Thorn's Status Thread
Thorn's Status Thread
Last round of exams and projects. Will post when possible, but don't expect me until mid-week next week at the earliest.
Hey all, am currently taking a two-week intensive surveying class. I had underestimated just how worn-out I'd be after spending eight hours a day in central Texas in May surveying open fields. In case anyone's interested, I look like somebody took your stereotypical IT nerd and boiled him like a lobster at the moment. I'll try to get game posts done tomorrow; this is just a note in a break between class segments (we're moving back into the computer labs, yay us).
Hmmm... lobster! ^^
Good thing you're done with the open-field surveying and going back into the labs. I, for one, have never liked direct exposure to sunlight.
On a more personal note, I've never been able to navigate open spaces. Hence why I never stray too far away whenever I'm at the family ranch. XD
Looking forward to your next round of posts. ^^
- A.
Good thing you're done with the open-field surveying and going back into the labs. I, for one, have never liked direct exposure to sunlight.
On a more personal note, I've never been able to navigate open spaces. Hence why I never stray too far away whenever I'm at the family ranch. XD
Looking forward to your next round of posts. ^^
- A.
Hooray hooray hooray. I'm back from the Vacation from Hell, and quite frankly, I need a few days to recover. Since you're probably wondering what makes it the Vacation from Hell...
1 - Bike quit firing on its right cylinder halfway to Bandera. Normally that's a six-hour trip, we made it in... oh... twelve.
2 - My dad's bike decided it didn't need a clutch. Of our week-long trip, we spent three days working on motorcycles.
3 - On Day 4, Tropical Storm Erin rolled in. Sure, it was Tropical Depression Erin by the time it hit San Antonio, but Tropical Depression Erin dropped ten and a half inches of rain on us in six hours. We were, at the time, about 50 miles from the condo, out riding. And missed our turn. So we wound up completing three legs of a fifty-mile square.
4 - Got back to the condo and saw that where there had been grass the day before, there was now a waterfall. Not a drainage channel, an honest-to-goodness roaring waterfall around the corner of the building. Decided to go into town for an emergency grocery run. Here's where it gets REALLY good.
5 - On the way back from the grocery store in the truck, we came to the only way in or out of the condo, a low-water crossing. Well, we thought, we're in a truck, and the water doesn't LOOK deep. Time stands still, everything moves in slow motion, and next thing we're trying to get the door open... 200 yards down-river. Door gets open and we swim (mostly) for shore. The truck swims (sort of) for San Antonio, 75 miles downriver. We find out the next day that it made it just a little around the next riverbend and grounded on some rocks.
6 - Next day was enforced happy time, since it was my son's birthday. So no adventures Friday. Saturday, however... Saturday, when we finally dared to cross the low-water crossing, we got a U-Haul to pack the bikes out. Nobody was enthusiastic about crossing the low-water crossing with motorcycles. Everything goes okay, save that six ratchet straps cost $80 in Bandera, Texas, after a major flood. So we come back to the condo and start loading bikes... and my dad's bike drops on top of him as he tries to drive into the U-Haul. Wheel height's about four feet; his head's four feet above that, so there's a total eight-foot diameter head-to-ground as the bike pivots.
7 - We drove back to College Station, got in around 10:30 last night. Went to sleep around 1:00. Got up and went to work at 7:00. About halfway home, incidentally, we discovered that my brother's bike had fallen over inside the truck.
Summary - In the past week, I've dragged my dad out of a river because he was the (mostly) in we swam (mostly), lifted his 800-pound upside-down bike off of him, lifted my mom's 800-pound bike off of HER when she went down, picked up my bike and spent a day or so laying in gravel, and spent an hour or so in a gasoline-soaked U-Haul van trying to get my brother's bike straight. I need a vacation, so I'm going to hold off posting.
1 - Bike quit firing on its right cylinder halfway to Bandera. Normally that's a six-hour trip, we made it in... oh... twelve.
2 - My dad's bike decided it didn't need a clutch. Of our week-long trip, we spent three days working on motorcycles.
3 - On Day 4, Tropical Storm Erin rolled in. Sure, it was Tropical Depression Erin by the time it hit San Antonio, but Tropical Depression Erin dropped ten and a half inches of rain on us in six hours. We were, at the time, about 50 miles from the condo, out riding. And missed our turn. So we wound up completing three legs of a fifty-mile square.
4 - Got back to the condo and saw that where there had been grass the day before, there was now a waterfall. Not a drainage channel, an honest-to-goodness roaring waterfall around the corner of the building. Decided to go into town for an emergency grocery run. Here's where it gets REALLY good.
5 - On the way back from the grocery store in the truck, we came to the only way in or out of the condo, a low-water crossing. Well, we thought, we're in a truck, and the water doesn't LOOK deep. Time stands still, everything moves in slow motion, and next thing we're trying to get the door open... 200 yards down-river. Door gets open and we swim (mostly) for shore. The truck swims (sort of) for San Antonio, 75 miles downriver. We find out the next day that it made it just a little around the next riverbend and grounded on some rocks.
6 - Next day was enforced happy time, since it was my son's birthday. So no adventures Friday. Saturday, however... Saturday, when we finally dared to cross the low-water crossing, we got a U-Haul to pack the bikes out. Nobody was enthusiastic about crossing the low-water crossing with motorcycles. Everything goes okay, save that six ratchet straps cost $80 in Bandera, Texas, after a major flood. So we come back to the condo and start loading bikes... and my dad's bike drops on top of him as he tries to drive into the U-Haul. Wheel height's about four feet; his head's four feet above that, so there's a total eight-foot diameter head-to-ground as the bike pivots.
7 - We drove back to College Station, got in around 10:30 last night. Went to sleep around 1:00. Got up and went to work at 7:00. About halfway home, incidentally, we discovered that my brother's bike had fallen over inside the truck.
Summary - In the past week, I've dragged my dad out of a river because he was the (mostly) in we swam (mostly), lifted his 800-pound upside-down bike off of him, lifted my mom's 800-pound bike off of HER when she went down, picked up my bike and spent a day or so laying in gravel, and spent an hour or so in a gasoline-soaked U-Haul van trying to get my brother's bike straight. I need a vacation, so I'm going to hold off posting.
Well, folks, it's down to two semesters before I have to get a real job. Unfortunately, these two semesters could be construed as trial by ordeal. I'm working 40 hours a week and taking 15 hours of senior engineering courses; this is the first chance I've had to get on the MRC and post something. So the long and short of it is I'm going to be leaving for a while. If I come back, great, but I cannot give you a timeline - which, ironically, sounds a lot like my deployment in '03. It's been fun, when I remembered to post.
I haven't forgotten any of my game commitments; I'm just trying to prod the Department of the Army into getting PCS orders so I can verify that I make more than starvation wages for a new lease, and break my old lease without any sort of bad blood, plus packing, plus work, plus trying to wrap up two months' worth of architecture classes in the next two weeks, plus (on top of, and probably caused by, all that) I've come down with shingles.
Just so we're all clear (lokei, Cobalt, Frange, inix, mostly), I have NOT abandoned the MRC. I'm having ISP issues; Verizon cannot seem to understand my frustration that "Monday morning" does not mean "afternoon of next Tuesday." As such, I'm piggybacking both off whatever wireless I can find, and off whatever wireless computers for posting I can. That's about to drop down to just a Wii unless they pull their thumbs out.
Another weeklong trip starting tomorrow. I'll try to bring all my threads to current before I leave, in case I have posting issues while I'm gone. Good news is that Araruin's Flat Stanley request doesn't get an SR-71 out of it... they get an A-12. And if you know the difference between the two, shame on you, why aren't you working for NASA?
The (LOVELY) thing about this job is that my work schedule alternates between spending three weeks a month traveling for classes, and being a wreck (see my last post), and spending a month at home, twiddling my thumbs at work doing nothing and stressing because of the amount of nothing I am doing. This is exacerbated by the Army's desire not to have its employees do anything that might be even remotely un-productive, which means that the MRC is blocked as a game - which means that I spend large blocks of work time, say, browsing Wikipedia entries for German seaplanes of the '30s and reading lists of stuff on Cracked.
One result of all of this is that my writing time is not where I want it - when I get home at the end of the day, I don't really feel like writing anything, and when I'm on the road and have the ideas to write, I don't have the energy. Personal problems have been complicating that recently, but they're either ironed out, or ironing out. My MRC hiatus continues until the travel schedule is in a similar situation, but in the meantime, I need a place to use as a notepad for game ideas, and this is as good as any, and better than most.
I'm currently at the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and I was thinking that it would be a great setting for a Rifts game. For my own reasons, I prefer to play Coalition games; you trade halfassed Naziism (and I really think that Palladium has a bad habit of half-assing their bad guys - "ooh we're anti-magic Nazis but we don't kill magic users out of hand!") for much tighter control of Rifts power creep. Combining these two leads me to think of a sort of techno-archaeological organization with a strong military presence. The thing about Vicksburg is that, in addition to ERDC (which is where USACE has consolidated the overwhelming majority of its large, space-intensive research projects), it sits on a commanding point on the Mississippi. This means that, if a dig site yields results, you'll have the fort-town effect given long enough. First comes the archaeological site and fortified camp, then a riverine patrol, then colonists.
It's a good setting for a campaign, but I'm not really in a position to start a character, let alone a game. I'm putting this all here as sort of a down-payment. If I can ever get to where I feel like I can reach a stable posting state, and I'm not being flogged by airlines or drained by work, I hope to do something with it, but first I figure I'll need to establish that I can play reliably. I don't think I'm there yet, either.
Anyway, I'm alive, and sort-of watching here, but not where I can do much more yet.
One result of all of this is that my writing time is not where I want it - when I get home at the end of the day, I don't really feel like writing anything, and when I'm on the road and have the ideas to write, I don't have the energy. Personal problems have been complicating that recently, but they're either ironed out, or ironing out. My MRC hiatus continues until the travel schedule is in a similar situation, but in the meantime, I need a place to use as a notepad for game ideas, and this is as good as any, and better than most.
I'm currently at the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and I was thinking that it would be a great setting for a Rifts game. For my own reasons, I prefer to play Coalition games; you trade halfassed Naziism (and I really think that Palladium has a bad habit of half-assing their bad guys - "ooh we're anti-magic Nazis but we don't kill magic users out of hand!") for much tighter control of Rifts power creep. Combining these two leads me to think of a sort of techno-archaeological organization with a strong military presence. The thing about Vicksburg is that, in addition to ERDC (which is where USACE has consolidated the overwhelming majority of its large, space-intensive research projects), it sits on a commanding point on the Mississippi. This means that, if a dig site yields results, you'll have the fort-town effect given long enough. First comes the archaeological site and fortified camp, then a riverine patrol, then colonists.
It's a good setting for a campaign, but I'm not really in a position to start a character, let alone a game. I'm putting this all here as sort of a down-payment. If I can ever get to where I feel like I can reach a stable posting state, and I'm not being flogged by airlines or drained by work, I hope to do something with it, but first I figure I'll need to establish that I can play reliably. I don't think I'm there yet, either.
Anyway, I'm alive, and sort-of watching here, but not where I can do much more yet.