Every Day an Adventure

Oops, I guess I went to sleep last night without updating. I thought I had, weird. Friday at work, I was a bad girl and ducked out of yet another all-hands meeting, to go down to the IT guys and beg someone to make my laptop work for remote VPN stuff. They were all like "Bah, we are very very busy, file a ticket and we'll get back to you in a couple of days," and I said "Can't I just plug it in and show you the error I got since I already installed all the stuff and I'm just getting a weird message or two?" So they gave me a cable modem to plug it into, I booted it up, showed them one message which turned out to be that I needed to uninstall Norton, and the second was some arcane Lotus Notes problem, but the IT guy typed a few random incantations into it and it magically worked. I think I wasted a total of maybe half an hour of his time, so I guess I do feel a little bad, but it wasn't like I had some huge hours-and-hours-long issue to work through.

After work we had D&D at Cory's house. We now ACTUALLY have one session remaining. As in, our final boss to fight is in the floor above the room we're at. We've worked our way up the outside tower thing, found the ethereal plane portal, went up the other side, had a few fights, and are now there. We were going to do the shopping thing, since Cory got turned to stone (for like the third time -- honestly, he had sprung a prismatic spray trap early on and got turned to stone but Justin decided that'd be lame so instead he just got hit with a lot of damage by a ray. Then later, we had prismatic spray cast on the party and AGAIN Cory got hit by the "turned to stone" ray and AGAIN failed his save) but Josh decided to Miracle him back since I didn't have Stone to Flesh memorized, and so in theory we'll just plow through, next session. Though next session might not be until mid-December at this rate thanks to travel.

Today I meant to do some shopping and then go visiting people, but I was exhausted and slept until 2pm. Oops. So instead, I got up, called oren, went and picked him up around 4ish, and we drove down to Tacoma.

First I stopped by Narrows because the In The Groove nationals qualifying tourney was going on and I just wanted to stop by and say hello to people. I didn't see many people I knew -- darknote and toastercookie and Jedi and Shakespeare by the 5th mix, and cynic573 behind the table, and bobsyouruncle and crackoon getting ready to actually compete, and keevon over by the Beatmania III machine. There were bunches of other people there, but I didn't know who they were. I played a game of Beatmania so I could play 20 November just in case, and I also played a game of Drummania for the hell of it. Oren played a game of Initial D, and in the meantime Jeff had called me, so I called him back and we headed even further south down to Lakewood.

We got to damienroc and wooko's place, and they were there, as was Pete, and Julianne. Wooko took Pete home for some reason or another, and Jeff and Julianne and Oren and I went to grab pre-HP dinner; we ended up at Applebee's. It wasn't too bad. islandergirlro and Brien caught up with us to give us movie tickets at Applebee's, and then we all ended up at the theater a bit later, and we saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I'll talk about that in a second.

After the movie we came back and watched a 5-minute episode of some weird anime (Magical Play?) with "The 2-D vs. 3-D fight!", and then I suggested we watch the Simpsons softball episode, which was of course vastly entertaining, and then we all headed home. Whee.

Tomorrow I might go try to play IIDX at that new arcade thing, or maybe stop by Illusionz or such, but more likely I will just go shopping for my trip and maybe start packing. I will make sure to play 20 November on some Bemani game one way or the other, though.

I guess I'll LJ-cut in case people haven't seen the movie, but is it really possible to spoil it?

( Harry Potter And The Triwizard Tournament )

I was awoken this morning by the sound of gusts of wind against my window, and the blinds thumping against the frame as the air pressure changed. Apparently we're getting into the season of Cold, Grey, And Rainy, which will last sometime until approximately late May.

Then half of my day was spent in "Golly, GE!" meetings, but I still managed to get some work done, at least.

We had D&D tonight. Josh made pork roast for dinner, which was pretty damn good. I brought my chocolate-iced chocolate cupcakes, which also went over well. Megan and Josh are currently dogsitting Ficus's brown lab puppy Oliver, who is, as I have previously mentioned, the cutest puppy on the planet. Oliver was very excited about our D&D session, and he spent a lot of time running around the dining room and coming up to try to chew on my sleeve, or alternately, lying down on my feet and staring up at me piteously with a look of "I am the cutest puppy on the planet! Play with me, infatuated human, play with me!"

Anyway, tonight's D&D session featured the only time our normally-noisy party actually used a Silence spell and it didn't backfire in our faces, and actually gained us something. As we finished clearing the main two towers of the drow castle last week, this week we were going to go investigate the auxiliary stalactite, which we have since discovered is a temple. So, we come up to the big doors, and Josh and Cory get this brilliant plan to cast Silence on an arrow, and we'll open the doors and fire in the arrow so spellcasters can't hit us. Great! Except... we open the doors, and thirty goblets come crashing down, because they were stacked up behind the door as an alarm. Now, normally they'd make a great clatter and wake up the guard, except we'd Silenced the area, so they didn't. Heh.

Then we go into the hall, and get a good surprise round to beat up on the drow guard there (turns out that he's the drow elf Jarrett's character has been hunting for all along -- his six-fingered man, if he were Inigo Montoya), who is named Kumar, which seems a little weird ("What, is he going to White Castle?" "I hate to break it to you, dude, but this castle is about as far from white as it gets."). Whoooosh. Well, all hell breaks loose, and we have a big ol' undead-bashing contest, which eventually ends in us winning and the undead losing, which is fortunate. We also cut off the reinforcement undead troop by disintegrating out the walkway floor and closing the door behind us. The evening ends with us fighting these three extremely large demonic nightshades or something like that. They were kind of kicking our butts for a bit, and so I had to unleash something big on the one that teleported right next to me. So I debated: Disintegrate, or Bigby's Grasping Hand?

I decided they should talk to the hand. It was a good choice.

Tonight we had D&D at Justin and Colleen's new house. They made meatloaf for dinner -- normal meatloaf for the lame people, and AWESOME TACO MEALOAF for the rest of us. (No, really, it was meatloaf with taco seasoning and onions and peppers and crumbled nacho chips and mmmm, it was really good.) Due to my trip to Minneapolis, I wasn't able to bake anything for dessert, so I will have to try to make something super-yummy for the next session.

Anyway, we continued on our quest in the City of the Spider Queen. Unfortunately, as we haven't found the compass yet to tell us what room of the labyrinth the final boss is in, we pretty much have to systematically eliminate all quarters. Today we finished clearing out the two main towers, so we're pretty sure the final drow bitch^H^H^H^H^Hpriestess is in the auxiliary tower that we discovered a few sessions back. We almost went in there, until Josh realized brilliantly that most places we were *supposed* to go into, we killed something that had a key to, and we had no key to this tower, so maybe we should go clear the other ones?

The song of the evening was They Might Flee Giants's hit from their first album, "I Hope That I Kill Drow Before I Die".

Actually, Josh and I were trying to figure out who would win if Roquefort and Janthina played rock-paper-scissors, aka Destruction-vs-Disintegration. After all, both spells would have a 22 save (mine's 6th lvl, his is 7th), both are fort saves, both of our characters have a +13 to fort save, we both have the same initiative (+4, although my dex bonus is higher), etc. Later on in a fight, I rolled a 1 for my initiative and Josh yelled, "DESTRUCTION!" Har.

We went into the 6th floor of the main tower after aborting the auxiliary tower, and it took Justin a while to find the correct paper map to spread out on the table. I said, "Ah, floor 6! Insert disk 3, side 1." Cory said, "We need a new GM! This one isn't loading maps fast enough!"

Of course, we get into the room and there are two huge undead dragons. Yippee. Cory's like, "Is there such a thing as a good dragon?" and Josh goes "Not in a fucking DROW CASTLE, you MORON."

After we beat the dragons (mostly owing to Jarrett's fortuitous use of Freedom of Movement after Josh got paralyzed), we had a small room to open up. Cory failed his traps and locks roll, so Josh went to open the door... and got hit by a Symbol of Death trap and failed his save. Oh, bloody hell was that annoying, since not only is he the party cleric, but we only had one Raise Dead scroll. Fortunately, Cory made his Use Magic Device roll after an hour (using the random Cloak of Charisma we'd acquired last session, which I hereby dub the cloak of crap-isma because nobody in the party has a Charisma above 8), and we went into the room. AHA! We found a vault! With chests full of BOOTY! ARRR, we be pillagin' the drow treasure, yarrr... yeah, or something.

We got a whole lot of loot, including a lute. "We looted a lute? What?" We also got several decent magic items, including this BAD-ASS suit of elven chainmail, which Janthina is now wearing. It's a +4 Elven Chain of Invulnerability, which gives me damage resistance 5/magic. Man. Awesomeness. It's worth more than the rest of the party, I think. Don't be surprised if my character gets killed in her sleep one of these days.

Anyway, we called the session a bit after we finished clearing that top floor, because we figured it'd be a bad idea to start storming the rest of the castle at 10:30pm. And obviously this was a bad luck session, given that after all the crap we'd faced, Josh's character was killed by, of all things, a *doorknob*.

Lessee, what can I say about today? I was given a new project at work. It's going to make my head explode, there's so much to learn, ack.

I did find out that sugar-free hot chocolate sucks a lot less in higher concentrations than it does when watered-down -- this shouldn't be a surprise, of course.

Gym today was good, though I should decide really soon whether I'm going to join the place for real after August (if I join by the end of this month I get a discount). I'm doing okay with my upped weights, too, which is nice.

D&D afterwards -- again, just one big battle, but it was pretty funny all along and not nearly that dangerous until this really big nasty undead dude came out and cast Horrid Wilting on our party, which is a super-nasty spell, and fortunately my character had ducked out of the room right before he did. After the battle, I got his spellbook, which was pretty damn cool, except for the fact that I'm an evoker who doesn't cast enchantments or necromantics. Doh.

I came home and did laundry and played PP. The laundry was really important, because it'd been about two weeks since I did laundry last. The PP was less important, but I got to catch up with Rome and Parka, which was nice... it really is just like one big IM client now :)

man, I can't believe it's been almost 3 years exactly I've been out here...

D&D lasted way too long tonight. We basically played one battle from 8pm until 12:30am. That was just... bad. I lost interest about 2 hours in... well, really, I just got tired.

It was good to see people though, we had a whole buncha people hangin' out at the House of Slack for a while there. We listened to the Mariners game, which sounded fun.

I went to the gym after work and before D&D. I swam for half an hour. It felt really good, what with being sunburnt, but it felt really bad, what with being somewhat sore still. Walked to the HoS from the gym, which is also good exercise.

I left work right after getting a script to work. That was pretty satisfying. It's nicer to leave on an accomplished note than a "dammit, I'll figure it out in the morning" note.

Work was pretty good, too. I feel like I am getting more into the "how to sp34k p3rl" mindset every day. It's cool when I figure out the "right" way to write stuff the first time.

This morning, chai from Torrefazione Italia or however you spell it. Still generic, just like yesterday's chai from Tully's. I'm going to try chai from every coffee shop between 4th & Union and 4th & Madison, since I walk that every morning from the bus to work.

I'm sorry about London. I wish I knew if rkane was okay, since I know he's there for some Magic tourney that was starting today, but other than that I don't think I know anyone currently in London. It's very sad. Bad people suck.