And if you thought there would e posts on the weekend, you’ve got another thing coming.

It takes some structure for me to remember this, and even in the bad-old days of offthebeatenpath.org [defunct], I was only good about my M-F posting. I took Friday off to have some time with SexyWife, and to play with her for her birthday. I got most of what I wanted, but not quite. We wound up being out and about for a lot longer than I’d wanted to (most of the day, really) and the mall-walking just wore me out. I owe her a good spanking, so that’ll just have to come later.

We hit two bookstores, because Waldenbooks never has what I want, and I wound up buying a couple more of that paranormal-ish books. How long before this breaks into its own genre? Right now they are in Speculative Fiction, Romance, and Mystery. Sure, they all have a slightly different focus, but sometimes it’s pretty hard to tell where they go. I’m reading Mark Del Franco’s Unshapely Things (filed in fantasy), and have Casey Daniels’ Don of the Dead (to be followed by a purchase of The Chick and the Dead if its halfway good.

It’s about time for the flurry of summer books, with Jim Butcher’s new Dresden novel; the seventh and final Harry Potter book; and the second book in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Scion series. I may buy Jim Butcher’s book outright (along with his December release, Cursor’s Fury). I hope I can get my mp3 player up and working, because I’d prefer to have them as audiobooks for the bus ride (and for the walking around downtown that I do in the daytime.)

Tam’s mp3 player/birthday present should be here any day now, assuming that the recall on it doesn’t fubar things too much. It’s actually a DS card that’s designed to play homebrew games (as well as turning the DS into an mp3 player). It comes with a small (both in size and in megabytes) 128 micro SD card. Girl bought her a 2Gb one from Newegg, so it’s already here.

Mine needs some special screwdriver to open it, and the screw head is at the end of a one-inch deep hole, so it’s impossible to both shine a light down it, and look down it at the same time, so I dunno what size or type of screwdriver it needs. The problem with it is almost certainly mechanical and thus fixable by the tried and true “take it apart; put it back together” school of maintenance. If that doesn’t work (and Tam’s is nice) I’m going her route.

The rest of my Friday and Saturday were filled with planning for my new D&D campaign, set in Monte Cook’s Ptolus. It’s easily the best (and most indexed) expansion that I’ve seen, with lots of interesting moral questions and oddball characters — while all being completely within the standard 3.5 edition rules. OK, there’s a few twists, but they are mostly about pushing everything to 11. One of my favorites right now are a couple of 20th level characters who protect a Castle that’s been here for nigh-on-forever. One is an ex-blackgaurd, and the other is an ex-paladin. They aren’t romantically involved, but they have been partners for so long it’s hard to tell. And that sort of stuff goes on and on for over 700 pages, along with more in notes, modules, and a comic book.

Overall it went pretty well. The combats weren’t boring, and there was only one bit of rules-lawyering that I did for no good reason (sorry Girl). Still, it happens, and tactical combat in D&D is one of those twiddly bits of complication that just gets more and more so as you get more and more abilities to modify it. And that doesn’t count all the other role play type stuff. But Goddess knows, it’s good to be DM’ing and playing again. I missed it.

Sunday was a mostly quiet day. I worked through a couple of levels of God of War, while I wait for God of War II from Gamefly. I think I’m nearing the end, with maybe 3 or 4 levels to go. Still it’s been pretty fun, and I got to show JB the knocking-the-vase-off sex scene. There’s evidently a similar scene in GoW2

The other Sunday ritual (besides date-night with Girl(although this was my last Sunday night with her, as quarters change and so do date-nigths)) is watching Dresden Files on the SciFi channel. As someone who has both enjoyed and read all the books, the show has been hard in places where they have changed things. Most of the changes have to do with the relationships of characters (notably Dresden and Bianca’s love affair), as well as playing up the skepticism on the part of the police. I always felt Murphy believed in Dresden’s magic from the beginning of the book series. With the show, it’s hard to tell. And he tells her even less than he does in the books.

Bob, however is the show-saver, played by Terrence Mann. He’s witty and sarcastic, and sad, more or less like Bob’s supposed to be, if a bit more broody. Even in the episodes Girl and I didn’t particularly like, Bob did something that made us laugh or nod sagely, and made it all better. Last night’s episode, however had two major problems, one of which was the absence of Bob.

The other was that it was the original pilot (and thank the Goddess it wasn’t the real pilot) which strongly based on Storm Front the first book of the series. It’s hard enough to take a novel and condense it down to a movie-length feature (or two hour pilot), but this tried to shove that novel down into one hour. And introduce the missing Susan/reporter/girlfriend character. She was Dresden’s foil for this, instead of Bob, and well, she was never that interesting until she got turned into a vampire, anyway.

It’s the first episode of the show that actually sucked. I had some I didn’t like, but there was some redeeming factor (often Bob, but not always) that made me still want to come back next week. Thankfully, I have some other shows to bring me back, but it looks like next week isn’t a new episode anyway.

I really need to do these earlier in the day, they clear my mind out so well, and I’ve been a bit hazy today. But this morning our home internet connection was experiencing 25-30% packet loss, so there was no hope for anything at all. The only downside to writing these things at all has been a massive increase in the spam comments I’ve gotten (now finally not only on the first post, but on several of them.) I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but I’ve gone from getting one or two/day to getting 15-30/day since Thursday. Still, the therapeutic side effect, and the fact I’m getting more done on days I do it, show that it’s worth it.

I doubt I’ll miss a real comment amongst the spam, but if you’re a registered user you don’t get moderated, I think. So you wouldn’t be missed if you did want to comment.