Tag: Life

Exiled for the Good of the Realm

Posted on by Greg

Well, I blinked again and it’s been two years since my last post. WTF!?!? Where did the time go. Oh I know. Covid. Stupid bastard plague!

Well, It has taken nearly two years but our defenses finally failed and Omicron invaded our house this past week. My Wife and eldest were both laid low by it and have spent the week alternately sleeping it off or lounging on the couch playing on the playstation.

Thankfully, both myself and the youngest tested negative (or were asymptomatic) and could function like semi-normal humans. However due to an overabundance of caution my work told me to take the week off and isolate so I’ve been catering to the whims of two sick people all week and avoiding all human contact.

Since my loving wife and daughter are hogging the PS5 pretty much 24/7 these days, I’ve been left to my own devices and with nothing much else to do, I have been dreaming dark dreams of creativity.

Since I haven’t seen my friends together in one place in over two years I haven’t had many creative outlets. Our Star Wars game ground to a halt for a number of reasons. (1. We couldn’t satisfactorily get it working online with everyone’s computer setup, 2. Fantasy Flight Games/Asmodee shifted the license to Edge Studios and there hasn’t been any books in 2 years, 3. Campaign/Theme fatigue. We need a change.)

With the government continually teasing that they’ll ease lockdown restrictions we’re ever hopeful that we can finish off the last adventure. None of us want to leave it hanging where we left it but we’re already looking for other ideas and games. Since none of my friends wants to be the GM, I’m stuck with it and after messing around with various options of different campaigns, I think we’ve decided to go back to D&D in the 5e setting.

Rather than just dive into one of the pre-built existing settings in D&D, I have to be unique and to that end I’ve decided to go back to my homebrew fantasy campaign, The Realm of Tarsere, and update it to the 5e system. I’ve revamped this system so many times that one would think that I’m sick of it but quite the opposite. The world building is my favourite part!

With this quarantine, when I haven’t been tending the plague-ridden, I’ve been digging through old files, cringing at bad (or weak) world-building decisions, and revamping what I can. I’m a bit of an ADHD squirrel at times because there is so much that I have already written and stored deep in the recesses of my brain that I almost don’t know where to start (Do I redo the map? Do I rebuild the races first? Ooooh! what about the Gods? etc.) but then I settle on something and my hyperfocus kicks in and blammo! Six hours later I have something tangible.

Now I know this is silly as it’s not even something that isn’t going to come to fruition for months yet but right now, with all the shit that’s going on in the world right now, I need it to stay focused and sane.

If you’re bored and want to see my progress of stuff that I will eventually post. Swing over to http://tarsere.shadowmyth.net/. At some point I’ll update the website properly and tweak the theme.

For now. Stay safe out there fellow humans.

Signal Disruption

Posted on by Greg

Oh look. There goes all my plans for regular posting. It’s been about a month since I last posted and it irritates me that all my good intentions and plans were derailed. I blame the holiday season. Working retail at Christmas messes with my routines, my sleep habits and my time.

Normally I’d come home from work, cook dinner, tidy up and then ensure the kids did their chores/homework. Once they are settled, I’d then disappear downstairs to my cave and type up something here, paint a miniature or work on my Star Wars game. Since the beginning of November though, I’ve not done any of those things. My RPG stuff sits stagnant in the bag I use to carry it all and has been there since the beginning of October. My paints sit similarly unused and obviously the blog has been silent for the past month as well.

There’s hope that as we near Christmas and the retail nightmare that is my life, subsides to little more than a bad dream I will get back to a much more regular routine.

In the meantime, have fun without me. I have laundry to fold.

Enjoy The Silence?

Posted on by Greg

So, Tam and the girls went down to the states for a week to visit her mom on her birthday. Due to blackout restrictions at my work, I wasn’t able to make it.

While I was sad to not be going and enjoying some quality fam-jam time, the introverted nerdy recluse that lurks in the core of my being secretly reveled in a week without the wife or kids.

My week of bachelor life however started off to mixed results. I woke up on the Saturday and managed to pull a stupid: I locked myself out of the house. I knew I’d done it the second I closed the door behind me. Yay for having to climb in my kids bedroom window. Double yay for not having the neighbours call the cops on me.

Thankfully, the afternoon turned out somewhat better. Managed to have a few of the guys over and we played board games for most of the evening. Not something that I regularly get a chance to do, and the fact that we all had piles of shame we needed to work through was incentive. I would have liked to get through more, but we’re not as young as we used to be.

The rest of the week passed somewhat uneventfully. I mostly just worked and came home to an empty house. Too empty to be honest. When I’ve been alone in the past, I’ve thought nothing of it. It’s part of the background. This time though, there was definitely silence. Sure, the cats were racing about being shitheads, but the lack of people in the house was definitely noticable and once I noticed, it became somewhat disconcerting.

You know that feeling you get when you’re alone and your mind starts playing tricks on you and your imagination goes into overdrive? Yeah? Picture that amplified over a whole week. I’m not ashamed to admit that I slept with a light on. It didn’t help the silence, but as I’m a hardcore Doctor Who nerd nothing really does…


Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that as much as I’m a nerdy introvert, having a connection to the world is a necessity. The noise and chaos of my life has become part of who I am and without it, I don’t feel normal.  Who knew?!?!

T Minus One Month (Give or Take)

Posted on by Greg

So in a little under a month, the growth that has been hindering Tamara’s sleep will be excised and I will be the proud parent of a new baby wetums doll. Or something along those lines. Yup, that’s right… approximately 30 days from now is when the little squidlet is due and I can’t wait. No clue as to the baby’s gender as of yet, so that’ll be fun. Stuff around here isn’t ready yet at all… sigh! Such is the life of a hectic homeowner I guess.

I’ll post more once the time is nigh and obviously I’ll spam the obligatory newborn baby pics.

Ugh.. next I’ll be corralling you all into watching my home movies of the vacation to butt-fuck, nowhere. Bah!

Anyways, I shall spam more later. In the interim there is laundry to do and boxes to unpacketh. Yay me!

Something Resembling A Post

Posted on by Greg

Once again here I am sitting in my darkened living room trying to wind down from a long day at work. I’m not really tired but I expect I’ll be up early so I should probably be in bed…

Obviously I’m not listening to myself and so here I sit listening to Zero by Yeah Yeah Yeahs and trying to wind down. Never said I was the brightest bulb in the room now did I?

I know it’s been somewhere in the range of 30 million years since my last substantial post and for that I apologize. Life… has been interesting, to say the least. Mostly I’ve just been busy with living my life and not actually being online 24/7 like I used to be.  Strange thing that.

I guess I should take the time now to expand and elaborate on some of the things that I summed up in my last post.

Now as you may recall, Tamara and I went to Rome just prior to last Thanksgiving and it was amazing. Exhausting, but absolutely fan-frickin-tastic! We spent a couple of days in London as well and just over a week in Rome itself. We didn’t get to see much else outside the city but what we did see we enjoyed. The history nerd in me was more than satiated on the ruins, architecture and general sense of history that permeated everything there. I’ve got a ton of pics (though less than I’d expected/intended) that I still need to sort and post and I will post them soon. I will however give you a quick shot that I took from inside the Colosseum just to tide you over.

IMG_2075

Once we were back, I ended up facing a bit of a crisis at work. All the management staff that I had, up and left on me within a few weeks of each other and didn’t give me enough time to find (or train) their replacements. That left me dangerously short staffed going into the Christmas season and I ended up working 80+ hrs a few weeks in a row in an effort to keep the store open.  It also burned me out something fierce and definitely took it’s toll on my relationship. Thankfully though, I survived Christmas and managed to get some semi competent staff in to help me cope. Unfortunately the damage was done and I had become utterly burned out at the thought of work and all the things that still needed to be done to turn the store around. After discussing it with my boss, we came up with a solution that satisfied everyone. At the end of February, I ended up transferring to a different location, stepping down as a Store Manager to the role of Assistant Manager in a higher volume store where I could get the “training” that I had officially missed out on. Officially I’m a Store manager in Training on a 6 month development plan that will see me back running my own store by next christmas… or at least that’s the theory. I may end up telling them where to shove it before then if things don’t go so well.

With all the overwork and chaos of my life, I haven’t had much time to write anything and I’m sorely missing it. Now that my schedule is returning to some semblance of normality I’m going to try and take some time to regularly do some writing and I’ll hopefully get them transcribed and posted here at some point. If you’re lucky, they might be posted here before summer’s end.

Alright, It’s 3am now and I really need some sleep. I shall leave you with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and their new single Zero.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero

Enjoy Kidlets.

Your Door Is Ajar

Posted on by Greg

Or is that your Jar is a door? I never know anymore and right this second I’m more than a little drunk so I don’t rightly care (and won’t apologize for any inonsistencies or smisspellings_).

Tam and I decided recently to budget our finances and start saving for a decent house and our trip to Rome (yeah forgot to mention we’ll be in Rome this time next month… WOOOO!). To that end we went shopping for some nice “jars” to decorate and use as our budgeting means. We’re not going to use our b edit or credit cards at all… or as little as possible and all our expesnes are run out of the jars. SO far it’s been an interesting experiment and I like the challenge that it presents.

Hopefully it’ll be a beneficial experience and we’ll be able to smash our collective debts into tiny pieces! Yarrr. As it is, I’m just glad that we’re both able to approach the whole monetary issue with rationality and without any of the problems that plague a lot of other couples. Hooray for getting lucky in that regard.

Wheee. Well this post was supposed to be longer but I’m now 3 shots behind and already feeling ti so I do believe that my irish arse is logging off to go drink itself into bed. WHeee!

Pax