General news

Been a while since I last posted. There's been a lot of stuff going on.

I finished a short story and submitted it to glimmertrain for their standard short story competition. It was about 8000 words. I have three other stories that I'm working on at the moment. I expect to have one of them in completed first draft form maybe this afternoon but by Monday for sure. The other two will take a bit longer but I estimate that I should have first drafts done in a few weeks.

Angela is pretty much the perfect girl friend. For a lot of different reasons but especially for someone who wants to be a professional writer. Her knowledge of grammar, punctuation and generally writing to communicate is just amazing. She read my short story a few days before I submitted it and her notes made the story 100% better. If they chose it to publish, I get paid 700 bucks and I get ten copies of the issue my story appears in.

I have also finished scripts for two comics and sent them to the graphics artist that I work with. She had a story board of one of them pretty much done a few weeks ago so I'm hoping to receive a first draft of the finished comic any day now.

I've made some big strides in my understanding of bread baking. I found an *awesome* white bread recipe in the bread book that Anita and Jim gave me for Christmas. It makes beautiful tall fluffy white bread that tastes awesome, stays fresh for days and toasts perfectly. I've made some awesome specialty breads like: white with a swirl of apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, butter, stilton cheese and apricots; white bread with chunks of milk chocolate melted and swirled through the dough; and some buckwheat bread. I'm baking another loaf of beef stew bread right this moment. It should be out of hte oven in about 35 minutes. The house smells so good :-)

I've pretty much given up on mmo's. I've been frustrated with the genre for months, maybe years actually. But, in the last few weeks, I found myself feeling like I was just wasting my time running on a tread mill. I would sit down to play and immediately be thinking about other things that were more interesting. I'm at a point with my characters in EQ2 where I basically can't do anything to progress their development without either 5, 11 or 23 other people. I only know about three other people that play so I end up spending hours LFG, just screwing around or grinding out gray quests so I can reach the AA level cap. Then our EQ2 guild went tits up seemingly over-night and that was the last straw.

So we were going to keep our EQ2 accounts and only play together but we decided to cancel the subscriptions so we can spend that 30 a month on bills and savings.

I've been reading and playing some games on my psp in the evenings. Every once in a while I fire up Team Fortress 2 and play for a bit. It's a lot of fun but I really need to play it every night to keep my skill up enough to be a contributing member of my team. I just don't want to spend hours playing it every evening. So I deal with feeling like I suck and just play for fun. I spend 99% of my time playing a pyro. There's no "Meet the Pyro" movie yet but you can watch the "Meet the ..." videos for the other classes in the game here. TF2 has a great sense of humor and some really solid game play too. I play almost exclusively on the (fu-q2) server. My name is Homo_erectus.

A while ago Angela bought boggle on a whim. Turns out we both love playing it. We play at least one game almost every day. Its turned in to a sort of thing we do. She gets home fom work, we walk the dogs, we play rounds of boggle while I cook dinner and then we play a few rounds after dinner.

It's been really good for our relationship. Even though she DESTROYS me almost every game. The only time I win is when she isn't feeling well.

I've been working on peoples computers to pick up some money too. I've only made like 150 bucks so far but every bit helps. If you live in seattle and you need some help with your computer feel free to contact me. I work for 20 bucks an hour. Minimum fee of one hour and you pay by the half hour after that.

Well that's all I have to say.

Later.


Abe