BUY THIS!!!

This is the cover of the new Aveneged Sevenfold cd, City of Evil. It is easily the best CD I have purchased in the last two years. You can find it here at Amazon. You can also get it through the Hopeless Records webstore where I think they have the band's two previous for much cheaper than anywhere else.

I would go into more detail, but I have a great album to listen to over and over and over and over...

peace... RHM

Time Flies (and Sails and Passes and...)

Wow... I just realized that it has been over a month since I last blogged. Where does the time go?

Well, part of it goes towards work. The end of the school year puts a big strain on us at Ye Olde Pancake Hut. With Mother's Day followed by University of Illinois graduation, the closing of a local favorite breakfast restaurant (30+ years in business), then public schools letting out, we just had five weeks of VERY solid sales coupled with five weeks of solid overtime for me. Right now, I'm one of three people my boss has available to do the job that I do. One of the others can only work weekends, which limits her availability considerably. The other person is pretty much the boss' right hand person. She can do a little bit of everything and she ends up doing a LOT of little things, thus she is kept moving from task to task. All of this adds up for a very tired me. =P

More time is going towards grilling outdoors. With our new back patio slab, I have grilled out more in the passed six weeks than I have in the passed three years. Things are less stressful when you don't have unsupervised neighbor kids walking up every time you fire up the charcoal asking if they can have some of whatever you're cooking. Also, with the increased practice, I am getting quite good at this barbecuing thing. =)

On the gaming front, my Feng Shui game died a horrible, lingering death. In effect, it didn't survive my move here, since I put the game on hiatus for six weeks. Trying to pick it back up again became more difficult than anticipated. Conversely, my friend Joe's Mekton game that ran at the same time also bit the big one due to creator burnout. In effect, Joe had run out of ways to make big metal robots fight each other and still be plausible. So, after a bit of commiserating, it was determined that Dennis (another friend) and I would run a space opera game using Savage Worlds. Not my real choice of rules sets at the moment. I mean I like the game system (a lot), but I have been finding it doesn't quite fit the scope of game I like to run. Characters advance a bit too quickly for my taste, and I have found that I would like a bit more granularity in the wound system. Still, for quick and dirty systems, Savage Worlds is very tough to beat in terms of speed and completeness.

The new game is scheduled to run eight days from now. Dennis and I have a bit of work to do before then, so...

Peace... RHM