Wow. Twenty weeks since the last update. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find nobody's paying attention any longer. Well if you have, or kept me on as a friend simply by way of not removing me, here's what's been going on in my life. I've suffered no disasters, carry no angst, and have few troubles hanging over my head. I wonder if the sheer lack of anything significant to bitch about has been the very thing from updating. There's been simply too much other stuff to do.

If I recall correctly I was just about to get married at last post. That happy event did indeed come to pass, the Saturday before Halloween. MrsTR always kind of wanted a Halloween wedding and the timing for such a theme couldn't have been better. In the months since we have been kept up the fun and romance and I couldn't be happier. MrsTR is the best wife in the history of forever as far as I'm concerned (I'm sure many of you will have a differing opinion, but I understand. :) ) .

I am still employed at the radio station and continue to get up at stupid o'clock in the morning to be at work by 5 am. My wife demonstrates her sheer fantasicness by getting up with me and fixing me breakfast and preparing a lunch while I'm showering and getting dressed. I have not asked her to do this and have regularly reminded her how completely okay it is with me if she stays in bed. She continues to get up anyway and I'm all kinds of happy for that time with her in the morning. At work I'm still doing the same job, studio producer of the morning show and playing with the audio for post show production. The remotes have been a casualty of the economy. They began to dry up last August and I went four months with none at all. That's been a large hit to my bank account, but the past two months have seen one each. So maybe things are picking up. We'll see.

Last month we moved. I greatly dislike the process of moving but the end result is so worth it. The place we moved from was that apartment I found back in November '06, the one I signed on the same day I was laid off. For what I needed from that place it did the job, but once MrsTR and I got married we needed more space. Most of her things were in storage just because there was no room for them. There's more than 100 extra square feet here for just over $100 more dollars a month and MrsTR is getting more and more of her things in. We'll probably still have to either keep the storage unit (moving things of mine into it) or have a big sale and get rid of some of the stuff I don't need. Despite that the place is nearly perfect. Were closer to her work and even though we are farther from mine than we were, the commute is faster due to less lights and higher speed limits. Plus this place has fine amenities: a pool (Son and MrsTR both LOVE swimming) seventy five steps from our back porch (oh yes, we have a back porch, fenced in, that we quickly fell in love with), an exercise room, a DVD lending policy, a huge screen tv lounge, a tennis court, and a clubhouse that offers coffee. There's a lack of closet space though, but I think it's made up for by having three bathrooms. The worst thing about it is the washer/drying is a small stackable model and simply doesn't do that great of a job. The model we were shown of unit had full size, side by side w/d and the leasing agent told us ours would too. Not so and we almost walked out of the whole deal for it. We went so far as to tour another place down the road. But after the heat of outrage faded we sat and made a list of qualities for each place and conceded this one was simply better in so many ways. So we took it and let our displeasure known, and I plan to stay on them for this list of stuff to repair and improve we developed. I have to say though, the maintenance people have done alright. Not great, but alright. All in all I think we'll be quite happy here. The border collie enjoys it better. With the porch he can get outside more.

Son love the place. His room is bigger and he has his own bathroom off it. Plus, as I said, he love the pool. The first weekend he was here that it was open he spent thirteen hours in the water (I kept track). This last weekend he put in nearly as much. He still is with his mom most of the time, and I'm not happy how her boyfriend is staying weekends with them (or they with him) on the alternate weekends. This week though he is with my parents attending a cub scout day camp for a week. He was apprehensive about it, but I think that's coming from it being something new. I think once he gets rolling he'll love it. I plan to call tonight to find out how the first day went.

My D&D game continues with mostly the same people. Two, a married couple, had to drop due to their jobs bearing down hard on them (they work at the same hospital), but the other five seem to be enjoying themselves. And I'm having fun. This is a much looser game than the last I ran. Honestly most of the time I'm doing my prep the afternoon before the session. They fought their first dragon the session before last (a juvenile green) and beat it (though they did have NPC help, mostly as added distraction for the dragon). They've since turned their attention to a haunted graveyard, that I've blatantly based off WoW's Raven Hill cemetery. The most recent session taught them why the orcs that occupied nearby Raven Hill (until the PCs, those same NPCs, and a Stone of Summoning Earth Elementals cleared them out) never explored the cemetery half a mile away: monstrous spiders and mobs of stirges will do much to drive invaders away. Come this next session I think the full group will be able to attend and, barring stupidity, they should make it all the way to the graveyard - possibly to their regret. :-)

As for my writing, well, it has suffered. Mostly from playing WoW way too much. I started a new fantasy, got stuck and shelved it. Started an urban fantasy, got it to the point that I realized I didn't really know what I was trying to do with it. Then picked that other fantasy back up and reworked the main characters, wrote out notes, reworked the main characters again, got rid of a few, and streamlined the beginning. I got two chapters written when we started our move work. So it's been on hold since then. We found this place on my birthday, filled out the paperwork two days later, started packing, had to delay the move in date, had the later move in date moved back another five days (they fonud where a pipe was leaking), and then almost walked out on the whole deal before finally getting going on the physical move - at 3:30 in the afternoon! (that thanks to the washer/dryer reality).

So part of my updating here is to get my fingers used to typing again. We still have a lot of work to get settled in here, but the hard work is done. The critical things are out of boxes. We've had the housewarming party. We can stop thinking about, "what do we have to do next?" and just live here now, doing bits and pieces as we're want to do. So that means I can get back on that fantasy. It'll likely be tomorrow, but it feels good just to have it ready in my head. I've let my warcraft account lapse (anyone know how long blizzard will keep an account on hold, waiting for you to buy another card full of time?) and am playing my last Civilization game - on an easy level so I can dominate and have a good time. :-)

With me actually writing I hope to have something to actually update about here, because I sure don't want to do it on MySpace or Facebook, so here's hoping you hear from me soon. Hope all is well with each and every one of you. I'll be poking around your LJs to see.

...except for setting up for the big Halloween extravaganza thing. We (me, Ms Carnival, Hostdude) met at Hostdude's house about 1:30 and were later joined by three others as the afternoon of work went on. All three tents are now in place, so the majority of the construction is complete. We still have a set of black plastic "walls" to get up, and the divides inside the tents. That means the decorating can soon get started.The front yard graveyard is up, the basic lights are up in it, as are the dead trees. We have an amazing archway to the graveyard this year. It's on loan, but Hostdude is hopeful it'll become a donation. We'll see. I'll be going back over there this week to get some more work done, maybe those inside walls.

Other than that, I've been working and living as cheaply as possible. No remotes since Labor Day means paychecks stripped to the bone. Ms Carnival and I are about settled on a date, but are still working on venue idea and the technical fiddly bits like the license and such.

Had another session of my D&D game on Saturday, #6. ( Behind the cut because I rambled more than I expected )
I had to have a drink when I got home. So did Ms Carnival (the Rogue).

Lasagna is in the oven. I am hungry. Ms Carnival will be here soon. I am financially poor, but rich in the things that matter most. Including having plenty of cheesy phrases with which to close out an LJ entry.

Wow - I've actually managed to work up a new post.

The local independant newsweekly has an annual Best Of issue. This year, for the first time, they took votes electronically only, eliminating the chance of physical ballot stuffing. Certainly the chance for electronic stuffing existed, but how easier or not that is I dunno. Nonetheless, when all was said and done and the votes counted and the results printed, the station I work for came in as 3rd favorite (FM) radio station, behind the local, independent, listener supported, not PBS station, and a top hits with heavy urban flavor station. That's the good news. The better news is the Morning Show for which I am one of the two producers won top honor for Best Drive Time show and Best Talk Show, and the two hosts were chosen as Best Radio Personalities.

Yay us. I couldn't be more happy about it even if this translated into extra money.
 

And So I shall dominate your Friends List, but will be kind enough to do it in a few parts. So you can skip to the topic that most interests you, go a little bit at a time, or just skip the entire thing because you're staring at this and asking - "who is this guy now?"

( So to begin - the recent Big Son Weekends! )

 

Until yesterday I had never attended a Renaissance Festival. Now I can check that off my list and add "go to another one" to it.  This weekend centered around the TN Ren Fest. Fun Stuff.

I have now seen Lou Reed and Aretha Franklin perform with my own eyes. I am pleased.

Now that I'm employed by a radio station sponsoring the music festival again, I was able to go and enjoy it. A place to sit, an available cooler of drinks, and a private (for the stations, not me alone! :-) ) port-o-john make all the difference. Backstage? Nope - but don't care. One fun-filled and tiring weekend.

The above quote, for any of you who might not know, comes from Tim Burton's fantastic film, Ed Wood. 

And yes indeed, despite evidence to the contrary, I am still alive and well. I have been happily busy most of the time, and those times I haven't been I have spent vegging out in from of the computer playing Warcraft. 

So there's a snapshot of my life right now. I'm very glad you've kept me on your friend's list. Here's hoping I'll actually make time to post more often. Now I'm off to review everyone's last few weeks of posts and catch up with  your lives.

Alrighty - going to try getting back in the habit of posting these weekend with Son recaps again.

Okay, I've greatly neglected posting for quite a while now. Rest assured (in the longshot chance you were worried) that all is well. All is in fact more than well. All is pretty much fantastic!

Son is racing through Kindergarden. We've had some great weekends. I went to his class Thanksgiving Day play some weeks ago and talked with his teacher for the first time. The school doesn't do any e-mail notices, but she nicely offered to mail me the weekly notices along with his periodic report cards. So that's fantastic. They've been coming in for about a month now and it's great to be able to keep up with what he's doing in school. And with the report card (which covers a long list of things, including paying attention, doing tasks without supervision, learning letters, and so forth) I've been able to work with him some on our weekends. Today I went to his class Christmas play and it was just as much fun. Watching the kids sing little Christmas songs and recite A Visit From Saint Nicholas (some delivering their lines better than others, but with his experience at the radio station(s), Son know how to speak into a microphone!) was great. I'm still smiling thinking about it. Spending five hour in the car in order to attend these things is less than fun, but I'm all kinds of grateful my job allows me the time to do it.

And the job is still going fantastic. I'm having more fun and making more money than I was while employed at the old station. Hurrah! The boss has given me more constructive criticism and it's had a noticeable effect on my air delivery. Plus I love getting to play with the audio. My work there has let Boss build up the "best of" segments from the morning show to what he's long wanted them to be. No more two minutes snippets twice an hour on Saturday mornings! No less than thirty full minutes split up over each hour! It also strokes my ego nicely to know people are e-mailing and calling the show on the mornings when the morning team isn't there as if they were! I'm just loving it.

It also inspired me to renew what used to be a year end tradition with me: compiling a collection of choice songs from the year. For about six years in the '90s I did this, made bunches of copies, and gave them out as supplement Christmas gifts. I fell out of doing it after the nineties, though I made a few personal collections once in a while. with better resources than ever this year (and all of them promotional anyway) I discovered how much fun I had back then putting these together.

I'm gaming again! I'd been running a d20 D&D game for about two years before the divorce, and was in no mood to continue as that went on. A friend of mine started running a game in January but for various timing issues I was never able to jump in. That changed in September, but other events (both of them involving Ms Carnival) I missed the October sessions. However, for two solid months now I've been able to sling dice again in a Castles and Crusaders game (a more streamlined version of d20 D&D if you don't know) and am loving it. My fine stat set was marred with an 8, but as I'd decided to play a dwarf fighter I put that to his intelligence. Playing a fighter of Forrest Gumps IQ has been an unexpected blast! I don't bother keeping notes and if *I* forget anything it's perfectly in character.

And as briefly hinted above, Ms Carnival and I remain a couple. We're compatible in all kinds of ways. She likes to kiss in capitol letters. I'm ecstatic! Without really meaning to I got her interested in Battlestar Galactica (I loaded the mini-series to capture some sound for work and she caught a glimpse and asked about it, then became very interested from my description). So we're working our way through the series. Watching her watch this show is great. I refuse to give spoilers to her and sometimes her reactions are wonderful. [in the min-series physical Six is revealing to Baltar what she's done and what's about to happen. Carnival says to the screen: "And it's all his fault." One second later comes Baltar's line: "I had NOTHING to do with this!" Priceless!]. She also harbored a long time curiosity about table top rpgs, so with the permission of the rest of the gaming group she sat in on a session (the GM made her run a few bad guys) and she got into it. So she's now a regular player with two sessions under her belt now. Last Saturday her Gnome Druid delivered the killing blow to the BBEG.

She and Son get along great, which is both a relief and wonderful. If he hadn't liked her I'm not sure how things would have gone, but I've all kinds of happy it isn't even close to an issue. She's sat him once or twice on the occasions when the weather was horrible and I had to be at an outdoor remote for the station. They conspired together to make me secret Christmas decorations that now adorn my door.

It's so all good I sometimes worry I'll wake up.

I'm way overdue for an update here. I've been happily busy but have started putting together the bones of a real update on a real development in my private entries, which I'll rewrite more publicly soon. But the precognitive prize goes to miketo, who two weeks ago commented: "And if life were a novel, right about now A Woman Enters Your Life and complications ensue. Goodbye financial surplus. :) "