Earth Hour

On Saturday 29th Saturday at 8pm, the world is going to turn off its lights for one hour to help bring awareness to our environment and how we are damaging it by living beyond our world’s resources. Earth Hour last year was a Sydney only event, but this year it is going global. All you have to do to take part is to turn your lights off for one hour at 8pm. If you feel so inspired, you can make it a real event by holding a candlelight dinner for your family or friends or by having a night-time picnic in a park overlooking your city and just seeing what it looks like with all the lights turned off.

I really want to take part in Earth Hour, but like last year, I am going to be out. Last year I was seeing a production of “Sunday in the Park with George” and this year I will be at a Patty Griffin concert. I seem to always end up in a place that produces more greenhouse gases in one night than my house does in over a month.

Next year, I promise to actually take part in Earth Hour.

Drip

For the past three days I have battled with a sinus infection.  I have mucus dripping down the back of the throat, my teeth on one side of the top of my mouth are sore and generally I just feel awful.  I have problems talking for long periods of time cause everything gets all blocked up, which made the two training sessions I had to run today bloody difficult.  Yeah, I feel like shit.  I have also had a really tough week at work, so I am looking forward to the weekend.

Tomorrow at work, our upper management are cooking the entire company breakfast.  Our CEO, marketing manager, CFO and Managing Director are putting on their chef hats and are whipping up a cooked breakfast for everyone.  This makes me kinda nervous.  CEOs don’t cook breakfast for everyone just because they feel like it.  I hope whatever news they are going to deliver tomorrow is good news.

Calling All Passive-Aggressive People

Long term readers will know about the mystery at my workplace about who keeps dumping piles of toilet paper on the floor. I thought I had worked out who the culprit was after they took a couple of days off work and the floor remained free of toilet paper. But when they returned, the floor remained cleaned for a number of days. But things have gone back to their usual horrible state. I walked into the stall today and saw this.

Yes, I did actually take a photo of the toilet paper on the floor next to the toilet. These are the lengths I will go to to bring you the events of my life. The fact I just described toilet paper on the bathroom floor as an event in my life disturbs me greatly.

Anyway, the time has finally come to write a passive-aggressive note to put on the back of the bathroom stall to see if I can curb this despicable behaviour. However, I am really bad at writing these kind of notes, so I am appealing to you, my readers, to compose a passive-aggressive note to go on the back of the bathroom stall to get this culprit to pick up the toilet paper they are dropping and to flush it away. It can as humorous or as aggressive as you like. Become one with your passive-aggressive streak and write the ultimate back of the bathroom door note.

I’m Spartacus!

Because my day absolutely sucked, I thought instead of posting a rant about how much it sucked, I would instead post something that is guaranteed to make me (and hopefully you too) laugh.

These are a clip from the American version of “Whose Line Is it Anyway?”.Ffor those of you unfamiliar with this show, it is an improv show where actors are given a scene to do off the top of their heads. Ryan, one of the stable actors, does an amazing impersonation of Carol Channing….

In case it doesn’t come through the feed, click here

And another clip from the same show, this time the game “Scenes From A Hat”

Again, if not in the feed, it can be found here

End of Holiday Blues

It is the final evening of my four day Easter holiday.  I have done all my washing and ironed all my work shirts.  As the evening progresses those end of holiday blues increase.  Whilst I do enjoy my job, I have loved these past four days.  I have spent hours on the couch reading and even more hours surfing around the internet.  I have been amazingly lazy which has been really good for recharging my batteries. I have been tempted to check my work email to see what issues I need to resolve tomorrow morning, but I know that I will just worry about them overnight, so I am going to leave it all until I walk into work tomorrow morning.

Now I am just going to sit and watch “The Biggest Loser” and yell at the TV when I don’t agree with what the contestants are saying or doing.  The joys of reality TV.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Geeks in Love

When asking for suggestions on what to blog about, Naomi commented “Y’know, I’d love to hear about how you and Lelak met and got together. I don’t remember reading anything of the sort so far.”

Well, kids, gather around whilst I tell you the story of how Lelak and I met.

The year was 1998, I was in my third year of University and the TV show Xena had gained a cult following. Being a geek, I was a member of this wonderful cult following and was a member of a mailing list called DUX - Down Under Xenites. On April 12, 1998, the DUX mailing list decided to have a fan meeting at the King St Cafe, but we would meet at McDonald’s first as that’s the place everyone knew. I get really nervous meeting people I don’t know, but I decided to go along. This would be one of the best decisions of my life.

Lelak, at the time, wasn’t a member of DUX, but her flatemate’s friend Rox was, so Lelak got dragged along to the gathering since she watched Xena anyway.

We all meet up at McDonald’s. So, I can truthfully say, I met my girlfriend at McDonald’s. The initial gathering had an attendance of about 16 people. Fate had it that I sat next to Lelak. The lunch progressed, we ate, we talked, we laughed. After the lunch finished, Lelak and Sumac invited people back to their place to watch some Xena episode. Of the 16 people at the lunch, 10 of us went to Lelak and Sumac’s. As Lelak informed me after we started dating, that when Sumac asked if she invited people back to their place, she only agreed because I was coming. Aww…

Of those 10 people that spent the rest of the day and well into the night watching Xena episodes, 9 of us become really close friends. In fact, we are still friends today. But of course, you are here for the romance story. Well, at the time all this was happening, I was firmly in the closet and Lelak had a girlfriend. It took two years of us being friends for us to finally get together. I did kiss Lelak way back in about September 1998. She was the first girl I ever kissed and the first person with whom kissing made sense with. But, we still didn’t get together. When I finally came out of the closet in November 1999, the first person I dated was our mutual friend V. It was a short lived relationship with us deciding that we were better friends and we actually became flatmates a short time later.

Lelak and I officially got together sometime in July 2000. We are not really sure of the date. It followed months of flirting, hand holding and secret kisses. Lelak was dating someone else during our flirting period. That’s right, I was the other woman. Once we finally got together, it was your typical lesbian dating story where there was only a short dating period before we moved in together. Then again, we had been close friends for over two years before we ever dated so it is not like we barely knew each other. Again, this is what lesbians do, our dating circle is our circle of friends. It becomes very interesting at times.

Almost eight years later, we are still together. Still happy and still in love. We actually worked out that we knew each other before we ever meet. Way back in 1994, we were both on the Australian X-Files list. I actually printed out some of Lelak’s emails because I found them so funny. Yes, my friends, I think it was fate that brought us together. That and the love of sci-fi/fantasy TV shows.

*The title of the post is taken from a famous lesbian film called “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love”

Skydiving Baby

This morning’s trip to the supermarket taught me that being polite and waiting for people to pass in front of you in the supermarket’s maze of aisles means that you just stand there for a bloody long time. You only actually achieve forward momentum when you are rude, impatient and push past people. Also attempting to do your grocery shopping on Easter Saturday morning is possibly the worst time to even contemplate entering a supermarket. I must definitely remember this for next year.

This afternoon was much more pleasant as we spent it at F & M’s house catching up with them and their 6 month old daughter Zoe as well as friends of ours, Sumac, V & Fi. Six months old is definitely a much cooler age than newborn. Kids at 6 months become interactive, they babble at you and in Zoe’s case they actively try to make you laugh. Nothing is funnier than seeing a tiny child attempting to skydive whilst lying on the floor. She had the whole skydiving posture absolutely correct with a little wiggling of her nappy padded butt added in for pure comedy value. I would laugh, she would laugh and then she would start skydiving all over again. It was cool spending a couple of hours with a little one, but I am definitely not up for full-time child rearing. I prefer my kid time in small doses with the option to send them back to their parents when they become obnoxious. I was born to be a grandmother. Play with the kid, fill them up with sugar and then send them back to their parents for them to deal with the aftermath.

Paying It Forward

This is a buzz going around the blogosphere at the moment called Pay It Forward.  The situation is this, a blogger has on their blog a competition to win something cool - books, giftcards, online credit etc and of course people enter to win. However, unlike most competitions, the winner of this competition must agree to “pay it forward” and give away something on their blog and so on and so forth.  At the moment two people on my blog reader are having their own Pay It Forward competitions - Crazy Meezer and Red Sultana.  Please go and check them out and gift them with some traffic love.  If you feel inspired to enter their competitions do so, but my aim here is to give them some trafficky love.  I know I get very excited and sometimes break out into a little happy dance when I see my blog stats rise. Yes, I am a very strange individual. Hopefully, they feel the same way about seeing their traffic increase.  Also they are two blogs I enjoy reading (or else they wouldn’t be on my blog reader) and maybe you might find that you enjoy their blogging too.

RPGs and Me

When I asked for suggestions on what to blog about Mr Teufel commented, “I first met you on RPG.net, IIRC, but you’ve never blogged about roleplaying - past or present - that I’ve seen.” He is right, I have never blogged about it, but now I am going to correct that.

The vast majority of roleplayers are introduced to roleplaying in their teenage years where they spend hours surrounded by dice, character sheets and rulebooks. My introduction was an unusual one and sealed my fate as a cybergeek. In my first year of university in 1993, a school friend of mine introduced me to her friends that were hanging out in the computer lab mudding. MUDs are basically online text based roleplaying games and the MUD I was introduced to on this fateful day was Ancient Anguish which was an online version of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). It was also my first introduction to the internet - and I was hooked on both fronts. My school friend never mudded with us after that first day, but I joined the group of mudding geeks and my obsession with mudding began. Because of I was doing an education degree at the time, I was given an internet account that only gave me 100 hours online. When you are mudding anywhere from 2 hours to 8 hours plus a day, those 100 hours don’t last a long time, soI quickly learnt how to hack into our university computer system and “steal” internet time.

I mudded on Ancient Anguish for the next 8 years and learnt all about hit points, spell points, types of weapons, types of armours and the pros and cons of different races and classes without ever picking up a D&D rulebook.

My first encounter with D&D wasn’t until 2000 when my girlfriend Lelak, a roleplayer from way back and a group of my friends interested in learning about roleplayering had our very first session. There were a few difference between mudding and roleplaying, like rolling the dice, but I quicked it up fairly quickly and just as quickly fell in love with it. Most of our friends weren’t that enamoured with roleplaying, but Lelak and I together with our friends V and S formed a roleplaying group that meet together fairly regularly to play not only D&D, but Witchcraft and Exalted as well. With other roleplaying groups, I also played Call of Cthulhu and Buffy.

Unfortunately, it has been almost 2 years since I have played a game. Our core roleplaying group has pretty much disintegrated. We tried to organise a few games this year, but they never happened. I am really missing roleplaying and I think it might be time to seek out new people to game with. Anyone in Sydney want to game with two lesbian gamers?

Please, pretty please?

There must be something that you guys want me to blog about.  Surely,  I haven’t covered every single topic already on my blog.  Is there something you have been dying to know about me or just idly curious about?  Come on, don’t be shy, ask away and I promise I will answer your questions.