Tafeanorn

Monday

Monday was our first full day on the ship and it was _so_ easy just to fall back into habits of other cruises.  It’s almost like coming back home.  Everything is in the same place.  The schedule is the same.  The face are different, but the people -- the stewards and the housekeeping staff and the bartenders -- are the same, helpful, friendly folks that have been on every other cruise.

We got up at 7:00 am and were at breakfast a short time later.  Bacon, eggs (too runny), three different kinds of sausage, fried potatoes, and coffee.  And then to the spa by 8:00.  Chris had a massage appointment then, and since we had signed up for the VIP spa membership, I did that while she got hot stoned.

Now the thermal suite of the spa is something new for us.  I had been curious about it on our last cruise, but couldn’t quite justify the price, but the more I thought about the more I had wanted it last time, and so one this cruise I was determined to give it a try.

What is it?  First off it has a bunch of contoured, tiled beds facing a giant picture window looking out over the starboard side of the ship.  The contours of the bed fit the natural reclining shape of your body with your knees slightly elevated.  The tiles are heated from within, to just over body temperature, suffusing your body with an extremely relaxing heat.

Also in the room is a very warm, mineral water jaccuzi.  There is a special misting shower that sprays a cold, refreshing cloud of water to cool you off if you get overheated.  They play soothing new age music and there is ice-cold water to drink.

And it was fabulous.  So relaxing.  Nothing o do but lie there and relax, staring out at the North Sea rolling by, reading one of the Bernard Cornwell ‘Saxon’ novels.  Every so often taking a break to soak in the hot tub.  I spent 90 minutes doing that and then met back up with Chris.  We blogged a little and got our computers hooked up to the internet.

It was a sea day, meaning that there was no stopping in any ports, just continuing to sail from The Netherlands north toward Oslo.  The North Sea was very calm, with just the smallest ripples across its surface.  Hardly the dangerous, deadly, storm-ridden sea I picture.

At noon there was  Texas Hold ‘Em tournament that I went to, but there was still not enough people to play, so I still didn’t get any poker in.  I determined to try again at the 2:00 tournament.

We had lunch in the cafeteria, though we did it at the height of the lunch hour and had trouble finding a place to sit.  I had Swiss steak and potatoes, and a big slab of roast ham.

About this time, we met up with Becca, who was having a bit of a rough time.  While there are a bunch of kids on the cruise, there aren’t any other teens.  She had spent some time hanging out with the teen coordinator, just the two of them.  But she had also been working on  project of her  own.

Before we left, she had taken part in a YouTube music video challenge.  They supplied a song and then challenged people to submit homemade music videos for the song.  She wrangled together seven or eight of her friends and shot a video for it on the two days right before we left, on so she had spent Monday morning editing the video together.   She and her friends did a fabulous job and since the contest ends on the 19th, we’re going to have to figure out how to upload it over the next few days.  Once it’s posted, I supply links.
 
Much to my surprise, the 2:00 poker tournament did actually happen, though with only four of us.  I was the first one out, an unlucky break of a big hand and then I played a small pair too passively pre-flop.

Chris went to a gemstone and jewelry talk, and I went back to the room for a nap.  After the talk she joined me, and we slept until about 6:00.  We went up tot he Crow’s Nest for the drink of the day -- a Glacial Lemon Drop (a regular Lemon Drop with something blue added to it).

That night was a formal night, so we got dressed up and went to dinner.  Becca was feeling tired and uncomfortable in her formal wear, so she left dinner early.  That left Chris and I alone for much of dinner so we were able to have a really good talk about the what had worked and not worked the two days before and what we could have done differently.  We’re getting much better at having difficult talks like this and we able to have a very pleasant dinner despite the tricky subject of the conversation.

After dinner, Becca was already fast asleep, so Chris and I went to the Best of Broadway show in the big theater, which consisted of five or six Broadway and West End performers doing famous musical numbers.  That took us up to 11:00 pm, and so we back to the room and went to bed, because first thing in the morning we would be arriving in Oslo!

Saturday, we’ll call it Saturday although the word doesn’t really have any meaning to us at the moment, was a disaster.  Not a major disaster -- no one hurt or left behind or stolen from or anything -- but a disaster in sanity and planning.

But, as I write this, maybe I’m exaggerating.  It wasn’t so bad (or at least it probably won’t seem so in hindsight a few days from now).  The bad things that happened were planned for (though a magnitude greater than I had planned for) and that plan was activated.  But I do feel very bad that my plan got us all is such a rotten situation.  But enough of beating around the bush, let’s get on to what actually happened.

We got on the plane shortly after my last post on Friday Seattle time about 1:00 pm.  There was a slight communication error or misunderstanding between the airline staff and many of the flyers, including us.  So we had to wait in a line and have our passports inspected again.  Not a problem, just a different line to stand in.

We got our seats and they were fine, right over the wing.  Cute toddler sitting behind us.  Geeky, tossled, unkempt-haired guy sitting next to me.  French woman a few seats back demanding to see the pilot because she had been pulled out of line and made to show her passport.  She eventually got the head steward and went on to bitch up a storm, her story changing every few minutes -- first she was flying on important business, then for pleasure, that she traveled to the US dozens of time each year, then once or twice a year. 

We got into the air on time and all three of us went promptly to sleep, Chris and I getting some help from a muscle relaxant.  Now, this had been our plan.  We’d been up early that morning -- at 2:30 am -- with just this in mind.  Our 1:40 pm takeoff landed at 8:00 am with a 10 hour flight time.  Don’t question the math, it’s the wonder of time zones.  So the plan was a good one -- be tired, sleep for ten hours (or eight or five or six depending on how well we were able to sleep).  Wake up at 7:00 in the morning ready to be on Europe time and sightsee away.

I put on my noise-dampening headphones and iPod with some nice relaxing music to drown out the noise of the teenaged girls soccer team that was flying to Denmark for a big game and went to sleep. 

The stewards bringing around the main meal were pretty loud and woke me up about an hour into my sleep, but I just kept my eyes closed and tried to tune it and get back to sleep -- until they shook my shoulder to wake me up!  They did the same to Chris and Becca.

WTF!?! Who ever heard of a flight attendant waking someone up for some bad food?  I admit that I don’t fly that much, but I often sleep on the plane and have never had this happen before.  I started getting mad and dwelling on that minor outrage and that was the end of sleep for me.  I tried to sleep for the next three hours, only to spend twenty or thirty minutes relaxing and trying to sleep and eventually drifting off, but then having some bit of noise wake me up ten or fifteen minutes later.  Or the guy next to me elbowing me in the ribs.  He did that a lot, as he fumbled around for manga in his bag.

And then the toddler woke up, and wanted to play with his Leapfrog. “T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T” it said loudly in its slightly computerized voice as the kid pounded on the toy.  “Y Y Y Y Y  Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y  Y Y Y”
And then his mom would get mad at him and, in a whispered yell, tell him to shut up or stop that.  But that was the end of sleeping.  I woke up first (or more likely, gave up trying first) and watched an episode of _ Big Bang Theory_ on the personal video screen.  Then once the others admitted to being awake, we all watched the movie _Paul_.  So total sleep, 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours.

We landed in Amsterdam on time in the rain and we were all dead tired.  Becca was grumpy but Chris and I were coping pretty well.  We got through customs surprisingly fast and easy and got cash and a bite to eat at Burger King (yeah, I know, but the kid was grumpy and hungry).  That was at about 9:00 am.

We got our rental car, though as the younger guy looked up my reservation he turned to the other older fellow working there and said, “Did you see this reservation?” in a tone that I well recognized from U-Haul.  It was one of those, “Can you believe that the internet let someone make a stupid rental like this?” looks.

The care was an Opel Astra Wagon and was VERY nice.  Just enough room for our bags, built-in GPS and iPod support, cruise control, manual transmission.  Very fun and easy to drive.  If I was in the market for a new car, I think that is one that could stand a chance at replacing my beloved Saturn SW2.

We drove south into Belgium with the town of Leuven being our eventual destination, but with plans to stop in the Dutch town of den Bosch for lunch.  Driving was easy, especially with the help of Margaret, the name we gave to the female-voiced GPS in the car.  Even going through the tiny, poorly-labeled streets of medieval den Bosch, was relatively easy. 

Relatively being a great weasel-word.  It took extreme concentration and I really should have found a chart of European road signs and studied it a bit.  One Way signs were a lot harder to recognize than you’d think they should be, and I would not be surprised to find out we had gone the wrong way down a few.

Den Bosch was great to look at, but the excitement was starting to wear off and Becca had already crashed in the back seat of the car, so we decided to skip lunch.  The local museum was under construction and looked closed, and the open-air market, which was one of the highlights of the town in my mind, was not to be found.  We found a beautiful church in the neighboring town of Drust (?), that we happened upon by accident.

But the stress of the difficult driving was getting to both of us (though I wouldn’t admit it t the time) and we were coming down from the excitement high and so we decided to continue toward Leuven.

After some really gorgeous driving down some rural roads we got onto the freeway.  Despite Margaret and Google Maps both agreeing with each other, but seeming to disagree with the paper road map we’d bought, we made it to our hotel in Leuven right at 2:00 pm.  It was a stunning building but we were in no condition to appreciate it.  Luckily our room was ready, so we parked, unloaded and trucked our heavy bags up two flights of stairs to our room.

And collapsed.  That’s not a euphemism or an exaggeration.  We closed the shutters, turned off the lights, used the bathroom, and fell into the bed and slept.  At this point we were 27 hours with 2 hours of sleep or 51 hours with something like 6 or 7 hours of sleep.  I can’t remember the last time I was so tired.  Maybe never.

So we slept.  The girls slept better than I did.  One problem, at least in this situation, was that the room didn’t have a clock.  My watch’s battery had died while we were on the plane (bad luck that!).  The only other clocks we had were on our computers.

The first time I woke up I’m going to guess was around 6:00 pm.  I then passed in and out of consciousness, maybe waking every hour, until there was no more light coming through the window shutters, when I guessed it was about 10:00 pm.  I kept drifting in and out, but as the night went on, a headache of massive proportions was building.  I got feeling pretty down as the pain worsened and had a harder and harder time getting back to sleep.

I finally gave up and stumbled around in the dark and fished out my laptop.  3:30 am local time.  We’d been asleep for over 13 hours, although it had been a pretty restless one for me.  My headache was horrible, and I theorized it was because I hadn’t eaten in nearly 24 hours.  I tried to find a 24-hour grocery store online but had no luck. 

The girls woke up about then, and Christine had a stash of pretzels and ibuprophin and that helped a little. We turned on the TV and watched some American and British shows with subtitles.  I wrote the first four paragraphs of this entry before the sun rose and we started packing up and getting showers.

We talked.  We laughed.  We got online and saw pictures of our kitties that Kelsey had posted to Facebook.  Becca played City of Heroes on her laptop and we both helped her do a big trial.  That felt really good, and despite the headache that would not go away, it moved us forward from the misery of Saturday onto what would turn out to be a good Sunday.

Here we are, all set and ready to go.  Bags are packed.  House is clean.  Cats played with.  Chris just made us a delicious breakfast.  Our car will be here in about 3 hours and then we’re off the airport.

Yesterday was a pretty rough day.  I crammed in a full day’s worth of work into four hours.  My belt broke and I had to run by the store and get a new one.  Chris had an emotional crisis, partly about our ongoing problems, partly about worries related to the trip.  We talked for four or five hours that was good, but emotionally draining.  My attempts at comforting were weak and at times I may have made things worse.  But we got through it and I’m pretty sure she’s doing a little better.

Becca was out with some friends during the time, which was convenient.  She’s been working on a project making a music video, and for the last week has been getting lots of experience herding cats -- I mean her friends.  But she finished and then wanted to hang out late with her friends, her mean old parents made her come home.  We watched some TV and went to bed early.

None of slept well.  Becca hasn’t slept at all.  Chris and I got four or five hours.  We were up at 2:30 am and have been puttering around trying to keep busy and stay awake, but not really having anything to do.  We watched our recorded episodes of Expedition Impossible.  Becca’s been watching episode after episode of Buffy.  I’ve been backing up computers and defraging and the like.

My netbook’s battery wasn’t working, so I ordered a new one that arrived last night.  I charged it last night and it’s looking pretty sweet.  It a triple capacity battery, and looks like it will power the computer for about 9 hours.  That’ll come in handy!  Plus, after I ordered the new battery, I fixed the old one.  I feel stupid for that mistake, but it does give me a lot of battery life.

And here we are with just over 24 hours before we leave for Europe. Chris is off of work. I have a four hour shift (which may be a little longer than planned because I have some plumbing to do down there) left. Becca is off school, though she’s desperately trying to finish a video project with some of her friends before she leaves. And her foot seems to be mostly healed.

Laundry is mostly done. Chris is going to run to the store and grab a few last-minute things. We have a cheesy Viking movie from Netflix that ought to be awful to watch tonight as we pack.

The car to airport picks us up tomorrow (Friday) at 9:45 am. The plane leaves at 1:40 pm. It is a 10 hour direct flight to Amsterdam.

I’m still very excited, but some of the worrying has started to crop up. Will everyone have fun doing that things I’ve planned? Will I push us too hard? Are the expectations I have for the trip realistic? Will we get grumpy at each other while trying to settle out our jetlag?

But I’m doing my best to keep busy (by blogging, among other things) and not dwell on those kinds of thoughts. There are, however, a few things that I need to remember:
Don’t get so caught up in my own excitement that I fail to see and recognize the needs of the others.
Stay flexible and don’t get locked into itineraries or ideal situations.
Don’t overthink things. It’s related to the point above, but in more of an ‘efficiency has its place, but not on vacation’ sort of way.

Today I started in on seriously catching up on work. I cleaned the kitchen. I weeded (partially) out gravel parking lot. I worked on Ellis. All things that I just haven’t had the time or energy to tackle. It felt really good.

Then Becca and I went out thrift storing and garage saleing. We found some games -- nothing spectacular, but a new copy of Word on the Street, a Scrabble, a Rumikub, a Castle Risk, a Battleship and a few others that I don’t recall at the moment. And we just had some together time, which has been hard to come by. That felt really good as well.

And then worked more on Ellis. It is coming along well. The real work is done -- it’s all written, all playtested to my satisfaction, and laid out. It just needs four things: a major proofreading, artwork, a cover and maps. I have a map artist and a cover artist working right now. Their works in progress look very good, and though it’s coming along slower than I’d like, they’re going to look great. That leaves me with proofreading and art.

Christine got the first go-over of the manuscript and made a bunch of great comments in record time. And then Layla and I are going over it as well. It’s slow going and that’s disappointing on a let’s-get-this-thing-done-and-move-on perspective. But at the same all three of us have noticed and commented on how well it intrigues the reader and draws them in. It’s not a stuffy, academic-style world book. It’s actually fun to read. The fiction quickly demands that keep reading to kind out what happens next, so you tell yourself that you’ll skim through the next section, but that section grabs you and makes you savor it, forgetting for a moment the fiction.

We’re all probably biased for having spent so much time in this world working on this project, but even still, it’s extremely good. Better than I imagined it could be when I first started working on it.

And then artwork. The interior artwork is going to be nearly all public domain images. Not Dover Books line art that you see in all of the indie RPGs, but scans of actual medieval and classic artwork. I did that for one main reason -- I really wanted that style of artwork but found few reliable and affordable artists willing and able to do it. It just also happens to be free and thus very affordable.

So I’ve been searching for art. Online, searching through galleries of medieval manuscripts. The Maciejowski Bible. The Manese Codex. The University of Heidelberg has a stunning collection of manuscripts available on their website and you can just download the entire book as a .pdf. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ I’ve been to our local library and gone through all of their art books. I’ve been through my personal library . . . So it’s coming along. I probably won’t start actually inserting images until we get back from vacation.

I wrote a while ago about taking on a second job to pay off the huge bill caused by our roof emergency.  Well, that job ended as of Wednesday. 

It was a good job, and some bits of it I enjoyed quite a lot, while others I did not.  The best part of it was my co-workers, and they made the job enjoyable.  The worst times there were when I worked alone.  We all went out for dinner and drinks Wednesday night (along with Christine and Becca) and had a very good time.  They are good people and I will do my best to continue to see them socially. 

But I am _so_ happy to be done with it!  To have some time back.  To feel the burden of all that work lifted off of my shoulders.  To feel the stress level lighten.  To know that I will be able to put the energy that U-Haul required into people and things that deserve it more. 

So right now I’m at the beginning of a 4 1/2 day weekend -- the first one of those in God-knows how long.  I don’t have a whole lot planned.  My first priority is to rest and catch up on sleep.  But I do have some chores I need to do and I want to spend a lot of time on Ellis (which deserves its own post).

And I’ll blog.  I’ve posted here several times that I want to get back in the habit of blogging, and I figure that if I do it regularly for the next two weeks, and then for the two weeks while we’re on vacation, it will have become a strong habit.

Well, here it is, April of 2011.

I haven’t done much blogging in the last year and half, have I?

There’s some good reasons for that, and I’ll go into them here in a bit, but first let me say that I’m going to try to do more writing here.  I think I ought to be able to get in three posts a week.  Maybe not long ones or insightful ones, but I should be able to write something three times a week.  So that’s the goal.  And if I’m not successful at that pace right at first, it should become easier in a couple of months.

So what’s been going on?  What’s kept me from writing?  What’s kept me from wanting to share?

::sigh::

It’s kind of a long story, but one I’ve been wanting to talk about.  It’s also somewhat difficult.  There are parts that I’m very proud of, and parts that I’m not happy about at all.

It started back in October of 2009 (oddly enough, that’s where my semi-regular blog posts stop).  Our rental house needed an entire new roof and part of a side wall rebuilt.  To the tune of $26,000.  We had some savings, but nothing like that (and we had been planning a European cruise with that savings).  It had to get fixed, so we paid for it on credit.

That debt really started getting to me.  I was basically a wreck November through January.  I couldn’t sleep, which, for those who know me, is _very_ out of character.  It made Thanksgiving tense, which led to additional stress between me and my parents.  I made an emergency flight down to Southern California to smooth things over with them (which went very well, but amped up the stress another notch).

By February, I was sick of feeling bad and sorry for myself and was actually able to _do_ something.  I put together a plan that would get that debt paid off in a year.  It was hard work.  Damned hard work.  I took on a second job.  I sold off much of my game collection.  We made sacrifices to cut down our expenditures. 

It worked.  In eleven months, on January 5th, I made the last payment on that credit card.  It was a very proud moment.  Despite numerous obstacles (such as: a leaking water heater, a leaking shed, a 16 year-old needing to learn to drive, two computer disasters) we did it.

But there was a price.  Several, actually, that took a while to see and realize.

By the Fall of 2010 it was becoming obvious that there were serious relationship problems between my wife, Christine, and I.  Not obvious enough that I couldn’t ignore them, and so I did until she thankfully brought them to a head in January.

I was not the same person I used to be, she said.  I was distant and cold.  I took love and encouragement and gave little in return.  My life, my emotional life, no longer seemed to be linked to the rest of the family.

She asked me to see a therapist.  Now to be honest, I wasn’t too keen on that idea, but once I figured out that our health insurance would cover nearly all of it there didn’t seem to be any good reason not to go.  It would show my commitment to fixing things with Christine, plus it might actually help.  I started seeing Bob back in February.

And wow!  Has it made a difference!  I’ve always been a worrier and anxious in general, but Bob has really shown me how to put that all behind me and relax.  I can talk more about what he has taught me and what things really work for me if anyone is really interested, but for now I think it’s enough to say that all of that stress that had been going on back at the end of 2009 never really went away, and only just now am I getting rid of it.  We’re working now on feeling more comfortable expressing myself, and writing this down is a step in that direction.

Christine and I have had a lot of very good, very hard, very emotional and very draining talks over the last few months.  We missed one of our favorite trips -- a road trip to Eastern Washington for RadCon -- to have a long talk that at varying points seemed to be going either poorly or terribly, only to have it turn out very good.  We got away last weekend, just the two of us for the whole weekend, and had a very good time.  We talked a lot, a just did a bunch of touristy stuff together -- some we enjoyed, some we didn’t -- but we did it together and have those experiences to share.

We’ve also decided that nobody hates the other and that we’re in this for the long haul.  We’re working this out together and even if things are difficult in the short run, we’re looking past that to the future.  Together.

I am so lucky to have her in my life.  I am so thankful for all that she does and all that she is.  It took a lot of strength to begin this process and I admire her determination to pull me through it -- kicking and screaming at first.  I love her deeply and I am devoted to addressing her problems and getting us to a place where they are no longer an issue.

And so I’m still working the second job and I’m still selling off the remainders of my collection.  But not to pay off a debt or to fix something that’s broken.  This time it’s for fun.  We’re putting that European cruise back on the agenda, in July of this year, and are going to have a great time.  It’s part reward and present to ourselves for putting up with the last year, but mostly just doing it for the fun of it.  We’re all very excited about it and looking forward to it -- 14 days sailing around the coast of Norway.

And I’ll blog from there too.

Today has been a really good day.

Despite a really awful day on Friday that kept us from going to RadCon like we do every year, today was much better. A nice talk with Christine in the morning that was good at recapping, but at the same time wrapping up a lot of the emotions from the day before.

Then all three of us went out to one of our favorite Chinese restaurants (we were all in the mood for Chinese since that would have been the traditional Friday night at RadCon meal).

After that we hit three thrift stores. Chris got some great looking clothes and I made a haul of boardgames:

• Tsuro
• Lionheart
• Scrabble
• Risk
• Lord of the Rings Risk
• a classic edition of Battleship
• an 80s Simon still in the box
• a 3M Twixt
•  The Order of the Stick Boardgame
•  221B Baker Street 

and Livejournal ate about an hour's worth of additional post.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

I'll try to re-write it again tomorrow.

Remember last year when the stove/oven just stopped working, and then a few days later just started back up again? Well it happened again on Saturday, in the middle of the Christmas baking. Becca and I were at Epic Game Day (having no one show to play Ellis, so instead we fell in with a Steve Jackson Demo-person and Revolutioned our way through the day), and got the phone call just as things were wrapping up.

After a hour of tinkering to no avail, we gave up and made plans to shop for a new one in the morning. Sunday, I fiddled a bit with it and got it to work, while also making another discovery -- what got it to work was not fiddling with the range, but fiddling with the circuit breaker box. So after another hour of tinkering, we figured it out and got it working, temporarily at least.

Turns out that one of the circuit breakers is dying and if you apply pressure to the switch (not left or right, but inward pressure) it works. Certainly not the way these things are supposed to operate. Thing is, we've already dealt with this breaker box and it turns out that it's so old that they don't make replacement breakers anymore. Last time we fussed with it we had to go to a recycled electrical supply outlet to get one (and, of course, they're not open of Sunday).

I'll wrap this up because I've got to run, but we did get the cookies finished!

We also made our reservations for our cruise next summer, but more on that some other time.

Tonight, about an hour ago, I finished the Ellis manuscript (my fantasy roleplaying game). Final, no more than fixing a typo here or there, done, no more editing or fixing or changing. Full stop. No more. Done.

284,500 words. Three years. Much playtesting. Uncountable hours. I’m very happy with what I have here, but also very happy that it’s complete.

And on my birthday, too. I’m 41 years old today, and writing and publishing a roleplaying game has been my dream for at least the last 25 of them.

I am very pleased, though the work is not quite done. Layout and art are the next steps, but I’m going to give myself a few days off before I tackle that monster fully. A few days to catch up on a few delayed projects around the house, spend time with my family . . . that sort of thing. Between work and Ellis I have been neglecting my friends and other social festivities. Sorry everyone!

Thanks to everyone who has been so helpful and supportive. It has really helped. We should see the fruition of all of our efforts within the next month or two. I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, we’ve got a combat playtest scheduled for Thursday night. Bring characters or I’ll have some.

Christi: I’m going to bed now, but I’ll send you a long e-mail first thing in the morning.