Randomonday

- Is having someone proofread your resume and cover letter so difficult? Since I've started hiring people myself, I've had to really lower my expectation in regards to grammar and punctuation. I have a cover letter in my hand that's 1 paragraph long, centered, without spaces between sentences, and just terrible punctuation. The letter itself is horrible but the content is good. For a guy applying for an entry level position, and having some experience, he said a lot of the right things. I almost want to rewrite the thing and send it back to him or at least suggest corrections.

- I made the top 4 at our SGO Texas Hold'em game on Saturday and will move on to the final game which plays this Saturday night.

- I've been considering playing some micro-stakes games on Pokerstars or FullTilt. It's like $10 buy-in's with $1/$2 blinds. The crummy thing about playing the free money games are the stupid people that go all-in at every hand. Very obnoxious. I'm actually up about $2K in the free money games, but that's probably due to the stupid people.

- Tomorrow nights schedule has me in a game called Monkey Poo. Imagine players jumping and bouncing around throwing blue blobs at each other. In Halo, one of the alien grenades is actually sticky. It will stick to the players, but not walls or other inanimate objects. The idea is to get points by 'sticking' the other players with these grenades, which subsequently explode. That's it. Just throwing blue glowing 'nades at each other. It's really pretty fun but takes some practice to be any good. I don't practice.

- Fish tacos were on the menu last night. They were too good. I only made 3 fillets, but they were big enough to make 6 tacos. And I ate them all. Someday, hopefully, I'll use something other than tilapia. It's fine, but cheap. Most fish taco recipes call for a firmer white fish, like cod or even shark. I ain't got the dough for anything but tilapia.

- So my parents are picking up roots and getting out of CA. As far as I know, they've decided to settle in CO, but it might be a while before they actually buy a house. They need help getting all their vehicles over here so I'll be flying to CA next weekend and driving my dads truck back. Long drives aren't my most favorite thing to do, but my dad drove our moving truck for us when we moved and I have vacation time to burn up before the following weekend, so there you go. I get a mini-vacation and an extended look at one of the most desolate parts of the US.

- It's cold, wet, and dreary today. The morning started out ok, but now we have a drizzling rain. I don't need any more reminders than winter is coming.

- Next week starts Cap League. It's another gaming event, but geared towards those of us who didn't use to play in Major League Gaming events (i.e. - those of us who suck.) Below are some avatars I made up for it.

This one isn't mine but I thought it was funny.

So how was your weekend?

SG Olympic update 10/15...eh, forget it.

As much as I appreciate the comments that were made (Thank You!), due to the underwhelming response to my SG Olympic updates, I'll be modifying them a lot. I might mention the current standings, but I'll talk more about other stuff.

So here's some randomness:

- I'm so stinkin' fed up with my lack of performance at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that I'll be packing it up and sending it to a fellow Yellow SG'er tomorrow. That gets me out of making an ass of myself in the Objective games next week and since he really enjoys the game, maybe Yellow will have a better showing.

- I met my roommate last night. A very bold fellow. Went about his way without even a nod in my direction.

- Remember that thing that was under my fridge? The thing I forgot to check on during the walk through the 6' wide kitchen? Well, I finally remember it and checked on it a few days ago. The crummy thing was that when I went to check it out, it was stuck to the floor and when I pushed on it, it got unstuck and skittered off further under the fridge. I'm pretty sure I know what it is now and I think my roommate got stuck on it.

My trailer is right across the road from a very large untended field. Right behind it is another smaller field, unused, but they knock the grass down every once in a while. I knew before I moved in that pests were going to be an issue. When I was moving my stuff in, I left the door propped open and more than a couple of moths flew in. So the first warm-blooded pest is probably taken care of now. I'm sure there will be more.

- That's it for now. I'm off to get a some runs in on our unscheduled event. Wish me luck!

Here's a picture:

SG Olympic update 10/14

I suck.

No, really. I got my ass handed to me last night. In the MW2 game, the only kill I had was a betrayal! :(

We won 2 of our 6 games. *sigh*

I'm not really a 'depressed' person and I don't really go for the whole negative self-efficacy thing, but around 15 minutes into the 2 hours of games last night, I just wanted to quit and go to bed. I couldn't pull my head out to catch a breath.

I'm planning ways to get effectively yet pleasantly hammered for the games tonight. Any suggestions?

Seasoned Gamers is a community of gamers. It professes to be one for the 'fun-loving' crowd, but you can't get away from the fact that it's primarily made up of good gamers. There are a few SG'ers that I regularly play with, but they're on the same skill level as I am and we get matched up with people of similar skill. Compared to other games, the Halo matchmaking system works really well.

As far as SG events go, they do a lot of work to make teams even, but 'even' means every team has 1 or 2 really good players, 1 or 2 middle level players, and then the actually casual players. So the casual players get stomped by the good players. It gets very frustrating.

There is one SG organization called the Cap League. It uses a handicapping system to even out the teams even more. I think I'll just stick to that one from now on.

Of course, I've said that during some point in every SG event...

Here's a picture:

SG Olympic update 10/13

The medals standings didn't change because it's tournament time for the next 3 days.

Current win/loss standings for Reach, Gears of War, Modern Warfare 2, and Left 4 Dead (I'm playing in all except L4D):

Green: 2 wins, 4 losses
Blue: 3 wins, 3 losses
Red: 3 wins, 3 losses
Yellow: 3 wins, 3 losses

We're playing against Green tonight who beat Blue in 2 of the 3 games we lost to Red last night. (The #'s are a little offset because G & B tied in a game.) If we continue winning where we've already won, we'll need to win in at least 1 of the games we lost.

I played ok in Reach last night but sucked a big one in MW2 and Gears. I've always sucked at MW2, but I'm going to blame the crappy play in Gears on the different controls.

Yeah, that sounds good...

SG Olympic update 10/12

Yellow's still leading!

My games start tonight at 8. Beforehand a teammate and I are going to try and get a run in on our unscheduled Firefight event. It's kind of a 'do it when you can get to it' event. Teams can play a certain game as many times as they want but need to submit their final score by midnight this Sunday. The other Yellow team finished a round last night...and it took them 3 hours! They got a really high score, I think, but that's a long time to play a single game. I only have about an hour and a half before I need to practice my regularly scheduled games. Ah well. We'll get it done somehow.

Randomonday

So how was your weekend?

- I had the girlies this weekend. Good stuff. Their mom says they’ve been ‘acting out’ at her house lately. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary this weekend. Actually, I thought they were pretty good for me. In the past, I’ve suggested that her level of discipline isn’t quite as high as it should be. I think I’ll leave it alone unless things get worse.

- I did not hemorrhage money this weekend. Still spent a little but just enough to get by. Yes, $10 in Cold Stone ice cream was crucial to our survival.

- Took the girlies to Once Upon a Child yesterday. We were looking for some slip-on shoes for Aniqua. Mostly because I’m tired of dealing with her ‘twinkle-toe’ shoes that she needs help with both putting on and taking off. She found some that were a touch big, but I told her she could wear 2 pairs of socks if she wanted to. Her and Bellie found jeans too. All for $20. Not bad.

- I’m an Olympian! Well, not quite yet as I haven’t started playing, but I’ve signed up for a few events in the Seasoned Gamers Olympics. I know the schedule is hard to see, but I have different games every half an hour from 8pm through 10:30pm from Tuesday through Friday this week. Swapping back and forth between Halo: Reach and 3 other games.

If you’ve ever played video games, you might appreciate the difficulty in switching back and forth between different games. Each has their own control schematic. So when I hit the ‘B’ button expecting to throw a grenade, I’ll actually reload. I’m already frustrated. Ha!

There were some events played by others last night and here are the current standings:

Go Yellow!

I certainly do not profess to be a great player, I just hope I can contribute something to the team.

- So besides that my life has been pretty lonely. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but the stbx quit her evening job so all of a sudden I went from an every evening dad to an every other weekend dad. She still isn’t willing to discuss me having them an additional evening a week. She hasn’t said no, but she’s still not discussing it. I’m hoping that my parents might be able to talk her into something. But they need to be careful to not stress their relationship with her, so I don’t expect much to happen soon.

- Besides a couple of people at work (who I wouldn’t necessarily hang out with anyway) I don’t know any single people. None. I’m thinking that’s contributing a lot to my loneliness. There’s a local (well, seemingly local) single fathers group I’m looking into. It’s called Father Factor but it looks like it was established by an online law firm. That seems kind of weird. I’m checking into it, but not holding out much hope. As far as I can find, there really isn’t anything else of a similar nature. Lots of groups for moms though.

- I’m off. Taking an afternoon and getting some practice in. Haven’t played COD:MW2 for a while. Besides, I have vacation time I need to burn before the end of the month.

Have a good week!

Fisherman theme

Here's the closeup of the Fisherman quilt that Pamela requested:

I'm probably going to reveal that I know more about quilting than I'd like to admit, but I believe it was created with the applique method. And no, I didn't look up the spelling of 'applique'. It's correct.

I think.

I did some digging and found the watercolor my gramma did, as well as the photo taken of me in Kings Canyon National Park (at the very end of road 180), and a small Thomas Kinkade print we bought at a gallery in Cambria, CA. I think I need to bug my gramma about getting a scanned copy of the photo she used to make the painting of my grampa, don't you?

I tried to get some good photo's of the individual pieces, but my camera wouldn't get close enough and focus on its own. Too late for me to mess with it right now. I plan on purchasing a good photo scanner soon.

As far as decorating is concerned, my top priority is getting the pictures of the my girlies up (I still need to get good frames), but if anyone has any suggestions on how to display these pieces, I'd love to hear them!