S-A-T-U-R D-A-Y night
Had a pretty productive meeting this morning with the subcommittee to work on Liturgy Goals for the Parish Strategic Plan. We’re certainly going to have to plan another meeting for the near future though.
I helped with music for a funeral this afternoon. Aaron was there to sing and play piano, Jeff sang and played guitar, I did the same. It was nice to sing/play with those guys again. Aaron and I went to the reception afterwards to eat and talk with some of the friends/family of the deceased.
Finally, this evening I played 6 hours or so of LOTRO. I worked on Jaimee, my second Lore Master.
Now I’m tired.
A day of rest
I spent today doing mostly nothing. It was great! I went to Mass last night so I didn’t even need to leave home to go to church. Speaking of Mass, this is the second week in a row that I didn’t think the music sucked. Yeah, I’m as surprised as you! Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t great. Not even close. But it wasn’t terrible. Oh, and I’ve watched a few televised Masses over the past few weeks. The music is consistently dreadful with those.
Anyway, I spent part of today awash in nostalgia for the 70s. I watched a Time-Life infomercial for Singers & Songwriters and also several episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss some of the fashion of the 60s and 70s. And of course, the 80s. I watched The Lost Boys again yesterday. Geez I really miss the 80s.
Other activities today: I cooked up 6 cups of rice along with a package of Freedom French cut green beans and 4 chicken breasts. Not only was it tonight’s dinner, but tomorrow’s and Tuesday’s too. I got the week’s laundry done. I did more festival stuff with Aluatis including getting the second Spring Steed. And I watched some other stuff on the TiVo; The Event, Walking Dead, No Ordinary Family, Modern Family.
I grow ever more eager for my Portland trip. Still a month to go. David is flying on Southwest from Texas. I hope his plane is crack free.
Thursday activities
I stayed home from work today. Despite having the whole day, I feel like I didn’t get much done. I did a bunch of festival stuff with Aluatis. I guess that’s something. I got a little caught up with Survivor. Mary should be happy. I refilled my prescriptions. That’s definitely a good thing. I went grocery shopping and bought food for the month.
Grocery list
Bag of frozen chicken breasts
pack of fresh chicken breasts
6 bags of frozen vegetables
4 packs of pasta
2 jars of pasta sauce
2 loaves of bread
18 eggs
6 packs of steak
4 boxes of cereal
8 boxes of oatmeal
2 packs of bacon
gallon of milk
ketchup
olive oil
bunch of bananas
bag of frozen fish filets
peanut butter
low sugar jam/preserves/jelly/whatever
The oatmeal is for work. I get three meals per box, so 24 breakfasts over the next month (3 more than I should need)
The cereal, eggs, and bacon is for breakfasts at home of which there will be 9.
I have 6 steaks and 9 chicken breasts. Add to that the 10 fish filets and that should get me 18-19 dinners. There will be three times this month that I’ll be at a church event or meeting where I’ll get dinner. So my total becomes 21-22. The pasta will get me 12 or so meals. So I should be covered for dinners. I’ll just have to figure out lunches and I’m set for the month.
I might need to buy more vegetables mid-month.
(Sorry to Suzanne that you had to read this twice!)
Tonight I had my ARISE group. It went well. We talked about doing a bible study after this season ends. I’m looking forward to that.
Let me explain. No wait, there is too much. Let me sum up.
I really didn’t want to get up this morning. I lay in bed for 15 minutes trying to figure out if I felt poorly enough to call in sick. Alas, I felt ok.
I did get a few of the catalogs distributed today. But I only had a couple of boxes of the bound variety so I didn’t get far. We did get in all of the loose-leaf boxes and I’m told we’ll have 16 boxes of bound catalogs within a few days. Apart from that, I got Tuesday’s agenda finished. So I was able to get a couple of things done today.
I skipped my walk today because it was rainy.
After work I went to pick up my new glasses. This make three pairs that I can keep scattered around town for my use.
I was hurrying to get home because I had signed up to do a new three-man instance in LOTRO. I met up with Theo and another player and we gave it a try. Several tries. But without a real healer, we didn’t do too well. 🙁
I think I’ll try to go to bed early tonight.
Gems I’ve found
Recently, I’ve spent way too much time looking for interesting blogs. I’ve spent even more time reading the ones I find. I say way too much because it can be so engaging that I end up doing little else. In the course of my meanderings, I have found a couple of posts that I want to share.
The first is from Twenty Sided, a blog that appeals to the role-playing gamer in me. There are two series of posts that I have really enjoyed reading here, DM of the Rings and a narrative of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. You should check them out. But I love this post. It makes me wish I spent more time thinking about these kinds of things. (Yeah, I’m a bit of a nerd.) If only I were so creative!
The next blog is called AdSense Tracker. It is “for the purpose of testing Google Adsense ads to see if they actually work and if they actually pay off”. The blogress is friendly and helpful and she is WAY more Web 2.0 savvy than me. She references many sites and services and a poor newbie blogger like me has trouble keeping up. But, I enjoy reading what she posts, and like I said, she’s so helpful and friendly. She recently posted a list of guidelines for good blog networking. If you are new to blogging, I suggest you read through her archives to benefit from her experience.
Enjoy and let me know what you think.
MMORPGs
For the last year and a half, I’ve been into playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The first I played was City of Heroes. In CoH, you create a superhero, choosing from numerous powersets, origins, and costume designs/combinations. Then you sally forth into the game world to right all wrongs and arrest bad guys. I liked this game and played for over a year. I was part of a small group of friends that had met in-game and we always found each other to team with.
But after a time, frictions within (and the subsequent disolution of) this group as well as the limits of the game itself caused me to move on to World of Warcraft. WoW is set in a fantasy genre with dwarves, gnomes, elves, and so forth. Character creation is similar to CoH but one is far more limited in the choice of how a character looks. But WoW has more dimensions of gameplay than City of Heroes. While CoH is pretty straight forward, in WoW, there are numerous things that a player can be working on at once, e.g. questing, crafting, reputation, earning money. These are all valuable pursuits in WoW.
Some of what I don’t like about WoW is that is looks somewhat cartoonish, and the game is full of pop-culture references like an engineer named Scooty and another character named Haris Pilton. Things like this really hamper the sense of immersion that I am looking for.
A few months ago, my cousin, Danny, suggested I check out a new game, Lord of the Rings: Online. I was a bit reluctant but agreed to try it out. LOTRO is also in a fantasy genre; the land of Middle Earth created by J.R.R. Tolkien. As such, it has an incredibly rich back story and anyone familiar with the movies or better yet, the books, already has a sense of what this world is like. Game play is much like WoW, with things like crafting, combat, questing, and so forth but the world has more of a photorealistic look to it. The graphics are just beautiful.
WoW has been around for years and is highly successful. It is still fun for me. LOTRO is new. While I enjoy both games, I am enjoying LOTRO more these days.
