Garden Project Day 3

Here's some dirt that should actually host a nice garden. You can see the difference between the new stuff (delivered by none other than the best) and the old stuff. The dump truck was just over an inch too wide to be able to back through the gap between two fence posts, so he had to dump the dirt right there, and I had to move that dirt out of the parking lot and out of the way, because we're getting another load tomorrow (okay, another part load, as the bobcat operator where we got the dirt from couldn't reach any higher, so that's really only a quarter of a load you see there):


Today was a much longer day than yesterday. Yesterday we really only worked on the yard for a couple hours, but today we worked for closer to ten hours. Behold our progress:



You can see I moved that whole pile of dirt over - we'll be using a wheelbarrow to spread it through the whole garden, after we install the path and the surrounding 'walls'. Today we also built half the forms for the concrete we are pouring to make the path.



Tomorrow: concrete and bricks. I've never done any of this stuff before, so it should be a very informative day.

Garden Project Day 2

Today was another day of using the rototiller and scooping out gravel, plus some pricing out of various materials. It wasn't that exciting, but we did solidify our plan a lot more and are ready to add some decent soil.



Check out the size of some of the rocks on top of the wheelbarrow. We have quite the high quality dirt, let me tell you. That is, of course, why we have such healthy looking grass - all the nutrients and stuff. Tomorrow we are getting a dump truck full of good soil, and we will dig out where the path through the garden will be.

Garden Project Underway

You read that right; the same girl who killed chrysanthemums (supposed to be hardy, come back every year) in 2 weeks (brown n crispy), is making a garden. Also, the girl who's been on all kinds of vacations without remembering her camera actually took a 'before' picture:




Ain't she purdy? We keep such a fetching lawn... well, not anymore we don't. Instead we're going to keep a nice vegetable garden. Here's the first afternoon's work:




I didn't work the rototiller, but I was on gravel detail. Here's the fruits of my labour:



Highlights of the day include uprooting a tree and bashing my hand into a rusty bolt while trying to remove another (you can see in the first picture there is a 'wall' structure in the corner - that was supposed to be our compost area). I actually broke a bolt too... I'm so tough... heh...

Onward to day 2...

Fun with Numbers

In LotRO (and other MMOs I suspect), there is a function where you can find out how much accumulated time you've spent logged in as a specific character (type the command /played into the chat bar). On a lark, I decided to do this on my main character, Melawe. My result: 2 months, 3 days, 18 hours, 56 minutes and 34 seconds.

By itself, that number seems like mere trivia, but I am trained in math, so to speak, so I had an innate need to make that number mean something relevant. Well, here's the relevance: I created that character a mere 10ish months ago, so quickly that number becomes: 20% of my existence since her creation has been poured into her. After a little more tinkering with this /played function, I discovered that my other characters I've created since Melawe have taken up an additional 7% of that time.

That means that if I sleep for approx. 30% of my time, then there's only 70% left of my life to fit all this play time into, which means that I am logged into LotRO for 39% of my waking life, and this isn't even counting any characters I may play that were created before I created my main character (and there are several of those - the reason I can't include them in my analysis here is that they would pollute the data, since I cannot discern how much of their playtime has occurred since Melawe's inception).

If we translate this into hours per day, then I play as Melawe for an average of 4.74 hours per day and another 1.7 hours playing as one of my other 5 characters I created after Melawe, for a grand total of 6.44 hours per day (nearly 7 hours per day).

That's a lot of time. Thinking back, every time I get passionate about something, large percentages of my time go into whatever my fixation is. When it was Diablo II, there was a similar amount of time devoted; when it was watching season after season of Buffy on DvD, there was actually probably a greater percentage of time devoted to it, when it was board games, I played every night and stayed up far later than I do for LotRO (I cannot force myself to get less than an average of 7 hrs sleep per night anymore, but I sure did in those days). All these things are much better than homework, which in my university days took up almost 50% of my time (cutting severely into my sleep time).

The good thing about fixating on one activity for a long period of time is that the cost of entertainment is dramatically reduced. Here are some examples of common entertainment activities:

Watching a movie in a theatre (per person): admission: $12, snacks: $8, gas: ? time: 2 hours.
Watching a rental movie, new release: cost, $5, time: 2 hours.
Cable TV: $40 per month, suppose 80 hours per month

Here are some of my activities and attached habits:
Settlers of Catan: Cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $50. hours played: 1000+
LotRO: Total cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $325. hours played: 3614 (this is a tally of most of my chars)
Buffy (assuming I paid for it instead of borrowing them): $350, for 144 hours

Summary:
Theatre: $10/hr (plus gas)
Rental movie: $2.50/hr
Buffy: $2.43/hr
Cable TV: $0.50/hr
Lotro: $0.09/hr
Settlers: $0.05/hr

Some of these activities have recurring fees, which keep their cost/hour up, whereas others have a one time fee, and these get cheaper and cheaper the more you engage in them. My current affliction has me entertained for 9 cents per hour, and that will go down and down and down as I continue to play.

A Blast from the Past

I recently reinstalled City of Heroes, just for nostalgia's sake. I missed being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and upon meeting new friends who had also previously played, I was curious about whether or not we could ever have crossed paths during that time. Considering my discovery that I have 12 heroes spread across 7 servers, it seems like it would be likely, but it looks like they played primarily on one of the few servers I didn't try.

It turns out that my highest level character was only on level 18 when I stopped playing City of Heroes a number of years ago. That's not really very high I imagine, yet she felt very powerful to me at the time. Upon taking her for a test drive this morning, I realized she really must be powerful, since I completed a mission all by myself (I don't remember how to find a group or what my character is supposed to do once in a group) first try, without really remembering what my skills do, how to steer (I kept trying to use LotRO commands, which don't translate over to CoH), or what all those little consumable things do (although I did figure out that right-clicking them gives me a description without actually using them).

Interestingly, the game tells me that I have not played my characters for 3388 days, which is roughly 9 years ago, which is impossible since the game only came out 5 years ago. I wonder how long it has really been, but I know I didn't play for very long because my computer at that time couldn't really handle the game, and physically melted inside trying to run it. Interestingly, I remember playing around Christmas time (I remember gigantic battles against a huge snowman, with upwards of 50 heroes combatting it), so external temperatures were not a factor in my computer's little meltdown. I wonder if CoH days count double, because I estimate I last played 4.5 years ago.



This is a picture of my lvl 18 hero, Burninatrix. She burns stuff. It's pretty sweet. I wonder if I wrote up a backstory for her, but I don't remember how I would find out for sure. I wonder if the fun I had with her is at all related to the fun I have with my main character in LotRO, who also burns stuff (my first real delight with my Loremaster was throwing Burning Embers, which has the nifty side effect of leaving a scorch mark on the ground around the target).