Same Game, Different Server

I was starting to feel like maybe City of Heroes had run it's course and was on it's last legs.  It was getting harder to find enough players for good teams, no one was running task force missions and it was starting to feel kind of empty.  Here's a screencap of one of my toons logged into the Infinity server:

 

That's Doc Quantum with his back to the camera, fixture signature hero Ms. Liberty and...no one else, really.  Look at all those awesome graphics going to waste with no one there to play in them.

But a teammate from our super group suggested changing servers and what a difference it made!  Check out the exact same game location with one of my toons logged in on Freedom:

There's Bronze Beetle in the foreground and look at all the other players!  Just a few minutes defore this, a lot of these folks and others were taking part in a costume contest...

No, I didn't win.  But I am VERY encouraged to see that there are still PLENTY of CoH players around and the game is far from being over with.

Post-Yule Drowse

Maybe it's the sugar high of too many cookies and too much fruit cake wearing off.  Either that or it could be knowing that Christmas for good or for ill (if such a thing is possible) is once again over with for the better part of nearly a year ahead of us.  Whatever the reason, we're enjoying some post-Christmas downtime this weekend.  Gift cards can wait to be spent, for now we'll just relax at home.

I'm thinking that next year I should make plans for some vacation time to be used after the holiday as well, Monday is looming large already.

Looking Forward To Longer Days

Yesterday marked the Winter Solstice here in the northern hemisphere, the first day of winter and the day with the shortest amount of daylight.  From here on out, we'll keep getting more daylight with each passing day until late into June and I'm looking forward to it.  Snow at Christmas-time is nice but other than that I have no use for winter at all and I'm pretty much done with nightfall coming around in the late afternoon.

Weather Closing In, Time Running Out

I had to revise plans to go take care of the usual handyman chores at my mom's place today because of the encroaching storm.  It's not here yet but neither of us wanted my trip home tonight to be hazardous.  This leaves me with an extra day to take care of some holiday errands instead.

Every year without fail I manage to have too little time left before Christmas and still too much left to do.  If I push myself into making two trips into town today I might get some packages in the mail but most likely I'll just get the boxes and get home with them.  Just as well because I still have cards to write to be sent with the boxes and it's starting to look like the cards are going out on Monday anyway.  And there are still gifts and gift cards to be shopped for and gifted.

How is it that every year we all resolve that next year we'll get things done better, earlier, cheaper, whatever and yet each holiday season finds us just as overtaken by time racing past us toward December 25th?  I brace myself early by having my lights up outside by Thanksgiving.  I plan an extra grocery trip for ingredients for baking, I even take time off from work right before the holiday itself.  And time and space still thwart my efforts by requiring that gifts be transported hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Christmas was easier "back in the day" because we were all at home then.  It's nice to be able to send a gift to someone you care about but much nicer still to be able to hand it to them and see their smile when they open it.  Even when my older siblings made their first flights from the nest they were never further away than a half an hour's drive.  Visiting relatives for Christmas meant an afternoon away from home at the most.  But now we're fragmented, the angles of our individual lives having sent us on trajectories that take us further away from each other with every passing year.

Through the years
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow...

Christmas Came Early

I wasn't expecting to see this until "Sherlock Holmes"comes out next week but Jon Favreau gave us an early present with the trailer for "Iron Man 2" ...

The Annual Bake-athon

I started baking for the holidays some years back when money was tight and I wanted to try something more creative for gift-giving.  The good news is that people seemed to really enjoy it so I've kept up the tradition.  The bad news is that it's not really any more economical than traditional gifts,  No matter, it's become something of an annual obsession for me anyway and this year is no different.

I've already made one batch of grandma Mem's applesauce fruitcake along with a batch of banana walnut bread.  I gave the oven a rest earlier today and indulged a couple of no-bake recipes, one for peanut butter bars and the other for corn flak wreath cookies.  Maybe it's just me but it seems that the no-bake recipes are the ones that make the biggest mess.  The melted marshmallow mixture for the wreath cookies is like napalm when hot and silicone caulk when cool.  It's also vivid green and the food color can really stain your skin.

Still more baking ahead in the next couple of weeks.  Luckily I'm off from work next week so that takes a lot of the pressure off for me.

A New Look

Regular readers may have noticed the new look here.  I finally got tired enough of the old blog layout to roll up my sleeves and make some changes.  While I do know my way around XML, using an XML template as Blogger does is still a little confusing for me (I'm an old-school HTML coder) so I'm not quite ready to cook up my own template for the site yet.

But I was able to find a template that I'm comfortable with for the time being ("stretched denim") and I tweaked it just enough to suit my taste.  I flexed my graphic app muscles a little bit to whip up a new header for the page and Bob's your uncle, the blog has a new look.  We'll see how long this lasts before I get tired of it, but considering it's taken me a little over a year to get around to this update I don't expect to be changing it again anytime soon.

It's the Most Illuminated Time Of the Year

I guess I should've posted this a few weeks ago, when they first went up but better late than never...


The Christmas lights are up! As usual, our big "light up" was Thanksgiving night and we had fun calling out a countdown and throwing the switches that send our electric meter spinning. Click through the links and enjoy the pictures.

I kept saying that I wasn't going to do quite so much this year as I have in the past. As much fun as the lights are to put up there's always the dreaded task of taking them all down, usually in much more frigid weather conditions than during the installation phase. Plus, the net lights were starting to show their age with several sets one or more "dead spots" in them and some of the other lights were in need of repair before they could be used.

But I picked up a LightKeeper Pro and I was surprised to find out that the thing really works! Granted, you have to follow ALL of the directions and keep in mind that it's a tool, not a cure-all. Watching their 40-minute instructional video online really helped me understand the why & how of the tool. But in exchange for my time spent learning how to use the thing I was able to fix all of the nets and other lights in literally a very small fraction of the time it's taken me in previous years.

So now that the argument regarding the repair of the lights was moot I found myself with many more usable lights than I was initially planning to put out. I'd already bought extra canes (thinking I wouldn't be using the nets) and the "Merry Christmas" sign pictured above. Ultimately, the only decorations that didn't make it to the yard this year were Frosty, the inflatable snowman and the animated reindeer pair of Rudolph and Clarisse (these pics are from 2008). Maybe I'll add them back into the mix next year. And maybe I'll add a string of blue & white C7's along the roof...