So last saturday was two big events.
1. it was Ian's bachlor party. Now unlike other B parties Ian isn't in to strippers and all that so for us him it was a big game day. We started off with "The War on Terror" a game which has been banned in the us and has to be special ordered from europe. The game was fun anf funny, but took a long time to play. Its kind of a mix between risk and Settlers with lots of funny cards and add ons. We started around noon and ended around 6pm.
Following that we played a bunch of games of Heroscape. Its a build your army and fight it out sort of game. Easy to pick up and fun to play as well. By the time we finished it was 2:30 am. I drove home from there fighting off sleep to arrive home at 3:30am. I am really not made for these late nights any more.

The secoind big even of saturday is BZ got her puppy in. After the Jay fiasco she still wanted a dog and decided to get a pupy. She found one on a Welsh Corgi website and sent away for him. He flew in Saturday night and was picked up in providence. I'll be putting some pics up on my myspace page when I get a chance, BZ already has some up on her's if you want to go there. He's cute and spunky and craps a lot. So far we've been calling him keebler, like the cookie maker. More puppy stories to come.

So on me third day off of work, My dad came by and we began work refinishing my attic. Up until this point it was just like 1/3 finished and mostly just storage space. When we're done it will be a usable room, probably a project room for BZ's painting and my gaming projects.
I had been planning on using this time to write and work on my book, but its been going real slow. I just havn't had the creative urge. I'm hoping once the attic is done I will be able to get back to it.

it seems to be getting harder and harder to post, hopefully it will get better when the attic is finished. So lets see where were we. BZ and I had gotten a husky from a shelter. We took him home, grabbed some micky D's and began the endless night. The husky, Jay, got a bath and let me say after bathing Razul I figured I had seen about the water capacity of a dog. Well this was just rediculas. Jay kept jumping out of the tub and shaking off, leaving a virtual pond on the bathroom floor. But finally it was done, doggie was clean. I towled him off as well as I could, then we took him out on the pourch to comb him out and let him dry some. We get him out there, he takes a quick look at the gate we use for the pourch, then leaps over it. F'ing dog!!!

I run back in and grab my shoes. When I get back the dog is just gone. We walk up and down the street looking for him, but can't find him. We fire up the forester and drive out to see if we can find him, but he's just no where. We drive home after about 10 minutes. And low and behold who is sitting in the dirve way, yup you guessed it.

I try to lure him back with a burger. He will aproach close enough to snag burger peices I throw but won't get close enough for me to grab him.If I try to approach him, he runs back about 10 ft and waits. BZ tries to help but she's not very adjile and Jay is. We chase him around for about 30 mintes. Then go back inside to see if he will just come back when he is done playing this chase me chase me game.

There is some homking from outside and a squeel a breaks. I already know what it is. I go out and there is a car in the road and a "woman" walking down the street. I see jay running back from "her" (woman and her are in quotes as I'm not really sure if this was a man or woman. and I got a close up look at the face. It was eithor a very femine man or butch chick. "She gives me a lecture about letting my dog run in the street, but helps me try to catch him and calls for the dog pound, unfortunatly they aren't open at this time of night. The dog runs off again and we lose sight of him. "She" leaves. I go back in the house. Jay proceeds to come back but sits in my neighbor on the corner's yard, where he can see my place but can easily run away if he wants. We make a few more attempts to catch him, but to no avail. And if we go back in side he goes and sits down in the middle of the road until someone stops. It gets cold and starts to rain and I'm sick of playing around.

I get another hamburger and take one of BZ's unisom gel caps and squirt all the gell over the burger. Then I take it out and act like I'm trying to lure jay back again and toss him the burger a bit at a time. He eats it up. We go back in and wait 20 minutes for it to sink in. The rain kicks up and jay comes back onto the pourch and lies down and dozes off, long enough for me to sneak up and leash him up again. So after about 5 hours we get the dog back, crate him up and he goes back in the morning. A total annoyance of a weekend. Oh yeah he howled the whole night in the crate.

Its been a few days since I've posted, apparently being out of work isn't entirly agreeing with me. So all of those things I normally do to avoid working (like blogging) don't work so well when I don't have any work to avoid. But I'll give you all the catch up anyway.

Friday was my last day at school. It wasn't as sad as it was leaving pfizer. I was actually kind of happy. Lots of good byes and I left on good terms with my PI.

Saturday was the start to the crazy weekend. BZ decided she wants to get a new dog. She had been surfing petfinder.com for the last few days and had narrowed it down to a few pooches. Unfortunatly those dogs were from shelters that weren't running drives that weekend. {please forgive any bad typing this cat has decided she needs to lay right in front of the key board so I can't see the keys}. Since none of those shelters were open we decided to go to one that was. The MEridan Shelter was having a drive so we head out there.

In the truck there is a beautiful Husky. I don't know for certain but it loked like a pure bred. BZ just falls in love. They were just about done with their drive so we follow the truck back to the shelter. There is another couple there waiting toi look at te huskey so they have first grabs. We spend some time touring the dog pound and find another dog which looks sort of like a cattle dog we like. Unfortunatly when we take her out she snaps at razel and scares our poochie.

back to work on attic story to contine later.

My last week at school is ticking by slowly. I really hate having nothing to do. I can't really get focused enough to work on any of my side projects and what little lab work I was doing is now done.

Bz is off for the week in colorado getting trained to run some sort of assay, oh and snow mobiling. The house is lonly and empty without her and ther pets are ultra needy. That darn cat woke me up some time in the middle of the night and wouldn't stop meowing until I threw a pillow at her. This is the second night in a row she has done that. This is the third night in a row I've had horrible night mares. I don;'t really know what the deal is with them but my sleep has been awful.

I picked up the last two Fable graphic novels out last night. The story is just fantastic. I really didn't want to come in today and just wanted to stay home and read them, but here I am, nothign to do waiting for lunch to transpire and then later to help a friend out with a technique, but thats not until 3:30 after when I wanted to be gone.

So a friend of mine just stoped by and apparently he is concidering leaving too. Its almost crazy how our class has widdled down so much. We lost 2 my first year, 4 my second, and now halfway through my third we're about to lose 3 or 4. of the 25 that started thats almost 50%.

back to mn.

So day three was x-mas. I was able to avoid going to church both in the morning when some of BZ's fam went and at night when all of them went, some for the second time that day. Her father made some rude comments at my expense when they got back and in remianing in some good graces I refrained from commenting. It almost sickens me to see adults so caught up in fairy tales. I love high fantasy, but I know that dragons and fairies only exist in our minds. The same can be said for gods, devils, demons, and the whole lot. Yeah its a nicie nice thought that we will all be together in wonderland when we die, but I'm just as happy making the best of my life here on earth.

Day four we went up to Dulth, BZ's college town. There was a good brewery up there, but it was kind of a dissappointment seeing the list of beers (probably 60-100) and then being told they only had 8 of them currently...none of those 8 were the ones I had chosen off the list. I ended up with a blueberry stout which was tasty and some of the best beer batter fries I've ever had. It totally made up for the lack of selection and them over cooking my burger. We shoped around for a bit with one of BZ's college friends after that. She is a lot cooler that I remember and fun to hang with.

Day five we hit the MAll of America!!!!!!. Unfortunatly we only had a few hours there before this play we were going to see was to start so it was a madd rush around. Of all the wacky things we went into the QVC shop, which contained all of those fun things you want to buy off the Tele'. I got a few cans of self heating coffee that T&J often have, a set of 50 horror classics, and a wind up flashlight. We hit a few more shops, but barly scratched the surface of what is there. I could have spent two full days at the mall. We left the mall and hit the olive garden for dinner.

Dinner in short blew! The bread sticks were way over done, some didn't have any butter or garlic on them. I ordered a steak in alfredo linguini dish. Of the four peices of steak in it:
1. tasted like it was marinated in fruit punch, sweet and fruity.
2. marinated in italian herbs, not bad, a bit of the fruit flavor.
3. only seasoned with black pepper,
4. no seasoning at all.
BZ's sister got a pitcher of sanguria, which turned out to be fruit punch with maybe a splash of wine in it. And then the manager had the gall to give her lip when she tried to complain.
Needless to say I am done with the Olive Garden.

Following that we went to see White Christmas done as a broadway show. In short it stunk. I feel bad for BZ's mom who put a lot of time and money into getting the tickets. The production was just sort of poor. The songs were very repititious, there may have only been 4 songs for a 2 hour show, they just kept repeating them. The acting was very constrained and not beleivable. Even the dancing was dull, not very complex or eye pleasing. So it ended up being kind of a poor day.

Actualy I just realized I reversed days 4 and 5, not that it really matters since I'm not going to retype or arrange them just thoguht I'd let you know.

I awoke this morning from a nightmare of being powerless in a situation undoing. I don't have much more to say about it. This has been the third or fourth such dream in the last few weeks. I begin to wonder if its some sort of sign, a premonition of sorts. I was fully charged in mystical energy again in my dream. Perhapse its time to retake some of those studies.

But back to our Mn trip.

The Holidazle parade was cool. Its a big parade at night where all of the floats and people in the parade are covered in lights. There were all sorts of floats to fairy tales and children's stories as well as your typical holiday stuff. It was fun just seeing who sponcered each float, all of which were mid westie things like malt-o-meal. Following the parade we had another flavorless dinner at Chevys. I had wondered if out first bad experience there was just because we were in St. Louis and everything there sucks, but no Chevys sucks every where. Its called mexican food people, try adding some spice!!! So ends Day one.

Day two was X-mas eve. It was a nice lazy sort of family day and a good chance to get to know BZ's fam better. We broke out one of those atari simulators and had fun rehashing the pixilated block games of the past. We took off for lunch and went to a place called "Carvers", home to the butter burger and cheeze curds, which turned out to be for the most part bite sized friend motzerella sticks. All was very tasty. My only complaint was that the shakes there are way too thick. You couldn't suck them through a straw so it ended up being a giant cup of soft serve ice cream.

Following lunch we explored BZ;s home town. Went to the BEnfranklin dime store she used to work at and a few other establishments ending at soe hores outfiter store where some high school friend of her's worked. The girl said like 4 words to us and was out the door. At least the stop wasn't a complete waste as Bs for a hot pair of cowgirl boots and I got a duster coat, both of which were at a great price.

We got back to the house in time for dinner, pasta and sausage, yummy!! BZ's family does have a good recipe for that, its one of the few foods I could easily eat multiple days on end. After dinner her family does gifts, its one of those x-mas eve not x-mas day sort of deals. The exchange was a bit dissappointing. When you do the straight up one person swap and everyone sends out lists you pretty much know exactly what you are getting and when you are some one who shops well and can really maximize 50$ and other people aren't you tend to be a little dissappointed. I ended up getting the Lego starwars 2 game, whihc I had requested and a bok of bathroom trivia, no its not on bathrooms but just normal sort of trivia, a lot of which I questioned. At least some of it was usable in my campaign. Its almost sad how many things come down to D&D for me.

The yankee swap followed the normal gift exchange. Here was another dissappointment. BZ and I were under the impression this was to be a generic sort of gift up to 50$, where as everyone else there seemed to think it was a 10-25$ gift. So when you put in 50$ worth of cool kitchen appliance gadgets and get back 2x 4.50 movies, on of which you already own its a little disheartening. The swap was done by different rues than I am accustomed to as well. You had to roll doubles on a pair of d6s in order to pick a present or to swap presents at the end. That was good for me as dice and I usually get along. I came home with the same set of kitchen gadgets I brought.

More to follow

Its been quite some time since I've written anything and there is a good reason for that. for the last week I've been away in Minesota, a state of lakes and cold weather, oh and bad pizza, but thats for a later story. The only choice for net access there was dial-up and I wasn't about to sink that low. So this will be a big post to catch up on all that has transpired.

So my x-mas vacation begins two fridays past with a trip to the dentist, where one of my teeth was mostly removed by drill and skill, leaving a nice hole. I was under the impression going in that it would be a one day job, but instead of leaving with a nice hard cap for this tooth I walked out with a temporary plastic tooth, yah, so I was banned from eating steak, gum, caramel, and just about anything hard of sticky, or chewy. So none of those nice tasty xmas type foods, not to say I didn't bend the rules.
So I got home in much pain. Did what ceaning and packing I could and prepared mentally and physically for this trip to no where.

Saturday was a big day of travel. Up at the near crack of dawn to get the last few things together then it was pack up the dog and bring her to my parent's house where she would be spending her vacation and me and BZ got shuttled up to the airport. One long trip full of crying babies later and we arrived in Mineapolis, city of fun. We me up with BZ's family and toured the finest parts of the city in wait for the ever exciting holidazle parade.

to be continued.....