Blogs are like journals, right?

And this is what Gwen looks like now.

A lot has happened in the past 3 months, but I've not really felt the "inspiration" to write about it. Here's a quick recap:

• Gwen was born 12/12/09, but had some breathing and eating issues, so we didn't get to bring her home until 12/17/09.
• My other 3 kids came out for the Christmas break on the 21st. I took 2 weeks off work so I could be with them the whole time. They loved their new little sister and a grand time was had by all.
• On 01/06/10 I was let go from my job, completely unexpectedly. I am still unemployed as of this writing, but actively looking and interviewing.
• On Feb 21 we named and blessed Gwynneth Fey Camp at my sister's ward in Lehi. We did that because she and her husband were blessing their adopted baby girl Eliana Caitlin Spencer the same day and we had a lot of family in from out of town and it was easiest to have the blessings in the same place. My sister wrote about it here, if you're interested in reading it.
  
• I got a CPAP machine and began using it and I feel a lot less tired now than I used to. I don't snore anymore either. Downside is that now that I'm sleeping with my mouth closed I've started grinding my teeth, but I went and found a mask that mounts on a mouth guard, so that's been nice the past few days. This one's awfully delicate though... I found this morning I've somehow managed to break the small tubes that connect from the big air hose. Fortunately it came with replacements, but if it broke in only 4 days.... not looking promising.
• Teri and I finally got our house in NM sold. We had to put a lot of money into it last year in order to get it "sale ready" and after paying the broker's commission and also the full cost of the place for the past 4 months without a renter in it while we were selling it.... we lost quite a lot of money on the sale, in spite of theoretically having a decent chunk of equity in it. Ah well... at least we don't have the monthly cost anymore and can simply work from a "local" budget now.
• Teri's maternity leave ended today and so I'm being "Mr. Mom" while doing my job searches. Gwen's actually sitting in my lap right now as I'm typing this. Teri's not really happy about needing to return to work, but.... life is. Once I get a new job we'll see how it all goes.

On the gaming front, I'm doing EVE still and playing just enough to get enough ISK to buy game time, so it's effectively free for me anymore. I re-subbed to EQ2 when the expansion came out, but no longer on the "Station Pass" -- just a regular sub this time. I've been focusing on my shadowknight and trying to work up her AA points. Got her up to 150 now (from 132) with 90% of my xp going to AA on the slider. I've gotten about 60% of a level also, so theoretically I'd be level 86 now if I hadn't been working so hard on the AA's. I've actually not set foot in the new zones at all yet, but am working on finishing all the old quests from RoK and TSO that I never did. The TSO quests are something of a pain with a lot of running around, but I can't say I really expected any differently.

I'm playing DDO under its "free model" also. There's another blogger out there who's organized a "static group" that I've joined up with and we're gonna see how far we can go with it. I've also checked out Allod's Online - a new F2P title - and while I think it's ok, it's nothing special either. It's free, so I've not uninstalled it and may log in from time to time when I'm not doing anything else, but I doubt I'll ever really do much with it.

And you can't tell, but Gwen's had her diaper changed, been fed, and is fighting not to fall asleep now so I'm gonna go focus on her until she is napping.

And here we are in October. . . .

Started my new job on the last day of September. Well..... same job, different company writing the paychecks now. The joys of being a contractor!

Life's starting to settle a bit into a routine now, though Teri and I are still moving storage boxes out of the old place and into the new one on the weekends. Not all weekends are the same either, but they generally do involve laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping.

Cable internet tech came out last Friday and found that since it was running from a splitter through a 2nd splitter (and in to an "out" part of the 2nd splitter) that it was causing a pretty severe signal degradation. He replaced the 2 splitters with a single one with more "out" prongs, and made sure that everything was on the proper prongs, and there's been no trouble with the internet since. I call that a win for the cable company.

Computer Stupidities: People calling in for help creating SHORTCUTS. Come on! That's one of the most BASIC Windows functions. People calling in asking if the file servers are down when a) we sent a site-wide email informing them that yes, they are, and b) the intranet home page has a huge red-text posting about it. People calling in asking for a 25' telephone cable to run from 1 side of the room to a new desk they want to move to, when there's a stinking jack AT the desk and we just need to have their phone number moved to the jack at the desk.

There are more, but those are the ones so egregious they're standing out in my mind.

We've caught up on Dollhouse and are enjoying that. Heroes episodes are stacking up becuz I still need to download or hulu the 1st ep of the season. I've caught up on Man v. Food now. I don't know why, but I just love that show. We've started watching Flash Forward also, becuz it had an interesting premise and it's seemed pretty well done so far. I'm still eageraly awaiting the resumption of Chuck, but that won't be until after the Olympics, apparently. Stupid NBC. . . .

My EVE news is: I completed Caldari Cruiser 5 and can now finally fly Tech 2 hulls. and if I wanted to, I could fly a Tech 3 hull in a little over an hour also. Time for me to start grinding out some ISK. . . . . But, I frankly haven't really played EVE in about 2 months. I'm not really excited about doing missions anymore, but I'm not really interested in pvp either, nor researching the market well enough to "play it" and try to make money that way, so...... I'm willing to keep playing it, but I think it's about time for me to be looking at a different corp. MY current corp is fun in that I know everyone in it IRL, but we don't really do anything in-game together anymore. I can't remember the last "corp night" operation we had. But I read a lot of EVE blogs and I know there's a lot more game out there.... it's just a matter of me going out and finding it.

In EQ2 I spent the past weekend doing the Everfrost quests on my mystic. I set him to 100% aaxp on his slider and so I got 8 AA's rather quickly. The thing that surprised me was that I thought it was simply a combat xp slider, but it turns out it's all the adventuring xp, so my character level didn't move a bit - all quest xp went toward aaxp as well. He's now fully melee spec'd and also has his full 40% boost to SoW. Add his racial 5% speed boost and he's permarunning 45% now. I kinda would like to put the next 5 points into the generic footspeed AA on the Shadow tree, but the difference from 45 to 50% runspeed isn't that great and I've got the racial +50% boost I can fire off every 5 minutes if I want. As a result, I'm going to work more on the WIS line in order to get the Ritual of Alacrity. I also worked on getting more AA on my monk also and got him to over 50 points, but I still am not sure where I want to go with that character.

In DDO I deleted all my characters except for a dual-wielding kopesh fighter. I am *loving* this character. Good AC from the full plate armor, high dps from the fighter haste enhancements and good crit multiplier from the kopeshes.... much fun! There are still other combos I want to try, but I think I'm going to focus on this fighter for a while and look at building a reserve of cash up in order to be able to twink the later alts a bit. As it is, I've been able to do about half of the "newbie island" quests on the Elite level by myself, and I'm pushing level 4 with her now and will be able to add the "weapon specialization" feat in for even more damage. Way cool, methinks. Time to start looking at grouping. . . . .

And that's about it. Nothing earth shattering but... life is pretty good and I'm enjoying my hobby.

Time flies, no?

We got moved in, but it became apparent in the next few days that I highly overstressed my back while doing it. I'm better now, though.

Past couple of weeks have really mostly been the typical "work, sleep, eat, repeat" routine. Teri's pregnancy is still kicking her butt, so most evenings she spends resting in bed, so I've been passing the time reading or watching dvd's.

We did get our cable hooked up this past Friday, including internet. The TV part's been great, but the internet part.... not so much. The guy hooked it up to his laptop to activate it and it worked fine, but when I hooked my computer up a few minutes later...... nothing. Link lights looked okay on the modem, but the nic showed solid, no flashy. Power cycled the modem, but no help. Called the cable company and their automated system did a remote reset of the router and that fixed it. Hooray!

It worked fine on Friday, but on Saturday it started going up and down a bit, especially later in the afternoon. I ran some errands and tried again and it seemed ok at first, but still was going up and down a bit into the evening. The modem would reset itself from time to time, and that seemed to help each time, but then last night it was just a no-go. Link lights looked good, but I was lucky to get the occasional packet in. Could barely load text-only blogs, never mind trying to play a game or something.

Called the cable company again and this time it routed me to an agent. I described what was going on and she indicated she could see exactly what I described to her in her activity logs -- tons of missed/dropped packets and timeouts, etc. Seems odd that that would be the case -- when it's working it's nice and zippy, so I don't think it's a wiring issue, and it's a new modem -- I watched the tech pull it out of its plastic when he set it up. Even so, she said she'll send a tech out. She could do it for tomorrow, but since Teri and I both work... Friday it is. Since the TV's working and the fall season just started, Teri and I have more than enough to keep us occupied in the evenings now, and can read when we run out of recorded programs too. Ain't DVR something?

Although, knowing me, I'll check the internet connection out each night anyway ;-)

As it was, during the times it was working I put in a lot of DDO and a little EQ2 this weekend. For DDO's soloing, I'm finding I prefer melee oriented characters, and I'm thinking that a straight-up human fighter (bonus 1st level feat, after all) seems to fill the bill best. I tried a fighter/rogue multiclass combo, but found that the dual-wielding path I took wasn't "doing it" for me. Don't know why, really. It's not like I lost a lot with that 1 rogue level, and if I were to take every 5th level as a rogue I could end up with a 16/4 fighter rogue at the end with several of the rogue skills capped out and a very respectable +19 BAB for the fighting still.

But, the idea of an Arcane Archer took me, so I made an elf fighter. From reading the descriptions on the DDO compendium it sounded like I'd need at least 1 level of ranger in order to be one, so I started level 1 as a ranger, then swapped to fighter for the additional feats and "kensai" enhancements. I'll grab level 9 as a wizard and that will then open up the Arcane Archer abilities at that time, plus the wizard spells will have some utility, so far as detecting secret doors minor AC buffs, etc. Thing is, I'm soloing right now, so while I'm doing okay at plinking at things as they run at me, I'm still forced to "sword and board" most of the time. And I'm not sure that I'm doing any more damage with the bow than a competent sorcerer or wizard would, so I'm not sure any group would want me as "ranged dps" in these low levels. Time will tell, I suppose.

Anyway.. enough rambling on that.... I tried several other classes too, deleted several, have open character slots again, etc.

Logged in to EQ2, but really it was just in order to re-attune my gear that got changed from "Lore No-Trade" with the latest update. For my lower level toons I also adjusted the new xp slider to 75% AA and only 25% toward adventuring.

Today's computer stupidity: Guy calls up and wants me to renamed a file, then put a replacement file into the folder from the desktop. no admin rights needed, the idiot just thought they would be. He didn't even TRY to do what he needed to do.