As promised, I unpacked all my books this morning. I amaze myself that they're all able to fit in two bookshelves. This might be because I didn't actually *bring* all of them, mind you, but we all must make sacrifices. (Or buy new bookshelves.)

I went over to Eric's this afternoon to watch Firefly with him and Jing and to play Chaos Roborally. What's Chaos Roborally, you ask? It's regular Roborally, but with the added choas element of a randomly-programmed robot (today played by Eric's stuffed penguin) as well as a flag positioned on a double-speed conveyer belt that was running around in circles. Fun times, fun times. Also tried some wonderful Haagen Dazs green tea and vanilla ice cream. My two favourite flavours, together at last. Bliss! (I can't actually find it online, otherwise I'd link to it.)

Got home to do some stuff on the computer and then it was time to try... (insert drumroll please)... the latest instalment in Julie's "adventures in cooking" series, crock pot chilli! Surprisingly, it actually came out really good. (Marc would say it's impossible to mess up chilli. How little he knows me.) This might be a recipe we'll try again at some point. For now, after eating our fill, we've still got enough for at least 5 small tupperwares (two ladle-fulls each, which is a Marc-sized serving and maybe one-and-a-half Julie-sized servings). So, success! Yay!

In other productive news, I did some brainstorming with my GM from Toronto and hopefully will have a new story percolating over the next few days, helped Marc hang some pictures (honestly, he did most of the work, but it looks really awesome), and finalized the spell list for my new D&D character. So there you go. We've all got our priorities.

Now time for shower and sleeping. G'night, all.
I have to admit, I'm really glad this week is over, all the more so because I've got a three-day weekend to look forward to. Yes, true, I'm going to be very busy this weekend as I continue to get the apartment to feel like "home" (high on the list: acquire saran wrap), but at least I'll be able to do that during the daylight hours.

I wound up writing another 4,000-odd words for the Toronto D&D game in the last 24 hours. Yes, the game is over, thanks for remembering. One of these days, Corrigan will settle down in a little house in the back of my mind, but for the moment she's still very much in the foreground. The new character I'm introducing in to the Shelazar D&D game has been raising her hand quite a bit for attention, but she's just gonna have to wait until she meets the party.

Ian cooked this week, which meant that Marc and I got leftovers today. Thanks, Ian! Much obliged! The leftovers were muchly tasty. On the topic of food, incidentally, we're now almost out of the cookies we got from Marc's mom last week. And all I can say is, thank goodness. I don't even want to think about how much weight I've gained or how much sugar my body has had to process in the last few weeks. In other food news, we've still got a whole watermelon in the fridge that Ian brought over last week as a housewarming present. I think we're gonna drop it off at Marc's mom's place tomorrow, because goodness knows I can't eat a half a watermelon on my own.

And really, that's all the excitement in my life today. Riveting, I know. Stay tuned tomorrow when I'll hopefully be speaking on the ever-fascinating topic of Dollar Store runs, laundry, and the purchasing of filing cabinets.
For those who have been following along, "I kill it and takes its treasure" was the name I gave to a D&D game I started playing in Toronto back when I was doing my M.A., early in 2006. The game has been running more-or-less continuously since then, and even I've been playing along over MSN Messenger, doing side-plots with the GM. Saturday marked the very last session of the main game, though there may yet be a few epilogue one-shots or a spin-off game. But to all intents and purposes, the game is now over.

It's been a wild ride, kiddos. I've written many stories about this game, to the tune of 52,000 words, about 23,000 of them in the last month and a half, and that's not counting the session write-ups, which probably account for another 36,000 words. Speaking of session write-ups, here's the one for the final session (warning: about 3,000 words).

I kill it and take its treasure: the final session )
1. Marc is home safe. We're both horribly sleep-deprived and cranky this morning, but the important thing is that he's home safe. One of these days, I will learn to sleep in a bed with another person. This will probably happen right after I buy us a king-size bed for the new apartment.

2. An interesting gamer/non-gamer dichotomy. There's a D&D game in Toronto that I was part of when I was doing my masters. It's still running, three years later. Since leaving, I've been playing over MSN and email, doing side-quests and occasionally making guest appearances. One of the other key players recently left for Texas. The game is now winding down. At the end of September, the player from Texas will be back in town, and all the players will get together for one of the last, if not the last game of the campaign. Of course I desperately want to be there, so I bought train tickets for a 24-hour trip to Toronto the weekend of the game.

I was explaining all this to Marc's dad last night. He looked at me and said, "Let me get this straight: you just spent $155 to play a game."

Yeah. I guess I did. Gamer friends understand. Non-gamer friends probably don't. And so the dichotomy is maintained.
A fun day today. Started off by window-shopping at Fabricville with Mom, who (like I said yesterday) has agreed to make some garb for me. The downside of all this is that fabric is much more expensive than I remember it being, and the patterns I've seen so far use almost twice what I'm used to. (All my tunics so far use a variant of the St. Louis shirt, which wastes no fabric except the inside of the neck hole.) I really have no desire to pay $50 for a single tunic (ie: 5 yards of linen at $10 a yard). I might need to rethink this plan. On the upside, I'm apparently on John McGuire's "to make garb for" list, which makes me very happy indeed.

Thence off to Eric's to watch some B5 (midway through season 4, now) and conquer some pixels. Well, specifically he and Jing conquered pixels, I just took over a conveniently uninhabited continent. I'm so very addicted to Civ. Ian joined us later in the evening and we talked about everything from religion to comic books. Then Jing very kindly drove me home, and we didn't even get lost. Yay!

Upon returning home, my muse was struck by an offhand request from my GM from Toronto, to write a story about what my character's been doing after the session I was at two weeks ago. Understand that even though I'm no longer in Toronto, I've been staying current with the game and roleplaying via MSN with my GM. So tonight I wrote up a 1,300 word story about the further adventures of Corrigan, the second I've written this week. I like it when my muse is happy with me.

Tomorrow I've got brunch at Warren's followed by dinner with my Edmontonian aunt (and other family). And I'm sure other stuff will fill up the rest of the day. It always done. Now, though, it's time for bed. G'night!
So yesterday I was running off of 4 hours of sleep. I went to the SendOutCards conference, which was a lot of fun. I "adopted" myself into Team Francine, a woman and some of the people she had recruited into her business. Nice people. I've got 20 pages of notes from the conference. No, I won't post them all. But I enjoyed myself. Very positive energy in the room of 400-odd people.

After only a brief stop at Ian's brother's, I went down to the D&D game. They had started playing at 3 pm. I arrived at 6 pm. I didn't actually get any in-character interaction until about 11 pm, when I got about 10 minutes of playing the being that was inhabiting my character's body. Then commenced the huge Major Final Battle, which took about three and a half hours to play out about a minute of game time. At the end of it, my character was released from her three-year imprisonment. Strangely, this is one of those times when game-time and real-time match up, since it was the end of a storyline that started in June 2006. So I pretty much roleplayed from 2:30 am to about 3:15 am. I would have gone longer but, y'know, it was past 3 am and I was running off of 4 hours of sleep.

Got out to my car to realize I'd gotten the first parking ticket of my 11-year driving career. In my sleep dep, I hadn't seen that I was parked in front of a hydrant. Doubly frustrating because there had been plenty of space to park further back; I just hadn't noticed the hydrant. Ah, well. I have the money to pay for it, and I suppose I was due. It was an otherwise quite enjoyable day.

And, yes, this is the short version. Today I drive back to Montreal, hopefully in the daylight and not-rain. Yay!
1. It turns out that the D&D game I was playing when I was doing my M.A. in Toronto two years ago is apparently still running. Marc and I made a cameo appearance last December, and I'd had updates until last February. But it looks like I'm just 7 months out of the loop, because it's still (apparently) going strong. Now I just need to conspire to get them all to move to Montreal...

2. I've decided it might be time to buy some more teas. Using my notes from a tea-tasting last year, I'll check which of my favourites are currently stocked by Camellia Sinensis and how much they cost. Actually, it might not be a bad plan just to write down everything, because then I can have a cheat-sheet when I go out for tea.

Okay, not the most stunning morning realizations, but they bring me joy. So does the cooler weather. Yay, temperatures less than 30 degrees!
Okay, so I've been a bit behind in the updates. I blame this on, first, being extraordinarily tired, and second, on actually having lots of people to spend time with and thus little time for the computer. (Though still enough that Marc can make jokes about the internet being my crack.)

So, backtracking a little, here's a recap:

Toronto Day 3 (Saturday): Shoes, Tea, and Good Food )

Toronto Day 4 (Sunday): 'Montreal' Breakfast, I Kill It and Take Its Treasure )

Toronto Day 5 (Monday): New Acquisitions, The Drive Home )

And that, dear readers, was my time in Toronto. I'm glad I got a chance to do so much, though I could have done without the obnoxiousness of the drive back. But now I'm home, with practically nothing on my schedule other than Tuesday afternoon sessions at Dawson, a dentist appointment, and a bunch of holiday parties. That's it for now!
Yesterday morning was spent lazily. I actually got enough sleep, which was a nice change for this weekend.

At some point in the morning, Ian and I determined that he should go home by train in the afternoon, because nothing was keeping him in Toronto. So, a quick breakfast with Andrew, Kim, and Ian later, and Andrew drove Ian to the train station, and I drove to downtown Toronto to meet up with my D&D group. What I thought was supposed to be a 20-minute drive turned out to be 45 minutes. I was unimpressed.

Anyway. Gaming started around 3 pm and went until about 2:30 am. It was a fun game, including the death of all the major antagonists and my character being captured by a Daemon. It was fun, probably the highlight of my weekend. But, in the end, I only got to bed at 3:30 am, and was awakened by Andrew four hours later.

Now I'm looking at the traffic report. Just east of Toronto, on the Eastbound 401, there has been an accident and the entire highway is closed, both express and collector lanes. That's about 8 lanes of traffic not moving at all. I have no idea how far it's backed up. That means, therefore, that there's no way I'm getting out of Toronto until that's cleared up. Le sigh. At least I'll get some lesson planning done, I suppose. But this is truly frustrating.

Okay. Time to get ready. TTFN.

Edited, 8:30 am: And now I'm watching stand-up comics on TV. Yay.
Yet another gaming-related post. This one is an in-character letter from Corrigan (my bard) to Ivellios ([livejournal.com profile] rfmcdpei's sorceror). It probably won't make sense to anyone not in the game, so feel free to skip if you like. It has been emailed to the appropriate parties, but I thought that the other players in the game might be interested as well.

In-game letter from Corrigan to Ivellios )
Okay, so I believe I mentioned that there would be songs coming out of last night's sesison, and indeed there are. Two of them, to be precise. In consequence of the long hours of song-writing, I have *not* written a general, prose summary of the session. I may one day, but then again, I may not. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I give you the two write-ups, in verse format:

The Ballad of the Battle Beneath the Earth -- a longish (300-line) poem chronicling the final battle between Glothram Athelstar, paladin of Tyr, and Ideld the Deathless. )

Scourge of the Company -- a much shorter (3 verses + chorus) and lighthearted piece, designed to discredit and blacklist a certain pirate captain who slighted Corrigan. )

So that's it for now. Please let me know what you think if you read through them. I spent a lot of time on these and would like to know that someone's actually reading them.
What an absolutely fantastic session! It started off a bit slow, admittedly, but ended in one of the best combat sequences I've ever witnessed. Our Noble Paladin of Tyr (tm), unarmed and unarmoured, took on the main antagonist of the game, a half-titan warlock 4 levels above him. Through a combination of the favour of his god, sheer bloody-mindedness of purpose, and a liberal dose of luck, he took her down single-handedly. I suspect I'll need to write another song. ("And then the light shone down and felled / the once-thought deathless Queen Ideld.")

What an utterly fantastic session.

OTOH, it is somehow 4:40 am. Some sacrifices are worth it, though. Damned good session. (And now, sleep, as my thoughts fade off into incoherance.)
Yesterday night was my final session in Andrew's D&D game. It went very late (as I believe I mentioned), but it was very intense. I'd love to have written this in more elegant prose, but it was all I could do to just get it written. Be warned: 6700 words!

Part 1: Glothram and Seb )

Part 2: Ivellios and Corrigan )

Part 3: The party reunited )

Right. So that's probably going to be my last write-up for a while. I'll be keeping in touch with the game via email, from afar as Corrigan is now afar, but I doubt I'll post much more here. So... that's it for now. Thanks for reading.
Ye gads, last night's session was fantastic. It's been running through my head all day. I'm not sure I can properly capture the tension in a summary like this, but I assure you emotions were running high for a good 3-4 hours. So here you go. 5000 words, yet again. Feel free not to read if you haven't been following until now -- it probably won't make sense if you don't know the back-story.

In which yet more Bad Things happen to Our Heros )

And now for a fast lunch, and then off to write the PhD Latin exam. TTFN!
The bad news: The Red Tea Box, a place I've been trying to get to all semester, is closed on Tuesdays. I'd been planning on spending a relaxing afternoon there drinking tea, only to find it closed. What kind a business closes on Tuesdays?!? Instead, I had tea at Second Cup and read until page 215 of Game of Thrones. It's lovely, by the way. I truly missed fantasy / sci-fi reading.

The good news: D&D tonight was absolutley awesome. It started slow, but from 9 pm onwards it was wonderfully intense. Write-up will come tomorrow, probably. We left on a massive cliff-hanger, so we're playing again on Saturday to finally determine what happens to my character. (And everyone else, for that matter.)

I will be writing the PhD Latin exam in less than 12 hours. I have no hopes of passing, but nothing to lose, either. Good luck to everyone taking it! May the power of George be with you! (Vis Georgi cum vobis sit!)

And now, to bed. G'night all.
Right. I don't even know what number I'm up to, but here is the latest D&D update. It's very long (about 5000 words), so feel free to skip if you're not interested.

In which Our Heros learn some disturbing things )

Right. That's it for this week. We're playing again tonight, so stay tuned for another exciting adventure.
Right. So after about an hour in the library doing some basic fact-checking, I went over to Andrew's for some more D&D goodness. I won't do the write-up tonight, because it's late, but I will reveal something I've been saving for about a week and a half. You see, being the party bard, I am exposed to most of the exposition, and most of it comes in the way of songs that my character remembers. Obviously, the GM doesn't write these out in verse form, but merely gives the exposition. But I, being my normal obsessive self, could not let this state of affairs stand! I wound up writing a 13-verse song, "The Lay of Ideld." (Ideld being the main antagonist in the game.) Yes, my name is Julie, and I'm a geek.

So, for those who are interested, the song is behind the lj-cut.

The Lay of Ideld )
Right. This is another long write-up, about 3100 words. It will probably only be interesting to people playing the game or who have been following the sessions so far. Everyone else may feel free to skip. This has not yet been proofread, because it's 1 am and I've just spent two hours writing.

Behind the cut, bad things happen to Our Heros and their families )

Now it's late and I'm going to bed. G'night all.
D&D this evening was great, despite only being two players. We worked through most of the back-story to the present game, and then Seb and Corrigan went off to find Myrthas' tower quite the worse for wear. I am far too tired to write a plot summary now, though I hopefully will get a chance to do one tomorrow.

Also, as I turned onto Chestnut coming home about ten minutes ago, I found at least a dozen police cars and ambulances along the street and neighbouring streets. It turns out there was a fire (not just a fire alarm, but a fire) in the building next to mine. It seems it wasn't too bad, and things appeared to be dying down as I got there, but it was exciting and stuff... in a "glad it's not me" kind of way.

Now, sleep. Tomorrow I will get secondary research done, damnit! G'night all.
I had a very odd experience tonight: I had no schoolwork to do. Well, of course that's not entirely true, there's always more schoolwork to do. But I'd accomplished everything I set for myself today (to whit: outlined paper #2 and wrote 8 pages, did Friday's Latin exercise, and read some of the readings for next Thursday), and didn't have any real desire to do more. It was very odd, I assure you. But this is the reward I get for doing my work early in the day.

Of course, I needed to fill my time this evening. So I watched an episode of B5 and generally relaxed. And then, as I was in the shower, my muse demanded attention. (She does that, sometimes.) For several days now, I'd been mulling over the "Lay of Ideld," a song that features prominently into our D&D game as the source of our information about the main antagonist. Obviously, the GM didn't write out the song as a song, he just told us what it says and left it at that. Very reasonable of him. However, I am anything but reasonable, and I'll be damned if I'm going to start being reasonable now. As a measure of my bardic ninja skillz, I'd been meaning to write out the song for a while, but the proper tune never came to me. Tonight it came like a flash of lightening. (To quote the movie Hook, "that must hurt.") In the end, I wrote 13 verses. It is now done, and I am quite pleased with the result, if I do say so myself. I'll see the other players' (and GM's) reaction at the next session.

Until then, I think it's time for one more episode of B5, and then bedtime. G'night all.

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