred in my roleplaying game, removing the groups big gun. How this will affect party dynamics will be interesting to watch. When Kristi’s character died she effectively rebooted the character and simply carried on. Anders certainly wasn’t talking about playing another wizard (and Kristi really makes that post redundant filling both caster and healer roles).  There are other types of casters however and Anders was musing over one of them. This also leaves Val as the only surviving character (and the one who knows the most about the Mask’s. She carefully bundled up the one that Zolis had been wearing and has packed it away. I wonder if any other party members.

Slight update there, Ander’s new character looks to be an elvish Arcane Archer (an archer with a little magical talent which can be used to enhance his shots).

The weather continues to be slightly too warm to be comfortable, but I am still enjoying it. As well as D&D we had a short game of Cards Against Humanity last night which was fun. Think me and Anders will be playing X-Wing tonight. He wants to play the rightful forces of law and order (The Imperials). I think I’ll stick with my bounty hunters to face him rather than trying out Kristi’s terrorist forces (The Rebel Alliance).

Work is slow today. I have ran out of jobs I can find to do and the oppressive heat has robbed me of any desire to walk around the building to see if anyone else needs help with anything. Looking forward to October and those still long days that herald the arrival of Autumn. Or well they used to. What weather you get these days is anyone guess.

Anders is cooking dinner tonight. He is making a lamb dish which will be interesting. I am not a huge fan of lamb (although I wouldn’t say I dislike it and I certainly haven’t ate it for around 20 years). It just isn’t one of my favourites. Kristi meanwhile has never tried lamb before. I am sure it will be a good meal though. And it is nice for someone to be cooking a proper meal for Kristi. She has tried to get me to cook more complicated food but she gives me verbal instructions on how to cook something which I’ll have forgotten about 30 seconds later. One of these nights I am going to surprise her with something special though. We’ve been married for 1,995 days, perhaps I should do something for our 2,000th?

[Alex]

Yesterday some work came in last thing. Since no one is on the night shift for us this week I could either stay late and do it, or catch up with it in the morning. I looked at the stuff, assessed it as non urgent and able to wait for the morning. Nothing ususual or untoward there. Besides it had been a slow work and having a bit of work to do the next day seemed like a good thing.

Today something totally unrelated (and as it happens only tangentially connected to my job and nothing to do with me) was discovered to have went badly wrong at some point in the past. I had to dig out a lot of information for the senior engineer types and in addition work poured in. About 6 o'clock my boss came in and said it was ok, just wrap up, go home and we can finish looking into it tomorrow.

That gave me a chance to catch up on the work from yesterday. Tomorrow I still have some of yesterdays (as well as some of todays) work to do.

Had to phone Kristi and let her know I'd have to work late and go ahead with dinner without me. Although she didn't get to have dinner as Dagon managed to get into some cream cheese and has been sick all day. He got taken to the vets and I had a £60 bill to pay for some medication for him. If he is still being sick tomorrow he'll have to go back and find what a joyous experience it is for a cat to go on a drip.

Ok, question for all those of you out there with a significant other. Does your partner have odd habits you can't figure out why they do it? As an example, I tend to make myself a sort of nest area if I am spending a lot of time in a room. Be it my desk in my man cave, or when I visit my mum she has a fold out table and I tend to sit in a corner of the room on a dining chair rather than a couch seat. Now when I make myself one of these areas Kristi will start putting things on it. Examples of this are when she first moved over to Scotland I would come home from work and find my desk buried in piles of paperwork. Some of these would be bills and things which since she was newly arrived I can understand why she'd put them there for me to deal with, but other things were just random pieces of paper that had absolutely nothing to do with me. And I do not mean one or two things. When I say buried under paper work I mean an inch or two deep of the stuff. After two days I got fed up with this and simply picked it all up, dumped it on her desk and since then I have never came home to a pile of paperwork on my computer desktop again. When we are at my mums all manner of things get put on the table, baby things, books, drinks and they all get sat on top of what ever I am working on. This tends to irritate me and after a couple of days I'll start moving them elsewhere. I had to move my special chair from the man cave down to the living room and replace it with one of the living room recliners so it would be more comfortable for when she was feeding Ash in the man cave. This isn't a problem but everytime I went to sit on my chair again it was always buried under stuff. Might be baby clothes, laundry, shopping or what ever but my chair was never available.

Now here is the part that really confuses me. As I've mentioned, I get annoyed with this within a day or two and dump the stuff off where ever it is being put. Sometimes I'll put it somewhere else, sometimes I will simply dump it on the floor out of irritation. When I start doing this Kristi will then start sitting in my 'nest' and gets annoyed with me if I want it back. I mean does she not want me having an area I am comfortable in? Is it she wants to be a part of any of my areas or I am being told I am not paying enough attention? Does she even realise consciously what she is doing?

I study people a lot, but this is definately a behaviour I can't quite figure out and while I do have several theories, none of them seem to overwhelmingly be more possible than any other.

Anyway, do you have someone in your life who does something along these lines?

[316zombie]

if they don't ride harleys, they ride indians, guaranteed. .
  and i categorically refuse to answer the questions in the post above this one. my hubby reads this thread.

[Alex]

Ok, I can sort this.

To 316Zombies husband.

"You are hereby exilled from this kingdom. Let no man, woman, or child offer you comfort, rest, food or drink. You are outside the protection of the law and declared outlaw! Any man finding you within our borders is free to kill you without punishment or judgement. From now until the end of your days, you are accursed in the sight of gods and men!"

There you go Barri, you can now post what you like without fear.  

[316zombie]

lol, he wants to know if that means he gets to make me move to iceland like he wants then?
   psyched for our weekend adventure of seeing frank& trace from MST riffing movies and shorts live at the orpheum!! THE MADS ARE BACK!

[Alex]

Read something unusual today. It was an interview with some of the surviving family of Osama bin Ladin (his mother, and half brothers). His mother couldn't understand why he had turned out the way he did and mostly blamed other people in his life for leading him astray. Most of the family seem to want to move away from his legacy and the article presented the liberilisation of laws in Saudi as an attempt by the kingdom to move away from the kind of society that would generate such a person. However it is worth noting that one of his (either child or grandchild, I disremember which) descendants is trying to follow in his footsteps.

Other than that he had came from a wealthy family in Saud, I wasn't aware of too much of his background pre Mujahadin days and from that point of view I found it an interesting read. Most of his family, although not under any special observation or so on, is however not allowed to leave the country. As one of the wealthiest and most influencial families in the kingdom that must present some challanges. Not that I sympathised much with them. Must be terrible to be trapped in such a luxurious prison.

Been having to help deal with the kind of major situation at work that I can't really go into any details here. It has been an exhausting couple of days. Kristi asked me what was wrong and I couldn't tell her. I was tempted to reply "Well, haven't you seen the news all day? The third wave of bombers has now successfully been launched at Russia and we are knocking them back into the stone age", but something tells me neither her nor my guests would have found funny.

Tina and Anders are off to Edinburgh now. We enjoyed their stay and hopefully they enjoyed it too. I finally got to play Kings & Things.

[Alex]

lol, he wants to know if that means he gets to make me move to iceland like he wants then?
   psyched for our weekend adventure of seeing frank& trace from MST riffing movies and shorts live at the orpheum!! THE MADS ARE BACK!

If he want's to ask questions he will have to post them himself.

Except he can't because he has been exiled. Although he might get a pardon if you tell me that he spent at least 6 hours pampering you, giving you massages on demand and serving you your favourite alcoholic drink and so on.

Oh, and he has to watch at least 5 chick flicks of your choice with you.

He can go to Iceland if he wants, but being an outlaw he no longer has a legal passport and might have to swim it. You can go if you wish, but are under no obligation. Oh, and after doing some research on medieval law this also entitles you to annul your marriage with you receiving all assets and leaving him with nothing.