I'm so neglectful of my livejournal, it's really sad. I say this has to do with our RaiRo obsession and the fact that we've become like, hermits and spend most of our time in the office playing. To think just a few weeks ago I was ready to quit Rai again, but things have been going so well with the guild and stuffs I'm reinvigorated to the point of farming, working at capping Aana and Morg and getting ready to trans my dancer. Saturday night's WoE was probably the funnest I've had in a while (I'm sure a good chunk of that had to do with spending a lotta time defending Reph and sitting preemp bullshitting with Lion, Ashes and Sinister Monk). I e-called at one point when Mint was kicking our ass and 14 people popped through that warp and I almost cried happy tears. XD WoG represent...I don't know if its a happy day or a sad day when we're repping more people in the WoE party than GS/LN combined.

Spent some time last week chit-chatting with Greg. Haven't talked to him in an age. He's addicted to WoW, so no luck convincing him to join us on the dark side and roll up a class we need. I should really like, get off my ass and call Jay and Bob and see how they're doing. I miss my bros! I never even called my family yesterday, I'm like a bad daughter or something. I spent most of the day nomming the candy out of my easter basket and floating between the kitchen getting stuff ready for our Easter dinner (carbtastic!) and playing Rai/IMing with Strago while he worked on a paper for class.

At least the weather is getting warmer, maybe we'll be less anti-social once summer hits. Last summer was full of days spent outside with cold beer, the grills going, campfires at night and our neighbors, who are the bomb. I just can't wait, really. I want to go camping for reals, and spend some days at the lake or beach. At some point this summer my folks want to come up to visit, which is exciting. They've never been to New England. I've been pondering all the things I want to show them/places to take them. I know at least one trip to Boston is in order and it's not like it's a long drive...used to do it every day for work. We really need to get down to KY and see Ben's family too, he's homesick and I don't blame him. KY is so beautiful and it feels like home. I'll be glad to get back down there and visit. And hell maybe we'll stop by and see Rid while we're there, he's only like 2 hours from Ben's family farm. We're trying to convince Strago to come up for a visit, he just might. We're not that far apart at all. Skie lives less than an hour away when he's home from school, maybe we should try to hook up for dinner or something once he's home. (Geesh, always comes back to Rai)

Sharon's moving soon. It makes me sad, but I'm happy for her. She's totally in love and I'm sure she'll love living in Cali. It's not like we won't see her from time to time. Maybe a flight out there is in order sometime next year? I've only been as far west as Colorado, so that would be awesome!

Quite honestly, it's time to stop being lazy and start saving up for a wedding. I'm still of the opinion we go to Jamaica for a week at an all-inclusive and get married there, then have a party when we get home. Ben wants a "real" wedding with our families there. At this point I'd be happy with a JP in an alley. I mean, we've been living together with joint everything for over four years now. Would anyone really be shocked to find out we'd tied the knot? Nope, not really. We honestly considered doing it right before New Years just to file jointly on our taxes for the tax breaks. So who knows, maybe I'll come here and post some day soon that yeah, we did the deed and it's all official now. ;)

I had such high hopes for the day. Then the drama llama showed up and now I'm ready for bed. -_-

Mkay, you comment and I give you 5 things I associate with you, then you write about them. My 5 things are provided by myuumaster - Comment if you want some, then do it so I can comment and get 5 more things from you! XD

1.) Ragnarok - So I plays me some Ragnarok Online on two private servers. My main server is RaiRo. :D Ben and I play together there, and the bulk of mah friends is there. We've played on Rai through a wipe and for like, gosh a few years now! We have our own guild, Wings of Glory, and Ben's main character Dorlan is our Guild Leader. Aanaren is my 'main' a level 103 Sniper and she and Dorlan (capped 115 Sage-Professor) are married (wedding system rocks - I think I posted wedding pictures further back in my LJ). Morgaine (high mage, soon to be high wizard) is my secondary, she's married to Vodimier (97 Paladin) and they have one baby (yay for adoption system) Heimdall (baby thief). The other character I play the most is Eliza, my baby dancer.^^ Eliza's parents are Eliot (Vodimier's priestess) and Haichang (Theroff's wizard). Eliot and Haichang are also in Wings of Glory. Eliza is in the baby guild, Backward Compatible. She's freaking adorable!!! I also play on eRO, which is a high rate server. My sniper there, Aana Fairleaf, will be transcending to Ranger soon (they have some 3rd classes). Theroff totally power-levelled her through trans with his Rune Knight in like two hours! XD

Olive Garden - I love Olive Garden! Ben and I eat there when we get the chance. Their Zuppa Toscana soup is to die for, and I cloned it by piecing together different clone recipes for one that tastes pretty spot on:

1 - 1/2 lbs. bulk italian sausage (I had links, so slit them and removed the casing)
1 medium onion, finely diced
4 large potatoes, peeled & cubed
1 large bunch of kale, washed, stemmed and roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
10 cups chicken broth or stock
3/4 cup half-n-half
salt & pepper to taste
2 - 3 tbsp. olive oil

Brown sausage in stock pot or dutch oven, remove to a plate lined with paper towels to drain. Add olive oil to the pot (enough to coat the bottom) and saute and onions and garlic until the onions are translucent and tender. Add the broth and potatoes and bring to a boil. Boil until potatoes are fork tender. Turn down to a simmer and stir in the sausage, kale and cream. Add salt & pepper to taste. Simmer until heated through.

Try it, it's teh awesomesauce!

3. Laundry (Of the clothing kind!!) - So glad she specified! Laundry of the non-clothing kind is kinda an inside Twilight Dawn/Wings of Glory joke. XD I call it "Mount Washmore" because it's ever-growing! Ben's more apt to do the laundry than I am. Now that we've had the battle where I convinced him that its more efficient and just fine to wash everything on cold except for towels and stuff of that nature! He's a color separating pro! Plus, the washer and dryer are in our basement and I'm wicked short, so carrying the laundry up and down two flights of stairs is haaaard when you can't see over the basket!

4. DC Comics - I started reading Batman when I was 8 or so.^^ I've read my way through a lot of Batman, Robin, Nightwing (was soooo happy when Dick finally got his own comic), The New Teen Titans (not really new anymore!), Young Justice, Justice League, Outsiders and various others. I'm just a DC Comics kinda girl. XD! Ben grew up on Marvel, so it leads to some arguements of who would win vs. who. The most Marvel I've read is X-Men, 'cause Wolvie is teh hotness (it's all in the attitude girls).

5. Needing moar RP! - I RP Morgaine and Eliza, happy fun times! Most of the babies RP, and most of them are in the baby guild, so it makes for epic lulz. Eliza is a curious and precocious child, much to Daddy's dismay. She's a total Daddy's girl, and normally a stern look is enough to keep her minding her manners, but she's been getting in progressively more trouble these days. She's not necessarily bad, she's just testing her boundaries. Daddy is coming down hard to keep his little girl toeing the line, as much as he doesn't like to do it. Daddy has spies, and her Uncle Darien Stormhand has been keeping a close eye on her and keeping her in check. Mommy kinda indulges and dotes on her. Her Uncle Theroff definitely does. She has a secret crush on Erin Eldric, and she loves Marty (baby priest). Obviously, he's a priest like Mommy and they both have blush and toast so they were meant to be together! Hence why they run around Pront Square giggling and blowing kisses. He asked her to marry him, so now they're going to go 'play wedding' in Lutie.^^ Baby love, so cute! For Morgaine she's madly in love with Vodimier and she's fumbling her way through child-rearing. I need to bring Eliza out to play with Lion and Lomi more often. It will be epic win!^^ We're also talking about getting a long-distance table-top together with Theroff and a few others. Probably via Skype.

It's descended on our house and my place of work apparently. Last Friday I was feeling pretty darn horrible. I drug myself out of bed and said to myself I'd go in for about an hour or so, just long enough to get some pressing things done. Then I look outside and realize I had to clear snow off my truck and said forget it and went back to bed. I spent most of the day drifting between playing an hour of Rai here or there and napping on the couch having crazy fever dreams. I remember a few of them vaguely, mostly bits and pieces. Some of the highlights being:

- Tanking Valkyrie's with the baby and yelling for faster swall spam.
- Continuously mobbing Niff without anything dropping, at all.
- Pushing Theroff off his peco and going to ride away with him running after me yelling "That's my peco!" and me yelling back "You don't deserve her! She's not a peco peco, she's a chocobo!!"
- And a really strange one with lots of people in it, mainly Aana, Lomi, Lion, Vodi, Seil, Strago and Dorlan sitting in a circle staring at each other while Driftwood ran around yelling "you're full of shit" killing Dracula in east Pront.

I blame playing Rai between naps. But I'd wake up with a headache and know if I went back to sleep it would be much worse. Plus daytime TV really kinda sucks. After watching GMA & Ellen there wasn't much else aside from flipping through FoodNetwork. I lucked out with some What Not to Wear on TLC and a few episodes of A Haunting on Discovery and that's about it. I see Cartoon Network is still running marathon sessions of Johnny Test during the day...bring back The Grimm Adventures of Billy & Mandy g'damnit!

Now Ben's sick as hell. He stayed home yesterday and had crazy fever dreams too. This morning I couldn't help but laugh when he was flailing around dreaming and I was trying to wake him up to see if he'd make it to work. He fell out of bed and made this strange moan/grunt noise that had me laughing. He crawled his way back in saying "yeah, laugh it up." Turns out he was dreaming about black bears that could (surprisingly) talk, and they were having a conversation. I thought he was dreaming about ManBearPig or something by the noise he made. XD

Kate was out sick yesterday and Anne's out sick today. The big boss thanked Kate and I and we said it was Anne's fault...she started coughing first. I think he's going to follow us around the office all day with a can of Lysol. Everytime I have a hacking cough that sounds like a lung is coming up he pokes his head in my office an makes an O.o face.

I seriously need to clean the house tonight and tackle Mount Laundry. I think I'll make Zuppa Toscana soup for dinner, I need to stop for chicken broth though. How the hell we ran out of chicken broth is beyond me, I'm like a squirrel stock-piling nuts when it comes to keeping the pantry full. We're out of roaster chickens in the freezer too, grah! Not that it would help much with stock today. I think I'm still confused from being sick, that's my excuse anyway!

Oh yes, there's a dairy that sells raw milk, cheese & farm fresh eggs that's on Ben's way to work! How exciting...I need to slip him some cash and tell him to stop on the way home sometime. Ok well first I need to be nosey and check it out. I miss real farm eggs! We brought two dozen home along with a ton of produce when we went down to visit my folks this summer. My mom's taken to buying produce from the really nice Mennonite couple who have a farm down the mountain. Not sure where she's getting her eggs from with the family uproar and all, but they were darn good...yolks so yellow they were almost orange, and out of two dozen I had 3 double-yolk eggs. That's a baker's dream! I kind of want to look into a CSA share for this season but they're sooo expensive and I'm honestly not sure we'd use all the vegetables we'd get especially since we want to expand the garden this year. I'm hoping for a better crop of tomatoes. With all the rain last year the few heirlooms that we got were too precious to eat any way but raw, so I didn't get a chance to can any. The cucumbers died off on the vine from being water-logged. It left all my canning plans in ruin. Blech.

The BBC alleges that the average person will only have read 6 of these books. I must be an overachiever or something.

Bold I've read, italics I started but never finished.

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I've post these across the NPF and guild website, thought I'd throw some up here. :D It's image-heavy, so putting it behind a cut to save f-list.

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One of the girls on the stretcher posted this. Very beautiful.

Holy cow...is it the weekend yet?!?

Ok so there are people actually believe that President Obama was elected because the masses were manipulated into voting for him? Wow! That's kinda "put on mah tin foil hatz so the gov'ment can't put stuff in mah brainz" crazy, isn't it? Well then again these people also probably thought Sarah Palin was the epitome of feminism, so yeah...woohoo whack-a-doodle!!

I mean seriously. Obama won, McCain lost. Ummm...stop being a sore loser and get over it?

Sorry, I about laughed myself to tears of this one. Yowza.

This article came up in a thread about video games on NPF and I thought it was well-written and very interesting: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_142/3052-The-Myth-of-the-Media-Myth

Quote: "Alexander Sliwinski, Contributing Editor at Joystiq.com, attacked the myth at the core of the image problem. "The thing I love people saying is that videogames as a whole are violent. Mature rated titles made up only 6 percent of the rated games in 2007. If there's anything remotely over the top with one or two of those titles, it'll receive 90 percent of mainstream media's videogame attention for the year. Not only that, but many mainstream media stories pick up on games that aren't even rated and are 'outside the industry' like Super Columbine Massacre or JFK: Reloaded. It would be like the film industry being blamed for people making snuff films or amateur bedroom porn."

For David Edison, Associate Editor at GayGamer.net, the "image problem" has affected him personally, as it also affects me. "There's certainly a prevailing antipathy against gaming out there," he told me. "I'm a gay man living in lower Manhattan - in other words, I've got a pretty open-minded support network! And yet I've been rejected on dates for being a gamer, lost the respect of 'mainstream' friends by working in games media and spent more brainpower and tongue-time justifying the participation of adults in the videogames industry than I'm willing to admit. And almost without exception, those non-gamers who do accept games as a valid, mature, interactive art and entertainment medium do so only after having their standing biases challenged."

I knew that there were video game haters out there, but I thought it was a minority, not a majority. I find the sentiment that video games are for children to be absolute hogwash, along with the fact that video games make children violent, lead to obesity, etc.

I'm an adult and I'm a gamer. I'm also a female gamer. I've been playing video games since I was 12 years old, along with my mother! I have fond memories of coming home from school to a snack and several rounds of Mortal Kombat against mom; or the day we celebrated with pizza for making it through the end of Smash TV and Ms. Pacman on two-player mode together in the same night. Ben and I play console games together, and we game online in an MMO together. I certainly don't consider myself a violent person, yet I've played video games from a young age and not all of them were roses and candy lets save the puppies kind of games. My brother played GTA when he was 13 and still loves ruthless games, and he's about as passive as they come. I've never even heard him yell or raise his voice before, let alone have a tendency towards violence. (And to make a point, my ex and I had a copy of GTA that my mother played through before she bought it for him because it was rated mature before deciding he was mature enough to handle it - because she's, ya know, an actual parent).

All in all, I agree with one of the experts who believes its just a matter of people fear what they don't understand. I'm shocked that there are so many people in this day and age of technology that seem to loathe and fear video games! Why not sit down and play with your child and see what it's all about? If you're worried about them wasting too much time, set a limit on the amount of gaming they do a day. And hey, if you're that worried about the games, why don't you set a limit for TV in general and make your kids do other activities? There's room for fun and creativity you know.

It reminds me of going into GameStop during the holidays at the Burlington Mall a few years ago. The line was huge, Dad gave the kid the money and he stood in line. The game was rated M, so the clerk had to have the father come over and tell him "This game is rated M for Mature, and I need you to agree to understanding that prior to allowing your underage son to purchase it. Its store policy." Bravo for Gamestop and the clerk! The man was livid yelling about how he just wanted to buy the damn game. In other words, he doesn't give a damn what his son does. But I bet if little Johnny goes out and shoots someone at his school, well it was the video games fault! Not because Mom and Dad didn't actually monitor and parent, but because they gave him what he wanted, sat him infront of the electronic babysitter, and never bothered to discipline or provide a true sense of right or wrong.

Don't blame the games because you can't be bothered to be an actual parent and involved in your child's life. Don't assume that video games are evil until you've sat down and played them yourself.

http://www.truthout.org/010809R

It's sad that former President Carter has done more to bring peace to this conflict than our current President.

Merry Christmas - God bless us everyone, or something like that. :)

Wow I haven't even had a chance to read my friends list in a while, we've been so busy with Christmas stuff, especially now that the power's back on! I spent most of the day (from 11:30 a.m. to 10:45 p.m.) on Sunday baking cookies. I'm almost finished with the cookie tins. Ben finished shopping for his family, now he just needs to finish my shopping and he plans to do that Friday since we have snow today and his company Christmas party tomorrow night right after work. I need to remember to have him pick up a $10 B&N Giftcard when he's down in Newington for one of the neighbor kids. Need to finish all the rest of the baking tonight so I can get the packages sent out UPS tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to my "vacation." I'll be off work from 12:45 p.m. (although we have a luncheon afterwards) on Christmas Eve and won't go back until January 5th. Yeah I'm totally going to sleep in late and play RaiRo for like three days straight. Totally.

Merry Christmas, ya'll!

Got up at 4:00 a.m. and hit the Black Friday sales. Ben's parents are done. I still need a sweater and Xbox360 game for my dad & brother. I'm working on mom's presents (she requested homemade - making a lap quilt/wall quilt and pendant necklaces). I have two more things to buy for Ben plus a few things for his stocking and he's done.

Time to eat some Thanksgiving leftovers and convince Ben to lug the tree and Christmas decorations out of the basement. ^_^

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh yeah...random meme:

Guess I hurt someone's feelings on the Stretcher boards. Finally a good conversation and suddenly the thread is gone. I guess pointing out the fact that all Muslim's aren't terrorists, and that there is much in common as Islam was taken from the Christian faith didn't sit to well with the Christian fundies.

Or maybe it was the fact that I pointed out that Fred Phelps is a zealot? Oh noes! Guess what folks, we get zealots and pyscho's in every religion! Christianity is just as bad, if not worse, than many other faiths for breeding fundamentalist whackos.

I just really find it hilarious. Heaven forbid we question, right? If the Pastor says the sky is green than surely he is right! If the bastardized King James Bible says so, it must be the truth. Lets not look into the history of the changes to the religion, we'll just all be mindless drones. Lets pretend the books left out don't exsist, every other relgion is automatcially wrong, and we're right 100% of the time because Pastor/Pope/Reverand says so. We don't want to rock the boat with contradiction.

Bring on the hate mail, its already started. Today should be entertaining!! :) I've been thinking about leaving those forums for a while now, too much fundamentalist close-minded right-wing Republican thinking for my taste. Thinking this might be the straw that breaks the camels back. If you get offended over one silly little post because it lumps Christianity with other religions and the whole thread needs to be taken down, you got bigger issues than I can solve for you.

Aaaahhhh...the world is so full of sheeple!