Saturday, December 03, 2005


Here Sabastion is showing his pal Patches his blue ring, while Patches is holding a red.
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005


My sister Barb got married on Saturday, I never managed to get a shot of her and Gunther (her husband), but here's a pic of her wedding dress.
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This is Barb with Nancy, a longtime friend and one of her bridesmaids
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Me and Barb on the dance floor. Or rather, me having a good time, and Barb wondering when her brother lost his mind.
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This is my nephew Mike, cruising for a date. I'll give him this, he cleans up well.
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My mom and her father, taken from the swing you'll see below.
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My mom, my son and my grandfather. I'll let you sort out who is who.
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Killroy was here
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This is Sabastion guarding the whirlygig at my parents' house.
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Sunday, August 28, 2005


Here's me and my son, in a battle of wills. I wanted him to go down for a nap, he didin't. In this case, I won.
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This is Sabastion, doing ABA therapy. He's learning mimicry right now. He's doing very good.
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Monday, June 06, 2005


This is what my son looks like now. Handsome little bugger, isn't he?
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Monday, May 02, 2005


This is a test posting of Hello. The picture is of me and my son when he was only 17days old. And let me tell you, he ran that dungeon with an iron pacifier!
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Appeasing the Traffic Gods



Okay, so a couple weeks ago, as I was coming home from taking my friend Fred home from a game, I got pulled over for speeding. It was over pretty quickly, and I drove home with an $85 ticket. It's a fair cop, and I suppose I deserved it. I do occasionally breach the speed limit, although I've become a bit more careful since I became a dad. I rarely get pulled over, and assumed this was the standard karmic payback I get every couple years for having a foot with 10% more Lead content than the average driver.

Sunday night, I was driving home from work (I work at Kennedy Space center, and live 20 miles to the south), and found SR3, the route I normally take, was closed at the south guard gate. I took 405 west to US1 and continued my way from Titusville, south toward Cocoa. As I got my ticket a few miles north of where I got onto US1, I made sure to keep my speed at around 55mph. It was about midnight, and the road was pretty clear.

Or so I thought. You guessed it: familiar red-and-blue lights started flashing behind me. I pulled off the road, muttering "Crap. Crap. Crap!"

I rolled down my window as the cop walked up. "Evening, officer. Is there a problem?"

"You were speeding, sir. Can I see your license and registration?"

I handed them out to him. "I thought the speed limit here was 55."

"Along this stretch of road, it is. But back by Faye Blvd, it's 45. That's where I clocked you going 54." He started back to his car, then turned back. "Have you recieved another ticket recently?"

I nodded. "Yeah, a couple weeks ago, up in Titusville." He nodded, then continued back to his cruiser. I sat there is my car, feeling embarrassed and stupid.

Then I did the praying version of "sending out a feeler." I asked silently to the universe, "Who do I have to appease to get let off with a warning?" I shrugged a little, "'Cause anything I need to do, (within reason!)," I added, knowing whatever hears these things will gladly take all it can get, "and I'll do it. Just let me know."

I sat there for several more minutes before the officer got out of his cruiser and came back to my window. He handed back my paperwork and said, "Sir, I'm going to let you go with a written warning..."

I blew out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and said, "Bless you!" He had me sign a form acknowledging why I had been pulled over, to which he added a note that it would have been a $158 ticket. I headed home, and said to the universe, "Okay, what do I need to do?"

I received no answer. So, I resolved to research the question in the occult library that I and my wife have amassed over the years, especially a book call Urban Primitive. But I keep forgetting to sit down and actually do the research (I'm at work as I write this).

This morning, Puck sat down beside me and said he'd had a dream. From what he got from the dream, he figured it was important to deliver this message: "Don't be an oathbreaker." He didn't know what it means, just that it was important he deliver it.

You know, it wasn't until I was behind the wheel again that the message clicked. Unfortunately, I am at work, so I can't look up anything (the Google searches I tried were less than satisfying...). So, I figured I would detail Traffic, as a diety/ power/ anthropomorphic personification.

Traffic is a very ordered entity. He exists to make sure everything is going where it needs to go, but also that things arrive when they need to arrive. He holds dominion over pathways that pass more than one thing at a time: roadways, networks, bureaucratic grapevines and post offices. But a true place of power for Traffic is the airport terminal, because it is a nexus of at least three forms of traffic: cars parking and leaving, planes flying in and taking off, and people within the terminal itself, moving from place to place, with the terminal itself almost never being the destination, merely the medium in which the travelers move, between other modes of transit. Pure traffic.

You ask Traffic for help to get things speedily to their destination. When he smiles on you, lights at intersections are green as you pass through so you don't have to break stride, mail sent via ground somehow makes it across the country the next day, things like that.

Traffic is both very easy and very hard to get along with. All he asks for is patience, courtesy, and that you follow the rules of movement in the medium he is being invoked in. When tempers flare, he looks away. When many people show anger and discourtesy in a short period of time, especially if they try to ignore or bypass the rules, then Traffic may storm off in a huff. This is where gridlock comes from.

So, I suppose I should show proper courtesy to Traffic. Sending a message to him in another domain where he holds sway seems appropriate. So:

Thank you, Traffic, for sparing me from another ticket. I'll try to pay attention to the rules of the road from now on.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Okay, I'm at work, things are slow at the moment (6:25pm), and the servers at Steve Jackson Games are down.

Hmmm, Let's make a blog entry.

Looking back on what I've written before, things have really changed. And yet, few things really have. We refinanced the house in December, paying off my Insight and consolidating a bunch of bills. We currently do not have DirecTV, and won't until we build up a bit more in savings. But that's okay, as a friend is taping the shows we like to watch on cable, and we have a makeshift antenna for local channels. We still have the internet, and our cellphones have become are main phones (another reason for not restoring DirecTV: it needs a land line to phone home).

I'll likely be writing about less "mystical" things, going into the comic strip I want to write and RPG stuff I am putting together. Not that the magical aspects of my life have gone away (the group I'm in, Clan Of The Firery Moon, is doing the ritual for a Beltania celebration in a couple weeks), it's just that no "magic-specific" things have been occurring to me to write. If something does, I won't exclude it however.

We're doing alright, moneywise, right now. Got a good refund from the IRS, now that we did the taxes this yesterday (showing the down side of procrastination: it delays getting the good stuff, too).

Let's see... Game setting...

The Realm of the Segareigh (Interdimensional Space Opera)

The Intersticia (the Spaces Between) is the realm of interdimensional space. They have an actuality and reality of their own, with vessels making their way between the universes and outposts that float in the void. The ancients of legend, the Segareigh, are said by some to have placed the worlds in perfect order. Other believe they merely created the Goldlines, which are the means to navigate and survive in the Intersticia. Although the Segareigh are long gone from the known realms, they are remembered by subject races, who hold dominion over the vast swaths of the Intersticia. The subject race that protects the local "Set" of worlds (a Set numbers over 10^18 worlds, and there are more than 3 times 10^23 Sets) are called the Tirene.

The Tirene measure their lives in millenia the way humans would measure their lives in months. Although they specify that they are mortal, they are often treated with deference even by those dieties who take a direct hand in the affairs of their worshippers. They seem to be soft-spoken and benevolent, but there's always a feeling of uneasiness when one deals with them as if, for all the sweetness they project, crossing them would be a mistake of apocalyptic proportions.

The Tirene Set has other subdivisions, mainly based on dominant species (although there is a lot of bleed-over/mixing), or on groups that have formed political coalitions. (In forming these subdivisions, the Tirene don't count. They are there to protect the integrity of the Goldlines, and to keep skirmishes from getting too out-of-hand.) There are thousands of possible races that players can choose from, from the standard fantasy races (elf, dwarf, orc, etc.) through sci-fi types (Klingon, Kzin, Grey) to odder types (spiritforms, djinn, shapeshifters).