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).

St Patrick's Day Festivities

Yesterday was St Patrick's Day. In honour of this festive occasion, and also due to opportune coincidence with a recording of an interview and song, the Bards of a Feather put on a show. A friend and I were interviewed for the podcast in the link above, and although I think we were both pretty nervous, some interesting stuff came out of it. It was very exciting to have 9 Bards turn up to perform for the recording, as it was the most we've had performing at any one time. With so many people to get coordinated, I think we did alright at smooth transitions between songs, although it gets increasingly challenging the more people there are. We tend to have wonderful audiences who partake in general revelry during and between our songs, and last night was certainly no exception! We started the party in the Shire, moving along to the Guardsmen of the Free Peoples' kin yard, then onward to a great secluded area near Trestlebridge, before winding up in Bree. It was kind of a small tour, but at the major town hubs (Michel Delving and Bree), we had some pretty cool audiences. We like to play the music for our own enjoyment, but it really enhances the experience to find that what you are doing is being enjoyed by others also.



UPDATE: The gentleman who interviewed us has turned our recording into a wonderful video:

Grammar? Srsly?

I try not to be nit-picky, so I often hold my tongue when I see people I like making the same kind of spelling mistakes over and over and over. Here are some minor corrections I wish would make it into collective consciousness:

Viola = a musical instrument or a flower.
Voilà! = Presto! (if you can't get the accent in, no worries, but at least get the letters in order)

Definitely is definitely spelled with the word 'definite' + 'ly', which is 'de' + 'finite' + 'ly'

A watchman is one man on watch.
Watchmen are several men on watch.

Socializing and the Internet

Lots of people say that your online friends aren't as important as your real life friends, but I wonder sometimes about that. For me, my real life friends are typically more important, by virtue of I have known them longer and so we share a greater history together. This doesn't mean my friends have a seniority order of importance, but it is generally the case. Many of my real life friends are people I've known since high school - I reached adulthood with these people. I've been to their weddings, and I'm watching their families grow together. It's not about the order of meeting people - it's about the bonds we make. It just happens that the longer people know each other, the more opportunities they get to create those bonds.

That said, I spend an awful lot of time with some people online, to the point where, if we knew each other in real life, it would be the equivalent of practically living together. I may never, say, sit on the same couch as them, but I still spend a large portion of my waking day with them, close to every day. There's a point to be made that not being able to share real life experiences with them doesn't make them less important, as friends go.

There are friends I've met in real life and now keep contact with them solely via the internet. There are friends I've met online only, as well. I consider each of these people to be my friends and barely register the difference between 'online' and 'offline' friends. It would be nice to see each of these people face to face, either again or for the first time, but realistically, in many cases, this just can't happen. I am grateful that I have the internet to help me keep in contact with them at all. Should I prioritize them less because of these limitations? Some people argue yes, but I am just not convinced.

Another poem

This one is one I wrote a while back, and there is actually a melody for it as well, which I obviously can't share on a blog. This one's a sonnet, so if I wanted, I could take the same tune and apply it to any sonnet, since they share a rhythmic template. I like this one better than the last one I posted because it has rhythm, rhyme, and structure, and yet still conveys a message.

The Sweetest Thing

The winter frost makes patterns on my soul
For three long moons I put my heart away
What’s left is but a hungry gaping hole
There’s nothing I can offer, do or say
And so I hibernate and wait for spring
I take myself and store me all away
I wait for all the warmth that March will bring
The winter took the sweetest thing away

Feel not for me the same angst filled sorrow
I feel, now sure of what’s to come for me
This is an opportunity to grow
I won’t call out for help a silent plea
I find my strength inside myself today
To live life while the sweetest thing’s away.