Category: life

Holiday Tree and Decorations!

Holiday Tree, Xmas Tree, Christmas Tree, Hanukkah Bush, Festivus Pole...

Last weekend D and I went to Ace to pick up a holiday tree. From the looks of the trees there it looks like we should have gone on the day right after Thanksgiving, slim pickings. The remaining trees were all either an expensive type of evergreen I’ve never heard of or 8+ feet tall! We eventually found a 6-7 footer of said mysterious conifer and brought it home… The whole time D had her fingers crossed that it was not too tall.

Just a dead tree

After trimming the bottom and getting it into the stand we realized why there were so many of these trees lying around Ace still… They aren’t that aesthetically pleasing… The branches are sparse, the trunk was bare nearly two feet up, and all the branches seemed to be tilting upwards at much too great an angle.  But it was our holiday tree and we were going to enjoy it, dammit! So out came the ornaments; the nice thing about all our ornaments is that they are all hand crafted either by family or people my mother met at various craft fairs and swap meets. Fifteen odd years ago my mom threw away all the Xmas ornaments they had purchased over the years except for ones that had been handmade, and began shopping for new hand made ornaments. When I got married in 2009 1/3 of the ornaments she had collected over the years were gifted to D & I to decorate our first tree. D’s mom also gave us all the ornaments that D had made over the years as a child when we got married. Many of the ornaments have a personal story attached to them, some of which I actual remember! It is nice though to have ornaments on a tree that each tell a little story about them, us, or the people who made them…

D decorates the tree. Ornament placement is serious business!

Thankfully, since putting the tree up the branches have settle somewhat and the tree has a more “filled-out” appearance. Both of us were a little skeptical at first but the tree is starting to grow on us…

This is the extent of our holiday decorating beyond putting up a tree...

Once the tree was finished we put up the rest of our decorations. Which consisted mostly of a very tiny Christmas Village and a some countdown blocks my sister made everyone last year. The bottom of the tree has begun to slowly fill up with presents (though there is still a Festivus sized hole at there…) I hope all you readers are enjoying the season as much as D and I are. Happy Holidays!

Planeswalking Once More

I hope you appreciate the mess I made, and had to clean up, in order to take this picture...
 I played Magic: the Gathering in high school pretty extensively. I didn’t have much disposable income but what I did have went into procuring more MtG cards. I in to the hobby enough to participate in local tournaments and wager money on the game before I quit. My quitting story isn’t all that unique, I have an addictive personality and played Standard. That meant that I was constantly having to keep my deck(s) up to date whenever new sets came out. This wasn’t so bad when I was competing with other teenagers, there were a couple of kids who had large allowances but I could deal with that. No, it was when adults with jobs got involved in the local hobby scene that I left. These guys had jobs they had a lot more money coming to them than I ever did and they were happy to spend that money, frivolously, to get whatever cards they needed. I could still deal with that it just meant I had to be smarter about deck construction. What drove me away was these grown men taking advantage of naive teenagers and small children. How so? Selling cards and decks to them for much more than they were worth as well as showing up to tournaments where the oldest participant was maybe, 13, and then trouncing everyone one to win a box of boosters, when they could easily buy that box. I sold all my cards and went on with my life; happier and with more money in my wallet.

Fast forward 13 years and I now find myself playing the game again. It was a slow process of hanging out in a forum and IRC room with people who played, finding out one of my friends here used to play (and kept many of his cards), and the release of Magic 2012 for Xbox Live Arcade. I first picked up the XBLA game (that is a single purchase and comes with all the decks/cards you (or anyone) will be able to play with, you can unlock various cards for the various decks by playing with them. This is a nice way to play MtG without having to worry about purchasing cards or constructing decks. I’ve been playing about two or three games a week against the computer and am having fun.

I also went into a hobby store looking to pick up a couple of starter decks to teach D how to play the game. I some how lucked out and managed to enter a hobby store when someone working there actual cared that I was a potential customer and he sat down and answered a number of questions about MtG and then handed me two free 30 card decks to play with. D and I have played a couple of times with these and I’m hopeful that she’ll get into it enough that we can sit down with some real decks (pre-constructeds, probably) and play.

One of the first things I noticed is that they’ve simplified the game by removing interrupts and other card types, everything is either an instant or a sorcery, as well as reformating the phases in a turn. The game doesn’t play that differently but it is easier to explain.

So, just a heads up you might be seeing some MtG related posts in the future.

PS – If you have MtG:2012 on XBLA look me up and we’ll play! I’m xnosophorosx

ACK?! Here is a video about Cephalopods, Everyone loves those!

Keeping a schedule can be hard work, especially when you’re being hammered by work and have numerous other personal obligations. Spent the end of last week and the weekend back home in the desert where I was a groomsman for my best friend in high school. I didn’t have a lot of time for writing, or anything else really.

So, sorry about the filler post. Except it isn’t filler it’s a short, fascinating video about how camouflage in cephalopods works and how their ability to do it so well reveals that our ability to percieve the world, as it “really” is, is an illusion. Neat, huh?

Back to that wedding story; three piece black tuxedos in 100+ degree weather for over an hour? Not ideal.

%d bloggers like this: