Mishaps and other haps

That’s what we’re telling people, anyway. Truth is, it’s just a coincidence that my roommate’s friend named Pumpkin is over studying with her while pumpkin muffins are baking in the oven. But if he doesn’t make it home tonight, I know there are going to be questions.

It has been a pretty good weekend. The weather has paused at “comfortable” for the time being, so we have had our sliding glass door open for the past week or so, which will help our electricity bill this next month. By this time of the year, it’s frequently a little uncomfortable outside, even frosty in the mornings, so we’re pretty lucky at the moment.

I have been spending a pretty good bit of time with people this week– online and in person. Several of us played hours and hours of WoW yesterday and later this afternoon our SR4 group is getting together to finish character creation, start the game, and perhaps consume some of the pumpkin muffins that are about to come out of the oven.

So things are good on this end. Hope everybody is having a good month so far!

Montanni hasn’t exactly figured out this whole “faction” thing yet.

He was running around in Stranglethorn a little while ago, teamed up with an orc about three levels lower. The orc kept mocking and egging on a Night Elf druid who was a level higher than Montanni. Montanni felt sorry for the poor, pretty NE and patted him on the head. Montanni and the orc kept fighting things.

Well at some point the NE had enough, or maybe the orc teased him one time too many. All of a sudden, the druid beat the shit out of the orc. I didn’t even have time to notice what was going on before the orc’s HP bar said “dead”. Then the druid ran by and tickled Montanni, so Montanni patted him on the head again.

Hey, even some members of the Horde behave badly and suffer the consequences of their actions sometimes.

Went to dinner tonight with PhysOrg, who spent half of dinner making me squirm about vice-presidents. Yes, he knows how to do that now– make me squirm. I’m still squirming. But he picks fairly innocuous material, so I guess that’s fair.

We picked up Inle after dinner and headed over to the Point to see “Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” I laughed a lot. Mostly at silly things. And naughty bits. There was quite a bit of adult humor in the movie, but I would totally take my five-year-old to see it because, you know, the naughty bits are going to go straight over his head anyway and he would enjoy the silly bits. Like the were-cow. I’m gonna buy it when it comes out on DVD.

I also learned from PhysOrg this evening that the Aardman Animations warehouse in Bristol burned down on Monday, after the movie hit #1 at the box office over the weekend. That makes me very sad. From what I have read after the movie tonight, materials used in the new movie were not damaged, but previous sets and props were destroyed.

Aargh. Aardman Animations has made such well-crafted, unique, intelligent films. I hate that part of the studio’s history has been destroyed. Hopefully, they will be able to regroup, recover and continue making wonderful movies.

***

As a side note, I realized what I what to do for my (“milestone”) birthday today. I had British humor on the brain this afternoon and thought it would be a good idea to have either an Ab Fab marathon or a Red Dwarf marathon. Of course, I will also make tasty treats– perhaps thematic, perhaps not.

When I start playing Leguma, I’ll have to find a wedding dress for her. She sort of looks like … yeah.

I started writing a post about happiness a little earlier and linked over to an article about the evolutionary origins of happiness/unhappiness in humans as a biological mechanism. Then the article disappeared into the bowels of a deep, dark archive. My link did not work and I could not find the article again, which aggravated me a little.

It’s interesting to think about emotions as biological mechanisms, though– it makes it seem a little easier to deal with, or at least understand, the waves of feeling and moods we get caught up in from time to time. I guess I mostly puzzle about it when I am unhappy or in the post-unhappy aftermath because when I’m happy, I’m too busy to notice.

Chugging right along, now I think it might be more interesting to ponder human relationships, which are at least tangentially related because our ability to form relationships with others contributes to overall happiness in life. And again, the puppet strings of biology play into our behavior as “social animals.”

Particularly, I still think romantic relationships are enigmas. People seem to have very different ideas about how to pursue these and while you can have scores of friends, the number of romantic relationships you can successfully maintain is fairly small (frequently, one at a time). So there is a matter of choice involved. Some people seem to blindly stagger through hordes of potential choices until they find one that works, while others avoid rampant dating altogether and kind of happen into a relationship through luck and quirky twists of chance.

I guess it is all chance in a way, but love doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can plan and plot for. Which is why it disturbs me when I hear people talking about “wanting to be married by age 25″ or “wanting to settle down with someone in the next five years.”

I mean you might meet the goal, but will you really get what you want? Will you be as happy with a goal-driven choice as you would be playing with chance? Does it make any difference?

I don’t think there is a right answer to this one, by any means, but it’s just a big deal to me sometimes, trying to understand the way people think when it comes to love. And hella interesting.

It has been a fairly quiet weekend here, but some good things happened:

• I finally made it back to the gym Friday evening after skipping a week to recover from cold
• I had dinner with people I care about Friday night
• I saw more of Mlitiagrl and Inle than I do during the week
• A very good hug Saturday morning
• I finally made it to the Dane County Farmers’ Market (downtown)
  on Saturday morning.  I totally failed to buy apples, squash,
  cider, and pumpkins.  I investigated a long line stretching around
  the block and discovered that there was an open-call for “The Real
  World” going on at the State Street Bar and Grill.
• Found an excellent jacket for $10 on Saturday (huge sale!). 
  Alerted my roommate and she came home with a new coat later in the day.
• I spent a lot of time on WoW this weekend.  Around 10 hours,
  I’d estimate.  Completed some quests and levelled, but also did a
  lot of farming.  Montanni has 34 gold now.  Almost halfway to
  a mount!
• Peppermint schnapps.  80 proof.  In hot cocoa.  I
  didn’t really *feel* the schnapps until I was on my third cup of cocoa
  (spaced out over the afternoon).  But then I discovered that I was
  indeed happy about all things in life.
• We met for character creation for our SR4 game this
  evening.  Spent more time than we anticipated shopping at Pegasus
  and waiting for/eating pizza, but people explained some of the 4th ed.
  changes and game world events– which was useful.  I figured out a
  few things about my character and I can work on the rest this
  week.  It would be helpful if we had hard copies of the book, but
  the publisher has been having problems and apart from a few copies sold
  at GenCon, there are currently no books.  Hopefully this will be
  remedied within the next week or two.

So it’s October and wow!  The rest of the year should be one big
party!  That’s wishful thinking, I know, but I really love the
last three months of the year.  Several fun events are coming up
(e.g. Halloween film fest, Henry Rollins) and there are enough movies
that I want to see coming out over the next few months to fill in the
activity gaps. 

Besides, January is going to hit us smack in the face one of these
days.  Must do things before winter and snow set in and the days
are so short.  And when the days are tiny and the landscape is
white for *weeks*, we should still do things.  I am totally going
to ignore January and February next year and *pretend* that they are
decent months instead of the calendrical abominations that they are.

that I will never take for granted is waking up next to someone I love.

Just noticed that Howl’s Moving Castle is playing this weekend at the Union.

I’d like to see that again– not sure when it’s going to be out on DVD.

Happy 54th Birthday to my Dad!

I was just e-mailing Michael about the current frigidity of my building and the likelihood of substituting hot chocolate for an ice cream date if the temps plummet later this week when …

::GASP::

I realized that *instant gratification* was within my grasp– for the vending cow lives upstairs and her teats secrete all sorts of hot beverages, including HOT CHOCOLATE!

Yes, for only $.45 she will secrete a reasonable amount of hot chocolate for the needy patron.

Dear, beloved vending cow– how I have missed you!