angharad_gam

Back to work tomorrow, for the first time in three weeks, although I am having trouble coming to grips with the idea. I think I could happily have another couple of weeks off, although I am getting to the point of feeling like my brain is starting to moulder, so maybe it's not such a terrible thing. What have I done with those three weeks? Not a great deal. We had my parents and nephew visiting last week, so that kept us a little bit busy, but most of the rest of the time has been lazing around and playing Mass Effect (I have gotten about 2/3rds of the way through a second play through of the original trilogy and 1/3rd of the way through a new game of Mass Effect:Andromeda). I guess I did want something to take my mind off Dragon Age.

( Read more... )

 This cold has been taking ages to get over.  It has been about three weeks now and I am still not quite 100%. The 'doing my job and my boss's at the same time' thing ends in a few days, so that might help. I have got most of my Christmas shopping and mailing things done, just food to worry about now. I am looking forward to taking a long break after Christmas. 

Still playing through the Mass Effect Trilogy. I finished the second game yesterday and started the third today. The first game was good enough, but not amazing. The second really puts you through the emotional wringer. The third - I can already tell it is going to rip my heart out, chop it into little pieces and stamp all over them. I have been a lot more successful about not spoilering these games than I was with Dragon Age, but I have still picked up enough to know some of my choices in the earlier games are leading to some serious pain. And that's without the whole 'the galaxy is doomed and I don't know if we can save it' plotline. The game does a really good job of making the odds of success seem extremely low...

 ...when a combination of hayfever and the increased light in the mornings means I reliably wake up around 5:30am, regardless of when I actually went to sleep the night before. You would think that I would compensate by going to bed earlier, but that would be too much like common sense. So, sleep deprivation is the order of the day. On the plus side, the garden is awesome at the moment. Also, daylight savings came in this morning, which may help with at least one part of the problem. 

I have also been rather busy lately, but I am hoping that the period of busyness will more or less wrap up after I give my cooking class tomorrow, and to help that along  I am taking some time off work in the second week of the school holidays. 

I spent half last week at a Women in Maths conference. I was a bit nervous going into it, for some reason, but it turned out really well. There was a surprisingly large number of people there, the talks were interesting, and I met some really interesting people. Normally I only get to go to statistics conferences, so it was good to see what people are doing in other fields of maths and maths related subjects. I even went to a physics (well, technically astronomy) talk and was pleased I hadn't completely forgotten everything. 

I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda. That game has gotten a lot of flak and negative criticism, but on the whole I thought it was a perfectly fine and enjoyable game. I can see how it compares unfavourably to some of the other Bioware games - it didn't grab me anywhere near as much as the Dragon Age games have (then again I have always preferred fantasy to sci-fi) - but taken on its own merits it was ok (if not amazing). It kept me engaged through a fairly thorough and complete playthrough,  but I am in no hurry to play it again. So I am back playing Dragon Age: Inquisition again. Since I have now played the first two games I have been wanting to do a run through with the characters and choices I made in those games, rather than the defaults. It's weirdly satisfying being able to do this. 

I am really rather looking forward to having some time off. In the same week we shall be having my parents visit, celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary, and heading to the biannual plant fair with dirtygreatknife . It's going to be a good week.

 So I  just encountered a new species of alien in Mass Effect: Andromeda. All the voice actors for characters of this species have Australian accents (mostly  of the 'I am trying to be more ocker than Steve Irwin' variety), and the capital city of their civilisation is called Estraaja. I suppose I should be grateful none of them have said 'Crikey!'. Yet. I think my eyeballs rolled under the couch...

 Is why, in RPGs, you can usually only wear two magic rings at the same time. I wear eight rings as a matter of course, and could wear more, except I have never found any small enough to fit my pinky fingers (leaving aside plastic kiddie rings). And that's without getting into the mediaeval practice of wearing rings on the first finger joint as well as on the knuckle. Why would an adventurer not want to maximise their advantage by piling on as many magic rings as possible? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

1. Wearing rings that do not fit you very well (as would likely be the case if you had a random collection looted from various dubious sources) could make it more difficult to use a weapon properly. Speaking from experience, if a ring is too loose it pinches quite a bit if you try to get a firm grip on something,  especially something hard. Still, this shouldn't stop mages or maybe  even archers.
2. Magical interference. You might think the ring of attack and the ring of defense, and the ring of charisma, and the ring of perspicacity will work exactly as advertised, but when you put them on  together what actually happens is that you turn an unpleasant shade of green and become highly attractive to termites. 

Of course,  the real reason is that it's just a pain to keep track of...

I finally finished all the add-ons for DA:O yesterday, so I was going to start DA II today. However, it turned out the second hand game disc I bought was damaged and it wouldn't load. That's the only version of the game I have found (DA II was nowhere near as popular as the first and third games and us six years old now, so not entirely surprising). At least I bought it from a game shop, so I should be able to get my money back.

The cold has made a bit of a resurgence this weekend, although I may have only myself to blame. I sat up much too late reading Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (which, naturally enough, I recommend highly). As a result I have not done the front garden weeding that desperately needs to be done before the rain sets in next week. I have been doing a lot of crochet lately, however.

1. I am really bad at avoiding spoilers

2. I have a great talent for choosing the most tragic and least likely to have a happy ending of all the romantic choices in these frigging games. In my own defense, there are not many options that _do_ have happy endings as such, but I still seem to stumble into the worst of them.

In other news, this is the cold that never ends...

Andy and I are sick. I am hoping it is the mildish cold that Ashwyn had recently,and not the horrible thing that has been going around work atm.

We farewelled our exchange student last week, and managed to get in a day of mass pruning in the garden (prune in June - at least if you live on this end of the planet) over the long weekend before succumbing, so that's something I guess.

Currently reading: the last book in the Temeraire series
Currently playing: Dragon Age: Origins (yeah, yeah I know, I am asking for it)

Not having a lot of luck getting into ESO lately. The server has been down for maintenance the last two nights and tonight it's downloading a patch. The server regularly goes down for maintenance on Monday or Tuesday and Thursday nights. It is scheduled for 8am North American time, which is probably a fairly sensible time for bringing a game down, except here it's prime playing time. And so I turn to the old faithful LJ...

Only one and a half more weeks of trying to do two jobs at once. It has actually settled down a bit in the last week. We have mostly gotten all the performance review and staffing change stuff that needed to be sorted out for the new financial year in place. This week I have managed to dedicate a couple of afternoons to actually doing real work. Note that I say mostly, though. There's still a couple of situations that have the potential to cause some pain in the near future.

After that I am going to Sydney for a week for the joint ASC/IMS conference. It's going to be a busy time (the sessions go from 8:30am to 6pm most days), and somehow my papers always seem to get scheduled in the early morning sessions at these things.

And then I will fall in a heap. Or, you know, maybe just relax and enjoy having only three meetings scheduled in a week instead of the three a day I seem to have been averaging lately.

I also finally went off and got my blood tests done, and the news is mostly good. Iron stores are still fairly low, but my haemoglobin is more than fine, and my circulating iron is quite high (in other words I'm not managing to put any iron away for a rainy day, but I am more or less keeping up with my body's rather high demands). My thyroid hormones are back to a level I feel more comfortable with, but my thyroid stimulating hormone levels are getting higher, and my anti-thyroid antibodies are also high. So, the Hashimoto's appears to have reactivated, but the extra medication I've been taking is kind of keeping me on top of it. So, on the whole, feeling fairly cheerful.

Sorry, I meant to be getting back to this sooner, but between hot weather (the kind of hot weather where it's too hot to do anything but scurry between air-conditioned boxes always seems to discombobulate me as much as if I actually had to be out in it) and toying with having a bit of a cold, and the new place not quite as well set up for sitting at my laptop, I couldn't really summon the energy for it.

Anyway, where were we...ah yes, we'd just gotten the keys.
So we drove over to the new house, let ourselves in and marvelled at it a bit. Then we poked around a bit, discovering the confusing range of air-conditioning and heating options (there seem to be two of the former and three or four of the latter), the very large number of picture hooks (good) and the fact that we didn't seem to have keys for all the locks (bad). Then the removalists showed up and started hauling stuff out of the truck.

I spent the next few hours doing the 'put that in there...no just dump that there for now...' thing while Andy went to get the kids from school and then he and the removalists went back to the house for round two and I actually started unpacking. The new house was a bit dusty because no one had been living in it for a while, and also there's no obligation when someone sells you a house that they do the kind of clean you need to do when you move out of a rental property and have to pass an inspection or lose your bond. So all the shelves and cupboards had to be swept out before we put anything in them.

The removalists came back about 5pm with the remainder of the stuff, and once they had gotten all that inside, it was time for them to reassemble the furniture that they had disassembled to move - principally the beds and the dining table. There were a number of problems with this as a) they could not understand how to put Andy's and my bed back together, so Andy had to help them, b) they had managed to lose a large number of the bolts from Liam's bunk bed, rendering the top bunk unsafe to use and c) they put Erin's bed (also a bunk but with a desk underneath) together the wrong way so the ladder and the guard rail were against the wall. This latter meant that Andy and I had to half disassemble it, turn it around and then reassemble it again.

We ordered pizza for tea, bathed the kids, managed to actually find all of their bed linen, and put them to bed. Then, for want of anything better to do (we couldn't find the antenna cable for the TV) and a great many boxes urging us to unpack them, Andy and I did more unpacking. Until finally about 10:30 we packed it in (ha ha) and went to bed. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't find the bedding that was on our bed just that morning, and although we managed to dig out a couple of sheets, we could only find one spare pillow.

And so we passed our first night in our new house, passing the pillow back and forth between us. Since then there's been a lot of unpacking and sorting out of various teething issues.

It turns out we were missing some keys - the real estate agent rang us up on Monday and said they'd forgotten to give us them all.

We never found the antenna cable for the TV - Andy went out and bought a new one. And then went out and bought another, because he got the wrong kind first time round. And even then we couldn't watch the telly, because the reception was terrible. 'Maybe this is why the previous owners moved out', he said. 'People don't sell their house and move to Canberra just to get better TV reception' was my response. Eventually we had to call out Mr Antenna, and he discovered that the house appeared to be wired up in a more elaborate way than most TV studios, with a large number of TV points and far more sophistimacated connections than were actually necessary. So he snipped a few of those out, and now the TV is fine.

The internet took just about as long to sort out. They would have connected us pretty much immediately on disconnecting the old place, except there was some kind of issue with the phone line to begin with (or so they said - by the time we dug the phone out of a box and plugged it in, if there was a problem it was gone). The there were no more ADSL ports left in our area. So we eventually had to get a man out (Adam from Adam) to put an antenna on our roof. Now we have wireless, and because it is more expensive we reduced our allowance from 200Gb to 100Gb. We had used 13Gb within the first 36 hours of it being put on. Stay tuned for us being shaped well before the end of the month...

We managed to get about 50% unpacked by the end of the first weekend, and maybe about 80% by the end of the first week (with no internet and no TV there was not much else to do but unpack). We got most things in order, but some things had to wait on furniture. We lost one bookshelf during the move (it was too fragile to move so we basically threw it out), and we also decided to put all the cookbooks on shelves (in the old house they were in one of those large kitchen pan drawers), so we were going to need more shelf space. Last weekend Andy did a run to IKEA and picked up some bookshelves and some deeper shelves, so we could unpack both books and board games. At this point the only thing that's still awash with boxes is our room. This is because we need some new bedroom furniture, and we can't unpack our clothes properly until we have drawers to put them in (although technically we have drawers, but I refuse to unpack things into the grungy old drawers only to have to move them again when the new furniture comes). There's also some figures and garb that has yet to be unpacked.

We have the following furniture on order: a lighted glass display case (for figures); a new bedroom suite for Andy and I; a custom gaming table.

We still need: a sofa bed or futon for the back/family room; a new bed for Liam; storage for DVDs and CDs

The new house is very awesome, and I think it will be even more awesome once we have it all set up to our satisfaction. There are a few small irritations and things that aren't quite how we hoped they would be, but for the most part this move has been pretty good.

Casualties: four fingernails (not a bad tally all told); the aforementioned bookcase; the last of our favourite set of wine glasses (it was already broken, but Andy's superglue fix was not sufficiently strong); The Big Fella (Andy's large 60cm high Alien figure) - like the wine glass he was already broken and the fix came unfixed during the move; Andy's left leg - which he somehow managed to impale on his replica Conan sword.

Right now we're gearing up for crazy birthday week, and then it will be off to Canberra for me.