Archive for July, 2008

Good news, bad news

July 31, 2008 - 4:07 pm 2 Comments

The good news is that the doctor doesn’t think I have kidney stones.

The bad news is that he thinks I have diverticulitis.

Barium milkshake at 6 tomorrow morning. Yum.

Zombie Haiku

July 31, 2008 - 9:06 am Comments Off on Zombie Haiku

Conversations you don’t have in Austin

July 29, 2008 - 9:51 pm 3 Comments

Hub and I went to San Antonio this weekend to see The Dark Knight in Imax. It was my third time seeing it. Hell, I may go see it again. Because it’s just that good.

Anyway, the theater dude announced to the sold out theater to fill in all the seats, yadda yadda. He said that all cell phones needed to be turned off completely – not on vibrate or ringer off – and if they saw the light of a cell phone in the theater, they’d boot ya.

Guy behind us: Did he just say no cell phones on vibrate?
Hub: Yeah, if they see your phone out, they’ll kick you out.
Guy behind us: What is he, some kind of COMMIE FASCIST??
Guy’s friend: I bet he’s an Obama supporter!!

You just don’t have conversations like that in Travis County.

Garden

July 14, 2008 - 6:00 pm Comments Off on Garden

Garden before dogs
Garden before dogs.
Garden after dogs
Garden after dogs.

RIP tomatoes, serranos, chili petins, and half the Malabar spinach.

RIP dogs.

Coffeehouse Boggle

July 8, 2008 - 12:35 pm 1 Comment

The power went off at the house a little before 8 this morning. I had to do some work, so I headed to Trianon coffee house for the wifi. They block port 25, which means I couldn’t send mail. And the coffee was really awfully bad.

So I went to Panera Bread. Their coffee was better, but damn-near ice cold. But they have some Nazi net-nanny program that doesn’t let you visit sites like AR15.com (“Forbidden Weapons”) or TinyURL (“Forbidden Other”).

This country is going to stupid itself to death one day.

I love gooooooooooooooold!

July 7, 2008 - 8:08 pm Comments Off on I love gooooooooooooooold!

Here’s the rest of my Fredericksburg cache swag for Violette’s Dream.

It’s real, and it’s spectacular. 😉

There’s gold in that thar ARG!

July 5, 2008 - 7:29 pm 1 Comment

This is about a game called Violette’s Dream. The ARG is to promote the release of a first person shooter called Velvet Assassin, due out soon.

The upshot is that I went to get a cache hidden in Fredericksburg, Texas, found a phone number in it, called it up, and had an out-of-game conversation with the person at the other end who works for the game publisher. He’s going to meet me on Monday to supplement my cache goodies with actual gold. I’m not sure yet what kind or quantity (he wanted to keep it a surprise), but it’s certainly not your ordinary game swag.

There were some hiccups along the way; the cache had been in Fredericksburg for 3 weeks or more waiting to be retrieved, but there were no takers. I hate to see a game stall like that, and it’s a pretty drive out there, so I decided to try to talk the family into going out there to pick it up. When I told my husband that it was supposed to be the second part of a cache one of the characters discovered in France (full of money), he readily agreed. Our first trip out there I thought I just needed to pick up a book from a bookstore and follow instructions hidden in it to another location. Instead, I had to do some role-playing and have more of a grasp on the game than I did; I had to claim I was one of the characters and pick up a second book.

To our frustration, neither book had any markings, so we came back home to regroup. When I thought of looking at them with a black light. Doing this revealed writing in both books, and although I then had the address of the storage place that was the next stop, I had no idea what unit number or combination for the lock.

A cry for help both in-game (a PM to one of the game characters) and out (a post to Unfiction wishing that a shadowy character would contact me with advice) got me more than enough help. The PMs contacted me while remaining in character to help me with the unit number and combination lock code.

We got the cache this morning with no hitches and it was an ammo can (which hubby promptly claimed as his own) with some foreign currency in it, a replica bar of Nazi gold, a letter of instruction to the operative who the cache was originally placed for, and a card with a note to call a phone number – “out of game.” It turned out to be the person I mentioned earlier, and he was very excited that someone had gotten the cache. Sounds like it’s the first of many.

I imagine they won’t have as many problems getting someone out to retrieve the subsequent caches if they’re giving away gold!

I’ve got a little photo gallery of goods online if you’re interested. I’ll post an update once I have my Monday meeting.