eddyfate

* Signed up for iSweat. It's reskinned Twitter (and even syncs with Twitter), but it's also an easy way for me to be more honest about my workout schedule, such as it is. The idea is to "break one sweat every day," but I'm not there yet. Now that we have a smith machine as well as the elliptical machine in the condo, I can eventually build up to alternating between weight training and cardio.

* Quick Media Whore bit: Avoid Fringe. People who liked Lost may like it (I didn't like Lost either), but it comes across as a slow-moving, refried X-Files. I mean, props to J.J. for juggling a ton of creative projects, but this looks like it could have used more work, or at least a better set-up. Usually I try to give new shows four episodes, but nothing about this show clicks for me.

* In the process of reading Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. In some respects, it's kind of a counter-argument to the relationship between RPGs and games posited in Rules of Play, so I'm intrigued by the philosophical tension (although SP seems to be aligning with my interpretation of RoP's view on RPGs anyhow). I may have to see if I can dig up First Person as well at some point, but I'm still only about a third of the way through SP.

* Slowly making some changes here at work, between physical office move and subtle changes to my workflow. Trying to move administrative stuff to Mondays and being more selective about how I spend my time at work, but I'm still spending about 40-60 hours a week working. One of the downsides of being in a part of the company that touches on a little bit of everything is that it's harder to juggle when "everything" keeps getting slowly bigger.

* Wedding this Saturday, and more Victorian Mage this Sunday. Hopefully things will get rolling now that we've seen the so-called "ghost."

It's amazing what running in place for over half an hour can do for your mood.

After my frustrating day yesterday, I got on our elliptical machine for my regular 35-to-45 minute cardio workout. I've been having problems getting back to my pre-surgery workout goals (which was way back in November of 2006), but recently I had managed to get very close to my original goal of 45 minutes three to four days a week. I had been so focused on rebuilding the habit and keeping a good pace up to then, but this was the first time I was so distracted that I just got on the machine and worked. I was only able to do 35 minutes before my legs started cramping, but I was also pushing a lot harder than I usually do, and afterward I felt much less stressed and very, very sore.

It's kind of dumb to rediscover such an obvious source of stress relief, but there are days when such a little thing is such a relief.

Yes, I do do things aside from my writing.

Work on Friday sucked, as the Palm software I had to help teach at student orientation crashed 50-75% of the student's PDAs. But it as better, as that night was supposed to be "get together and work on various LARP games" with garchangel and mrogre that ended up being "let's cook food and play poker and hang out" and included me, greebotrill and banzaigrrl as well. I got to see banzaigrrl's new toy (shiny Apple laptop), talk about all sorts of amusing things, and get vaguely tipsy and lose lots of fictional money to mrogre.

Saturday was the impromptu family celebration of greebotrill's birthday (which is today in actuality), which involved sushi and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Both the movie and the sushi were better than expected.

Sunday was the impromptu (sensing a trend?) "Father's Day" celebration. It seems that, somewhat as a joke, garchangel got greebotrill a present on Mother's Day from Puck, our pug dog. So, greebotrill returned the favor. garchangel got these neat battling Megatron and Optimus Prime action figure guys, and I got a copy of Transformers Risk that I desperately want to play.

Over the weekend I found that I gained about ten pounds in the past week or so, and I had been steadily slacking off on my diet and exercise (for a lot of reasons that don't excuse that it happened). I resolved to start dedicating myself back to my weight loss today.

Today work was a lot of catching up on the work I couldn't do on Thursday or Friday from said Palm software crashing, which involved calling a lot of restaurants and trying to schedule a ton of meetings. Wednesday I plan to have dinner with friends, and Thursday I'm going to get my hair cut. It's not been an insanely busy week or so, or maybe I'm just acclimating to the pace better.

After my illness, I got back on the workout wagon. I had been doing a pretty consistent 20 minutes a day on the elliptical machine for around four days a week. Last week, before I got sick, I added in twenty push-ups and twenty crunches after my cardio. Today, I reversed it, doing the crunches and push-ups before my cardio. That helped to get my heart rate up for the cardio (which means more time burning fat instead of warming up). It's still hard to get past twenty minutes, and I'm sure I'm going to be sore as hell, but the goal isn't to reach some arbitrary number of minutes of exercise, it's to slowly and carefully increase my activity and improve my health overall. In that respect, I'm vastly improved from my "10 minutes, twice a week" routine I started out with after my recovery. I'm also more regularly floating around 195 instead of 200 pounds, and my clothes are fitting a little better. I still have a long way to go, but there's improvement, and I'm glad for that.

I weighed myself this morning, and the scales told me what my clothing had been telling me for a couple of weeks now: I'm back up to 200 pounds. Even after two surgeries, I was able to stay around 190, but the two courses of steroids slapped another 10 pounds on me. Worse, our personal trainer had to raise his rates. I don't blame him, the man needs to earn enough to support his family, and we had been getting a discounted rate for nearly two years, but we can't afford him anymore. So that means that I'm pretty much back to square one.

Well, not quite. I do have the experience of my previous fitness routines to guide me this time. I have been trying to do cardio at least four times a week, but it always seems like something comes up -- I get dizzy, my foot cramps up, something. However, I'm going to keep trying, even if it's only five minutes at a time. Once the habit is established, I can slowly increase my routine until I'm back to 45 minutes a day. Then I can worry about what I'm going to do with weight training.

My other big hurdle is dieting, and it's two-fold. First, I work in an environment that rewards with food. You did a good job? You go out to lunch. A catered lunch has food left over? You share it with your co-workers. Had a stressful week? One of the managers brings cookies. When I was working in an office that was detached from the rest of my department, I could avoid most of this, but now that we've moved into one office suite, it's harder and harder to do.

The other hurdle is that our trainer was also our dietician. He would usually come up with a meal plan that would have the same breakfast, lunch, and two snacks, and allow some freedom for dinner. After a few weeks, when that diet got stale, he would change it. However, I've been on the same diet (more or less) since November. I've been able to change it up some myself with what I've learned, but I don't know enough to completely rewrite my diet. I've looked into some websites and I'm getting a rough idea of what calorie, fat and protein targets I should be hitting, but it's going to be a fair amount of hit or miss while I learn what I can and can't eat. Plus, I suspect greebotrill and garchangel are going to be in the same boat, so there will have to be some coordination on grocery shopping and cooking so we're not buying tons and tons of stuff that barely gets eaten.

But I've reached the point again where I can't stand it. I hate feeling this way. I think it might even be worse, since I know I was there before, and I liked how I felt then. I hate feeling out of shape -- not just because of the weight, but because I'm tired of being constantly ill, and my physical health has to have a large part in combating that.

* Started working out again (now that my body is finally letting me). I counted all the lifting, walking and stair-climbing on Monday as a cardio workout, and I did 15 minutes on Tuesday. I skipped Wednesday to break it up, and got up to 15 minutes yesterday before my ear started to hurt, so I stopped. My hope is to get up to at least 30 minutes by the end of the month, if not back to my original time of 40-45 minutes.

* Saw the dentist. Nothing's going wrong there. The hygienist gave me some suggestions to help with my tender gums, which I'll start implementing.

* Finished draft two of MET: Awakening last night. It clocked in at just under 202,000 words, which is 17,000 over. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to sit down with my personal editor to deal with problems and improvements I'm just not seeing, and maybe tweak a few things to get a couple thousand more words lopped off. Or just delete all uses of the word "the."

* Somewhere in the next week or so, I have to start two new projects: hammering out details for the Origins one-shot LARP, and 20,000 words on another project I'm currently calling Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I also really need to finish reading a manuscript that's been sitting on my desk for weeks now.

* monkeegoth called to let me know that his second son, Grayson, was born and that they were home and okay. It was good to hear that everything was fine, and I'm looking forward to another opportunity to spend time at Casa del Connelly.

* Played Awakening on IRC last night, and we discovered that three WW freelancers in the same game gives you egg rolls, or possibly spare ribs. I'm still not finding my stride with Chance, but I think that's because I've played him entirely online, which is a medium I'm not totally familiar with (I usually use online gaming to supplement other games). Had to bail out halfway through to pick up dinner, and then got distracted by an OOC conversation about mechanics before I went to bed. There were some disagreements, but I got to flesh out some of my ideas on core resolution and the interaction between rules and story in MET. I may toss it into my notes for a theoretical MET 2.0 (i.e., "shit I considered shoehorning into MET: Awakening").

* I've also been starting to do email scenes with my Requiem PC, since I haven't seriously been playing him since December, and I don't think I've played him in LARP since November. The Gangrel Drama flows, and it is good.

* I haven't played World of Warcraft for a couple of weeks now. I logged in a couple nights ago, started a quest, died, and logged off. My attention will come back around to it, I'm sure, but right now I'm just not into it.

* We got plans for Wrestlemania 23 sorted out, making it as cheap as possible while still getting greebotrill back for classes on Monday. I, however, am taking that Monday off. We've decided that it'll be an early anniversary gift to each other, because we're huge dorks. greebotrill is also debating going to a dig Mexico for a couple of weeks for school (needed for her human anthropology degree). I'm very proud at how far she's come in her schooling!

Christmas was real low-key for us. I ultimately decided not to work on MET Awakening on Christmas Day, spending time instead reading two of my gifts (300 by Frank Miller and Batman: Hush by Jim Lee) and watching some of a third (Born to Controversy: The Roddy Piper Story 3 DVD set). I also helped greebotrill bake a little bit, played a bit of World of Warcraft, talked to some people on the phone, watched a couple of videos with my new noise-cancelling headphones, and ended up taking a nap on the couch at one point because I was a little dizzy and tired from all the excitement. There's some vague discussion of organizing time to give our friends their gifts, and I still don't know what we're doing for New Year's (although we've got some ideas).

Today I'm back at work, and as usual there is nobody in sight. I am getting a lot of little work projects done before I start tackling bigger ones, which is nice. I'm also hoping that the relaxed pace and my restful four-day weekend will help me get back on a normal schedule this week. If so, maybe in the next week or so I can try to start working on my cardio again.

I've been having a pretty crappy day thus far. Nothing particularly bad, but a pretty constant buzz of annoyance from a variety of avenues all day. It has been capped off by the realization that I haven't heard any word about my replacement notebook dock from Dell, and after 15 minutes of digging around on the website and forcing it to speak to me, I discover that my service call order has been cancelled for some unknown reason. So, now I have to email Dell back and ask them WTFd00d?! And tonight looks to be a long night of Mage work, so the odds of my mood improving are not good. Maybe my cardio workout today will help me to blow off some steam.

As a side note, only in my house would three people, working with a personal trainer, end up having a conversation that covers everything from nutrition to 80s music to sports to game and number theory. These kinds of conversations occur on a fairly regular basis, too.

I worked out yesterday. After that I posted my wordcount, did a first draft of my playtest guide, then went out to eat. My back and groin were hurting, but I assumed that was just from the workout. As the day wore on, however, I realized that it was getting worse, so I went back home to find that sitting for long periods of time was uncomfortable. I took the laptop downstairs and finished the guide, but sitting and writing was uncomfortable no matter how I did it, so I ended up spending most of the day watching television (ECW, Colbert Report, House, and Godfather, Part II). Today I'm only slightly better. It's not "oh my god I should go to a hospital" bad, but it does make me want to avoid sitting for long periods of time today to let my back get better before I have to sit for long periods of time tomorrow at work.

So I've been working out for about ten weeks now. Progress? My weight dropped from 200 to 194. Normally I would be distressed about that, but other factors have changed my mind.

For one, my strength has increased. Not only are there budding signs of bicep and calf muscles (which in itself is a novelty), but when I started I couldn't even match the weight greebotrill was getting. A few weeks after I started, I was moved up to her weight (and for context, she's been working out for over four years now, and her weight was actually reduced because she bulks muscle so easily). Yesterday, I actually was moved up past her weight for one exercise, and I managed to complete it.

And today, in the dark I accidentally grabbed my one pair of really tight jeans. Normally I can either not get into them, or they're painfully tight, but I'm wearing them to work now and they're actually comfortable, which hasn't happened in many, many years. I still have some fat that I'd like to get rid of, but there's certainly been some visible loss in that area as well.

So yes, progress. It's been slow, but it is happening, and that's helping me to keep going.

Last night went very different from what I expected (although greebotrill was fantastic and worked hard to make it all work out). My workout was cut short because my body really wasn't responding well to it -- not because of the legs (which are really aching today), but because I simply couldn't get my body to respond the way it normally does. I think my illness is taking a different turn, or maybe just isn't quite gone yet, although my ears are in less pain less often. I also was completely unable to actually write last night, and was putting a desk together until 12:30am, but now greebotrill actually has some space to do her job in, so that's awesome. Now I'm just dealing with insanely last minute problems at work. Whee.

So, between last night and today there were some minor annoyances and frustrations, but I got some kudos from the people involved with Sekrit Project A that made me feel really good. So I'm sore and exhausted, but emotionally kind of okay.

After writing:

* Workout (on the new smith machine). My legs were wobbly for a bit, but are doing well today.

* Chinese. Our kitchen is being remodeled, and while we had the idea of cooking in the dining room, due to the way the power is wired in that room plugging two appliances in at the same time blows the circuit. So we've had to order chinese a lot (sans rice). I'm starting to get a little sick of Chinese.

* House Season Premiere. Not quite what I expected, but still quite enjoyable. It seems like they're threading plots much more closely between episodes, so it'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

* ECW. Still entertaining. No, it's not classic ECW, but it's more enjoyable than Smackdown! at the moment, and ties with Raw for me (although Raw's two-hour format is starting to feel bloated after watching a few months of ECW's trim one-hour format).

* Savage Worlds. In the process of rewriting the characters for the Serenity game. Conversion was so easy, I was able to do it while watching House and ECW, and the system is FAR simpler. This'll also give me a chance to really play with SW, to see how it works for my idea of running a dungeon crawl-style game with it.[1]

Today:

* Continue to undig myself from my mound of work.

* Put in my wordcount at the computer.

* Go pick up a desk for greebotrill in fucking Eureka.

* Do my 45 minutes on the elliptical machine.

* Try to finish converting characters before tomorrow.

[1] I want to run a classic D&D fantasy RPG at some point, but I don't want the game to be clunky. I want the old school feel of "roll a die, hit the monster, get the treasure, move on," instead of the tactical grind of D20, but the original red books didn't offer enough options for me. I found a conversion to Savage Worlds, and have been toying with the idea for over a year now (although at one point I was considering using Cartoon Action Hour instead).

On one side, I've been very lazy the past couple of days. I have a lot of little things I probably should be working on (like organizing our books or getting more stuff from the basement or updating some of my Cam stuff or working on my fiction), but instead I've been sitting around reading a lot of Spider-Man 2099. I just haven't had the energy to do much of anything.

On the other side, I've not been lazy at all. Because of continuing scheduling wackiness, we had another two workout sessions with Alvin back to back on Monday and Tuesday. Both days I wasn't up for the workout, feeling exhausted or blah. Both times, I forced myself to do it.

However, something interesting happened last night. We were doing 4 sets (20 reps) of upright rows with a bar[1]. Normally, I suck at weights, and I'm certainly at the bottom of the weight ladder (the order of strength being Alvin, garchangel, greebotrill, then me -- people who have met my wife won't be surprised by the fact that she's stronger than me). Since I'm trying to gain muscle and Michelle isn't, we're on roughly the same weight program. However, since she's been working out FAR longer than me, she usually handles the program much better than I.

So we get to these upright rows. Everyone's having problems with them, including me for the first couple of sets. I get to my third set, and I just stare at the bar for a second. I'm sore, I'm tired, I don't want to do any more -- these are pretty common during my workout. I just took a moment and imagined myself doing it and getting it over with. I picked up the bar, and just knocked out a set of 20. Everyone was pretty surprised by it (including myself.) When my turn came up again to do my fourth set, I figured it was a fluke. I did the same thing, imagining myself doing the set -- bam, another 20 repped out.

Of course, it didn't last, as my shoulders failed on me during the double military press at the end. But still, I was pleased that I'm showing that I can be strong in at least one area. That's some sort of progress.

I'm guessing the lack of energy in my life is tied to the workout. The floors and the power outage threw off my workout schedule completely, and my body is probably reacting poorly to it. This week was supposed to be productive, but I think instead I'll focus on just getting things back to normal, so I can then really focus on getting things done. (Probably just another realization of how disgustingly obsessive-compulsive I am.)

Footnote 1: I'll try to explain. You hold a full-length bar with weight on it, hand gripping it so the fingers are facing out and the thumbs are facing in. Pull the bar up to the bottom of your ribcage 20 times, in 4 sets of 20.

Power came back on early Friday evening, so the second outage wasn't nearly as major. Spent most of the weekend putting the house back together (once with the kind assistance of naamaire). There's still a fair amount of stuff in the basement, but the bookshelves are upstairs, and two of the seven bookshelves are reshelved. I'll be going through the rest of the books and reshelving the other five.

My back has been giving me minor problems again. I've been keeping heat on it and restricting my lifting to low weight (but lots of repetitions -- we have a lot of books), so we'll see how it goes. I have a workout with Alvin tonight and tomorrow. I made the mistake of getting on a scale Sunday morning -- I hadn't been on one for months -- and found out I'd gained ten pounds. It depressed me for a while, but greebotrill talked to me about it. I explained some of my frustrations with my diet and my workout, and she helped me understand some things I was confused on (and I cleared up some misperceptions she had). Now that the house is largely back in order, I'm hoping to get back into a regular pattern and diet, and hopefully either get rid of that weight or turn it into muscle.

I had planned to work on a little hard-boiled story last week, but it didn't happen. Partly because of the power situation which threw my entire life into chaos for a short time, but mostly because the initial idea I had is turning out to be a short story instead of a short-short or microfiction. I'm finding more and more often that an idea I have requires some research and thinking through of basic premises, which makes the story much richer than I originally intended, and thus adds depth. I'm going to try to keep the tone as hard-boiled as I can, but so far there's an interesting secondary conflict developing over the primary one, and the overall mood of the story just got a little darker. (I'm finding that a fair chunk of my stories are a bit on the dark side. Not quite sure just why.)

This week, after I finish sorting out the books, I'm going to either finish the first draft of my hard-boiled story (which doesn't even have a working title yet), or polish at least one of my existing stories for publication. I'm also considering polishing a few of my microfiction pieces for a couple of markets that deal in short-shorts. My hope is that by the end of August I'll have at least a few stories in the mail. I believe I had set myself a goal of six stories in consideration by the end of the year, and I think I can hit that mark.

Saw the movie pi Saturday. Very bizarre movie, but intriguing. Some of the theory seemed a bit iffy to me, and the excessive use of shaky-cam was a bit annoying, but any movie with Kabbalistic number theory is pretty cool overall.

[Note to self: This counts as my journal entry for today.]

Normally, we have a personal trainer come to the house twice a week to help us work out, along with three additional workouts by ourselves. Due to some scheduling wackiness, our normal Saturday workout last weekend got pushed to this past Monday, so we had two workouts in a row, Monday and Tuesday. I had been mildly dreading it, especially since my workout schedule has been up in the air for the past two weeks and I was feeling a little under the weather on Monday, but they both turned out okay. I really pushed myself both days, and I wasn't insanely sore the morning after either workout (although my arms are lodging a mild protest today). However, what's interesting is some things I noticed about myself, and how they apply to my writing (becuase I can make ANYTHING apply to my writing):

* The First Ten Minutes Suck: When I'm starting out on one of the intense workout days, the first ten minutes suck. I feel like I can't do anything, I'm sore and achey, and my mind starts looking for excuses not to do it. My writing is the same way -- it all looks so huge and rough when I first start out, and I find myself wanting to watch TV or surf the net instead of cranking out word count. After that first ten minutes, though (the warm up, I suppose), it gets a lot easier.

* Your Limits Are A Little Further Than You Think: When I first start working out, I feel like I can't do anything. My body gets tired, and I just want to quit. However, I hate feeling like I'm a whiner, so when I have others pushing me I want to at least finish what I've been asked to do, unless my muscles just give out (which has happened once or twice). Usually, I finish, and end up doing more than I thought I could do, if I just push a little harder.

* Realistic Goals Add Perspective: garchangel is stronger than me, period. His workout is more advanced than mine -- when I'm lifting 45 in a military press, he's pushing 95. I can't lift 95 right now, just like I can't bang out a casual 50,000 word novel like some writers I know or respect. If I keep my goals to what I can reasonably accomplish and then push past them (like above), then I can eventually lift 95 pounds or write a novel.

* Structure Helps Build A Habit: I'm not yet to the point where I'm completely trained to do my workouts when they need to happen, but I am starting to feel a little guilty if I miss one, because I'm breaking the habit. The more I do something at the same time on the same schedule, the more my body and mind will be in the right zone when it comes time to do it.

* When You're Done, You're Done: One of the best parts of the workout is, of course, stopping. As I work out, I start to notice the signs of when my body is just bitching, and when it's seriously time to quit. The former is just me being lazy, but the latter is a clear warning sign. In writing, there's a difference between just being whiny because a particular passage is proving difficult, and when I'm seriously burned out and need a break or to call it a day.

Edit: Two more from naamaire:

* Having the right equipment makes a huge difference, and it's not the same equipment for everyone. I have to plot longhand, with a mechanical pencil, and graph paper, but I have to compose on a keyboard. In the same way, I tense up with free weights and can't do anything, but I can do bodyweight excersizes all day. On the other hand, you and everybody else has differant hardware requirements for both.

* You can't tell how hard someone else is working, even if you are right next to them. What looks easy to you might be a real struggle for them, and vice versa. No one else can feel how your muscles or your mind burns. "Yoiu didn't do very well" is a valid critisism. "You're not trying" isn't, because we can never know that about someone else.

That kind of defines my weekend. Saturday was our semi-irregular SlackCon, where we spend a little too much on food, booze, and entertainment and devote an entire day to just hanging out. There was much playing of Destroy All Humans!, God of War, and Chez Geek; watching of Down With Love and Pirates of the Carribean; eating of meat pies, gumbo, and snacks; and lots of conversation. Prior to this was my second workout with Alvin. We worked on arms, back, and abs, and my body was very upset with me. Hence, being sore, drunk, and happy. It's always a bit of a punch to the pocketbook, but usually a great stress reliever.

Sunday was much more low-key, mainly running errands and catching up on my media junkie cravings. I finished Battlestar Galactica (which wasn't as annoying of a cliffhanger as I heard it was), plowed through a few episodes of Transformers: Cybertron, and watched the first episode of Blackpool, as well as plowing through a few Transformers comics and finishing up the latest issue of Writer's Digest. This week I plan to catch up on some minor "to do" items, since I'll be living without access to my office most of next week as we get our floors done. I might also take this Wednesday off as there's fuck all to do at work, everyone else is on vacation most of this week (including my boss), and I could use the time to more productive use at home.

Worked out again last night, this time working arms (biceps and triceps). My arms felt like rubber after, and are very sore today. They're not so sore that I can't function, but I can feel it every time I lift my arm. Ow.

Things are a bit slow at work, so I've been catching up on my work "to do" list. I've also been tweaking my LJ a bit, and realized that I started a section on my bio page that I never actually did anything with. So, I'll finish that up:

Describe me in one sentence to someone who has never met me.

The most accurate, entertaining, and amusing answers will be put (with credit) on my bio page.

Physically sore, that is. I started working with a personal trainer yesterday, and I am in pain. At one point I actually got a little nauseous, but he said that's normal, and modified the workout so that I could complete it. I could barely feel my legs, but his stretching and me lying on the couch the rest of the night helped. But damn I'm sore. I feel like I sucked, but Alvin (the trainer) and everyone else said I did a really good job for my first time, so I'm hoping I can continue the trend.

Watched ECW again. Much better show this time, but still not (in my opinion) up to its potential. Still, if this kind of improvement can occur over a week, I'm much more hopeful. Besides, watching other people get hurt was much more entertaining (although I think Randy Orton seriously screwed up either his wrist or shoulder in the main event).

ECW was about all I was good for after the workout. I'm sure I'll get better as I get used to the workouts, so I picked a good time to start -- if I tried to work school around workouts, I'd be in serious trouble.

Still waiting patiently for word on Sekrit Project C.

* I decided to cut my hair. It's now slightly above shoulder-length when dry, and so much easier for me to handle. I think it looks a lot better, too.
* I decided to finish moving the bookshelf into my office. I had to lose my Transformers display shelf (sad), but it'll find a new home in the new workout room. I'll have to repaint some of the office, though.
* I decided to stop trying to force myself to work out and use a personal trainer instead. I'll be working out with greebotrill and garchangel, which will make things easier, and conforming to a schedule by someone else will make it easier than trying to self-motivate (since I already have to do that for work, for school, and for my writing -- I only have so much willpower).
* I decided to put some more RPG books into storage (and thus make more room on my shelves). I think I may decide to sell some of them as well.
* I decided not to play Jack Spade at Neglect. I don't think I quite have a feel for him yet, and I think it's best to try him out at a few local games before I drop him at a con. Besides, I don't have the right hat for him yet.

Be careful: I might make even more decisions before the day is out!