Umbral Echoes Blog

Looked into house buying, and got some good and bad news.  Good news is that if you’re buying a house right now, then you’re in luck.  Bad news is, if you’re selling… not so much so.  The market is over-saturated with houses, and our neighborhood in particular has like 12 other houses up for sale.  So to sell our place, we’ll need to do lots of cleaning-up, and even then we can expect it to take 6-8 months, and possibly more.

So, looking at our options for house buying, we figured that if we lived close to work and put ourselves on a shoestring budget, we could actually afford our current mortgage, plus that of a new house.  With some financial aid from our room mate Cary, this is actually a very solid possibility.

The plan now is that we get a new house ASAP, move in there, clean up the old one, and then put it on the market.  The only kink in this plan is… we’re not sure if the bank will actually give us a loan for another house.  But, we’ll be talking to our loan officer tomorrow.  And if that goes well, we’ll look for a new place starting Monday (as well as begin packing).

So, wish us luck!

Went to my friend Sam’s birthday party on Saturday evening, which was good times. Lots of wine, and Monkey came out for the occasion too. Met two Marcs, and Sam’s neighbor Yarra (no idea how it’s spelled), who was a European gal — I believe she was from Denmark or something — that could have been Steffi Graf’s younger sister.

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I was browsing the Office Depot site today, looking for some multi-line cordless phones for work.  One of the phones that was listed as multi-line actually wasn’t, so I was going to contact them to let them know about this.  I click on their Contact Us page, and something jumps out at me…

Apparently Office Depot is popular with vikings.

In preliminary news, I added comments and stuff to the DragonCon photos — or the Friends album, anyway.

Warning, roleplaying stuff ahead.  For those that could care less, feel free to skip it.

Played the first game in Monkey’s evil-based D&D campaign last night.  Man, I’m so used to playing good/hero characters in tabletop, I really had trouble getting into the groove of things.  My best evil contribution was along the following lines:

Bear: If someone goes too near that graveyard, the restless dead will wake up and eat them.
Grem: [with typical Grem insane fervor] I need parchment, and a bottle.  I’m making a fake treasure map to lead some poor schmuck to that place, and putting it in the corner of a bar or something.  So some adventurers will find it and go to their deaths.
Me: Bar? Screw that, put it somewhere kids will find it.  You know kids can’t resist that shit.  Treasure map + kids + zombies = crazy delicious.

Oh, also our first mission involved making some rival priestess go crazy, and we were instructed to leave her physically intact.  So I asked, “As long as she’s physically intact when we cast the spells to make her go crazy, is that okay?”  (We have a healer in the group that can heal pretty much any physical harm.)  And the answer was yes… we could feel free to torture her or do whatever else we wanted, so long as at the end of it all she was physically intact.  This made my character very happy (he has mommy issues, and a feels a particular sadistic urge toward women).

So I shall endeavor to think more evil-like.  If I can’t make the Dungeon Master and every other player in the game recoil with, “Holy shit, Mike, you are one twisted bastard!” then I haven’t done my job.

Sadly, DragonCon is over, but it was a blast.  Highlights this year include seeing members of the Battlestar Galactica cast on a panel (best show on television right now, in my opinion), a drunken game of Asshole, and crashing a pirate party with ninjas.

The pictures are up in my photo gallery, though I haven’t named them or added amusing captions yet.  All in due time, my droogies.  Here are a few highlights…

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