Spain!!!

Glorious sunshine and vacation time! First few days have gone by very swiftly with us doing very little indeed, apart from frequent visits to the pool, and one day when we made it out of the apartment as far as the bar where wifey's mother works. It's nice to get some time to just be lazy - very long lie-ins in the morning, lots of reading, a little mudding...blissful.

Tomorrow I think the plan is to go shopping at La Cala market and maybe even venture as far as the next town Fuengirola (shock!). Next Monday is our 2nd wedding anniversary, the cotton anniversary, and we still need to buy each other suitable cotton gifts...

More soon. Maybe.

Off to Spain today!

Two weeks of much-needed vacation time.

May not be online much, depending on weather and in-laws' computer and excursions and doing other fun things with wifey.

See you all online in October, if not sooner.

Life and weirdness...

Morthaur II finally got his 1000 kills token the other night, yay. That's an important achievement for a one-life single-classed mage (anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about, why are you even reading this?), and further than Morthaur I ever got.

Maraport Bay is in, and I'm working on the next three areas. No more here about those, so as not to spoil things for others/give you guys an advantage/get myself into trouble, but hopefully you'll all enjoy them when they're in.

Meanwhile out in that weird place called offline...

Work continues to be silly. Just finished a major project reindexing all of the department's policy and procedure documents, identifying those that duplicate each other or duplicate documents available outside the department on the organisation's intranet, and tagging those for deletion. Took the best part of nine days, where my mad manager expected it to be done in three. Checked over 700 documents, recommending they be trimmed down to 94. Really wish people wouldn't save the same document repeatedly in the same folder.

Went out for drinks last night with people from my old job. Nice to see there are still a few people there who remember me, and catch up on the gossip. Clearly karma comes to some people who deserve it - the muppet who was my manager is apparently now a homeless single mother, and they've finally noticed 18 months after her departure how much she cost the organisation by tying them to bad contracts, etc. All stuff that I could have told them 2-3 years ago, if the people with authority to do anything had only listened. Oh well.

Family coming over tomorrow - including cousins from Germany. Must get the place a bit tidy first. They're bringing over a wood-carved dragon for me which we bought in Germany last month but couldn't transport by plane (they're coming by car). One more to add to my growing dragon collection (yes I collect dragons. What do you mean, you don't? I collect elephants too.)

Wifey and I going out for a meal next week with another old friend from the old job, who had the sense to get out well before I did and is now in a senior management position at another organisation in the same field. She seems to be enjoying it so far, apart from working 70-hour weeks which I keep telling her is not good for her.

Only a week to go before our main holiday of the year! Off to Spain next Sunday to stay with wifey's parents for two weeks. Their computer still has some issues (apart from being lonely since it doesn't have a mate, unlike my and wifey's computers which can have fun together when their owners aren't around!) so we won't be online much if at all. Possibly good for us. Looking forward to the pool, the beach, etc.

That's all for now...
M

Friday Fives...on Saturday again, silly time differences

1. What is your favorite genre of fiction?
Fantasy, in various forms - high fantasy, dark fantasy, science fantasy,
horror-fantasy, historical/quasi-historical fantasy.
SF, time travel and alternate history in second place.
Though I also read techno-thrillers, political/historical thrillers,
the occasional legal thriller (Grisham etc), some comedy, and probably
more "chick-lit" than the wifey!
Not usually keen on crime writers like wifey is, except for the ones that
cross over in a serious way with politics/technology (Baldacci, Dubois) or
with comedy (Evanovitch).

2. Would you rather read hardcovers, paperbacks, listen to audio books, or read ebooks? Why?
I like the physicality of an actual book in my hands. Always have. Plus,
I do the vast majority of my reading these days in transit to somewhere
(buses, trains, planes) for which ebooks and audiobooks are less practical.
Mostly read paperbacks, though I do buy the occasional hardback if I really
can't wait for it to come out in paperback and can find it at reduced
price, or have vouchers etc to spend. Full-price hardbacks are just too
damned expensive over here now. Waiting for books to come out in
paperback is usually bearable because I tend to buy in bulk (wifey says
I buy too many books!) so I usually have a stack of books waiting to be read.

3. List three of your favorite books.
You're kidding. I have over fifteen hundred in the flat, and have probably
read thousands more.

Three favourite authors is tricky enough, but here goes:
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison
R A Salvatore
Mercedes Lackey

Close runners-up include:
Raymond Feist
Janny Wurts
John Ringo
David Weber
Harry Turtledove
Tom Clancy
Dale Brown
Dan Brown
Ed Greenwood
Margaret Weis
Tracy Hickman
Tad Williams
Steve White
Terry Brooks
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Diana Gabaldon
David Eddings
David Gemmell
Bernard Cornwell
Wilbur Smith
and those are just the ones that come easily to mind without
getting up and looking at my bookshelves.

People might expect an "obvious" one to be in the list above -
J R R Tolkien - but he isn't. While I consider him a first-rate
world builder and plot builder who influenced a whole
school of fantasy authors and would-be fantasy authors - myself
included in the would-be category - I'm not so impressed by his
actual prose. Sacrilegious, I know. So smack me.

4. Has a book ever influenced your life in any significant manner?
Books influence me all the time, in terms of my own writings and
story development (books and RP campaigns alike). Could also say
that my love of fantasy books led me to RPing in the first place,
which led me to mudding, which led me to Mozart, which is how I met
the two most important people in my life - wifey and Ange. So in a
roundabout way, books are why I'm a) still alive at all today, and
b) blissfully happily married.

5. What author has the most emotional impact on you? Add a little random bit of info (if you want) on the author's life that you feel applies or makes them more interesting to you.
Often the author I'm currently reading! If I can't engage emotionally
at all with a book, I'm perfectly capable of not finishing it.
That said, there are some particular books - as opposed to authors - that
elicited particularly strong emotional responses from me.
PS, I Love You (Cecilia Ahern)
Blackmantle (Patricia Kennealy-Morrison)
are both books that deal with love, death and loss in particular ways.

The first deals with a woman trying to come to terms with her beloved's
death (expected, after an illness) and finding a succession of notes he
left for her, and "events" he arranged for her, over the year after his
death. I read that one last year, when my favourite cousin was going
through a major health problem which at one point could have been
terminal, and I was in tears almost throughout the book.

The other deals with a sorceress whose husband is murdered by his
ex-lover, the revenge she takes, and her quest into the underworld to
restore him to life. It's worth noting that the author was heavily
involved with Jim Morrison, and the main characters do to some extent
parallel their real-world counterparts, dressed up in a science-fantasy
setting and with magical powers, and then crossed with an adaptation of
Odysseus' journey into Hades. When I read this one, my first girlfriend
had just died (of leukaemia) and I would have given anything to be able
to bring her back, like the heroine of this book brings her love back.
I've re-read this one several times over the years since, and I always
have a powerful reaction to it.

A little pic to show how some of us are feeling right now?

M

FRIDAY FIVES (on Saturday again, got to love time differences...)

1. What are your favorite outdoor activities?
Walking, swimming, sightseeing in new places, all of which I need to do more of!

2. Have you ever played on a sports team, been in a club, or done any other outdoor activities with a structured group?
Fenced for four years at uni, but that's an indoor sport, not an outdoor. Played rugby very briefly at school, until all the opposition got bigger and scarier than me.

3. What's your favorite summer past time?
RPing, MUDding, computer games...oh. Guess my favourite pastimes are the same all year round!

4. Is there any special event you like to attend during the summer, like the local fair, concerts, camping trips, etc?
Wifey and I went to see Bon Jovi live in an open air venue in June, does that count? Got sunburned and all.

5. What is the best way to eat ice cream, with who and when? What is your favorite flavor?
Cinnamon, off my wifey's naked body.
Or if you want a PG-rated answer, Belgian chocolate, at the cinema, with wifey and/or good friends in front of a good movie.