My Face When...

You arrive at work today and check your messages to find that your boss has indirectly called you out to the rest of the management team.  The message implies that you don't work hard enough and are too incompetent to follow directions.  Upon reading the message, you are dazed (save ends).  After saving, you are angered and take a -5 penalty to all CHA checks for the remainder of the night.


All my rage!  I don't guess I should be surprised, though.  I should have known by now not to trust anyone (at work) with even the most petty comments.  Our store is competing with another store under the same ownership, so the competition should be pretty intense.  I made a comment to a friend who works at that store, that I thought his store would win.  That comment made its way back to my store and the GM, after which she made the implication that I just needed to work harder.  This was the final straw.

Tomorrow before work, my supervisor is meeting with me and the GM.  With any luck, the situation will be resolved.  If I need to transfer to a different store, then so be it.  I'm tired of being the one to actually enforce policies, then get chastised for enforcing them!

My PS3 has made such an outstanding impression that I see no need to keep my 360.  The one thing the 360 does better (games), is the one thing I don't have time for.  Netflix on PS3 is better, the internet on PS3 is better, and I don't have to pay a yearly fee to use either of those.  Yesterday I used it to play one of my YouTube videos for some friends without having to crowd around a computer monitor.  I also used it to get "Like a Boss" stuck in my wife's head.  Thanks PS3!

Kennedy can't stop getting sick.  She had tubes put in and now she has bronchitis.  I hope she doesn't end up as sick as I was as a child.  If so, we're in for some difficult years.  On a positive note, the doctor said her ears are looking great, and her speech has improved dramatically since the tubes!

Oh, and Nigel still hasn't had his final night.  We ended up doing some prep work for my d20 Modern campaign, which I'll write about next time.  We took a pretty unorthodox method of character generation, but then, this is going to be a pretty unorthodox campaign.

Vacation!

The minutes tick by slowly as you finish off your last shift before your vacation.  Five minutes, three minutes, one minute.  You are now officially on vacation!  You gain a +5 bonus to CHA for the next seven days.  Now, what do you do?


Vacation time!  Yesterday was a pretty lazy day.  I got on Netflix and nearly watched the whole first season of LOST.  Today was my second day of vacation, and we took Kennedy to her Aunt Liz's house to stay while we took an afternoon to ourselves.  We went to El Chico's in Paducah (Karsey hated it) and we checked out Hobby Lobby.  She got a decoration set for making a fantasy-castle style cake with towers and parapets and such.  This cake will require a moat made of JELLO with some Goldfish piranhas.  It's going to be awesome!

After Paducah, we went back to get Kennedy.  The original plan was to get her and head home, but we stayed for a while.  Karsey and Liz went to get food and we ate.  I played around a bit with her Kindle reader and read a bit of Les Miserables on it.  The screen on the Kindle is amazing and I can perhaps see one in my future.  My only qualm is the fact that you don't actually purchase books on a Kindle, you license them.  It would be a terrible business move, but they could theoretically remove books after they had been purchased.

On a side note, to everyone talking about not buying gas on March 10, allow me to explain a few things.  We rely on gas.  If we agree to boycott gas for one day, then the days before and after will just get all the business that would have gone on the 10th.  Boycotting only hurts the local employees, not that national chain or the executives.

More vacation tomorrow!

Puppy Love

You weren't prepared for this.  You knew eventually your daughter would grow up and start liking boys, but you weren't ready this early.  Being caught off-guard, you take a -2 penalty to all dice rolls for the duration of the first day.  The penalty continues each day after, save ends.

Kennedy has recently become very good friends with our friends' son William.  It all started at Taco Bell when he tried to give her the rest of his quesadilla.  I guess she takes after her daddy.  The fastest way to her heart is her stomach!  Too bad these were a little late for valentine's day.  Although, yesterday she was getting smooches from another friend's son.  Shh, we haven't told William yet.  We want to break it to him softly.

I feel the need to re-review the Netflix streaming video service, this time for the PS3.  Since we got the PS3 roughly a week ago, we've watched quite a lot of video, and not once has it paused playback due to "changed bandwidth" or because my internet connection had slowed.  And just before I got the PS3 I called NewWave and had my internet speed reduced to save a bit of money.  I don't believe that my internet connection suddenly got better, which leaves me to conclude that there is a problem with streaming Netflix on Xbox 360.  With the Blu-ray and DVD upscaling, and a superior Netflix experience, the PS3 is quickly becoming the "always-on" console.  The 360 will still be used for gaming, but it will finally be getting a well-deserved break.

        

On a related note, a local video store has been having a going-out-of-business sale for a week or so, and I finally made it out there to see what they had left.  The game selection was pretty slim, but I managed to snatch the original Phoenix Wright for DS for ten bucks.  I also grabbed Kick Ass, Slumdog Millionaire, and Precious on Blu-ray.  Three Blu-rays and a DS game ran me forty-two dollars.  Thanks to services like Netflix and Redbox, I got a sweet deal, and several people are losing their jobs.  Capitalism at work, folks.

I have today and tomorrow off work.  The first of my two goals is now accomplished (writing a blog).  The other goal is to finish the backstory for my d20 Modern campaign.  Wish me luck!

Bye Bye to this Teferi Guy

You've been working at this for hours now.  Your eyes are starting to make the screen into a blur.  A seemingly endless stream of cards is being entered into your growing database cataloging your collection of Magic: the Gathering cards.  Roll your Stamina.  If you succeed, you continue to finish the job.  If you fail, you begin to nod off, slowly at first but you will soon go lie down or fall asleep at the desk.

Yes it's true, I've finally decided to sell my Magic: the Gathering collection.  I've played once or twice in the past year and it just seems silly to keep them around when I could make some money from them.  It's not from lack of opportunity, I simply haven't had time.  Having a kid certainly renegotiates your priorities.  Add to that working 40+ hours a week with a forty-minute drive there and back, and my free time limited and prized.

I decided that I will keep two of my favorite decks, just in case the itch strikes amongst my friends and they want to play. They're both five-color decks and rely heavily on Dragon Arch to get multicolor creatures into play.  The decks differ in that one uses these creatures to put the hurt on the opponent, while the other uses them to satisfy the win condition of Coalition Victory.  Using five colors, they are vulnerable during the early game, but they can be particularly nasty in multiplayer if left alone until turn four or five.  With a good opening hand, the beatdown deck can have an Autochthon Wurm in play on turn five.

My mother-in-law was supposed to watch Negligent Mother's daughter today for a little bit.  To refresh, Negligent Mother has been out of her mother's house for one or two months now.  When she dropped off her daughter, her hair and clothes were nasty.  My mother-in-law had to get her clean and get all the clumps out of her hair so they could go get pictures done.  While they were getting pictures, the poor girl kept telling her mom that she had to potty.  Negligent Mother, who was busy texting, said, "I told you to shut the f*** up!"  My mother-in-law marched right over there and slapped her across the mouth.  No matter how bad a day I'm having, I can picture that moment and smile.

Today I'm reviewing Netflix and their streaming service.  Several months ago, we ditched paying roughly fifty dollars each month with cable, and went exclusively to Netflix Streaming.  At the time they didn't offer a streaming-only plan, so we have the one-disc plan which includes streaming.  The selection of available titles is good and is added upon weekly.  I use the service on my Xbox, so watching with a party is possible, but not a feature I have ever used.  And of course, the price of ten bucks a month is a bargain when compared to cable.  

And now for the bad news.  Oftentimes the service will slowdown or reduce your quality.  Other times the service will increase your quality up to HD.  The problem is that each time it raises or lowers your quality, the screen blacks out and returns a few seconds later.  When the service slows down, it kicks you out to a red screen and tells you that the connection has slowed.  On this phase, it takes anywhere from thirty seconds to twenty minutes or longer.  I haven't decided yet whether or not that inconvenience invalidates all the other nice attributes of Netflix streaming, but it is very annoying.