Written last night at about 6:15 PM

I’m writing this from the seats in the Shimberg Playhouse of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, waiting for rehearsals to begin. Much to my dismay, there are no wireless networks in the area for me to leech off of, so I’m forced to actually sit down and write as opposed to wasting my time surfing the net.

I suppose I could be going over my lines or something productive like that, but at the moment I’m in the mood to just kind of take a few minutes to collect myself and regroup for the rest of the evening. As such, I’m going to just jot down a few things and see wherever my rambling thoughts decide to go.

The last week was a pretty hectic one, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Our friends John and Random, who we met while playing World of Warcraft, came down and spent the week camped out at our place. They were great houseguests, and in an amusing side note at the end of their stay Alex opined that they could stay forever. Always a good sign of a nice visit, don’t you think? Of course we spent a good deal of time promoting the area, as those of us actively recruiting more cool people to live here are known to do, but I think that for the time being at least they are staying put up in Cincinnati. Who knows what the future could hold, though? For know, at least, it’s safe to say that they have a place to visit any time they feel the need to get away.

On Friday night we took them out to The Castle, where we met up with several of the locals who play WoW with us. It was a hell of a good time. Sometimes I think we should go out there more often, but to be honest it isn’t the locale itself that makes the evenings there enjoyable. It’s the people. Hell, these days we usually end up spending most of our time out on the patio just hanging out and listening to music. We can do that at our places. Still, it was great to get my dance on and have a few drinks. Nothing quite to the extent that I used to when I was a regular denzien there (Ok, when did I get home and who was I making out with in the back seat???), but enough to certainly make it necessary for Krystalle to drive home. Speaking of the drive home – We decided to stop by our normal late night breakfast spot on the way, only to discover that it had been closed! We went to another one, closer to the house, and while the food was typical Denny’s fare the service was horridly slow. I don’t think it was entirely the fault of the kitchen, either, because by the time my Nachos made it to the table the cheese had kind of started to harden up into a congealed mass. Obviously we weren’t expecting a five star dining experience, but you’d think that the late night shift on a Friday night would be better equipped to handle the hordes coming in from the club to get their greasy food fix before hitting the sack.

Saturday night was game night, and for the second week in a row we opted to do the card game thing instead of our typical D&D session. Between our guests and rehearsals I just didn’t have the time to get anything ready for the session, and to be honest that might end up being the case more often than not until this process is over. I honestly don’t remember it taking quite so long to put adventures together when I was a kid, but that may have something to do with the fact that back then it was a lot more about senseless blood and gore than developing story or real challenges. Actually putting things together that make sense and require the players to actually do more than just “attack the orc” isn’t as easy as it sounds!

Speaking of which, I finally have a copy of cavalorn‘s first book in the Drow War series. As it is designed to take characters all the way from level one to twenty, I haven’t quite decided how we’re going to approach starting the campaign. Maybe we’ll switch back and forth between the two campaigns. Ah well, we’ll work it out.

Well, maladr1n just got here, so I’m gonna finish this up and get down to business. Will post this when I get home.

Day one in the first of three hellish days schedule wise is about half way done. I’ve got about an hour to go here before I head over towards the downtown area to grab a bite to eat and go to rehearsal. Should be relatively light on me this evening, as we are blocking Act I and I’m only in the last few minutes of the act.

In those glorious few minutes, however, I shall achieve another pinnacle in my Jobsite career.

I shall have my spit-take.

I’ve died. Multiple times. I’ve said “fuck.” I’ve killed someone. I was in my skivvies (with a robe on, but still). I’ve been in (several) dream ballets. To this date, however, I have not had a spit-take. Until now.

I’m so very excited.

While it feels good to be ramping up another show, psychologically I’m still not fully prepared for the work load of the next few months. It doesn’t help that this week, the first real week of rehearsals, coincides with three consecutive days of training here at work. Just an hour and a half today, but tomorrow and Thursday are full days. Oy. Training just saps the life out of me.

In honor of the very long few days I’m looking at, I actually went to bed at a decent hour last night. For me, anyway. Got back there around 10, but probably didn’t fall asleep until 10:30 or 11. Got up promptly at 5 AM this morning and got 45 minutes in with Maya on Yourself Fitness. Speaking of which, my abs and chest are so very sore right now. I just recently pushed my workout to 45 minutes, and my recent improvements in the core body strength areas have caused Maya to “kick it up a notch” Emeril style on me. So what was getting easy is now painful again.

No pain, no gain, right?

Have a new laptop at work, which is one of the reasons why I’m being such a posty fool at the moment. I’m downloading fresh copies of all our web sites, which takes forever. It’s a pretty sweet laptop, but one thing about it is already bugging me. The docking station doesn’t work with the monitor risers that I use. Not such a big deal here, as I have plenty of desk space, but home is going to be a different story entirely. I may end up having to put the docking station under the desk where the two desktops are.

We’ll see.

Gahh…I think I just screwed up the FTP by messing with my settings.

oops

netgoth stumbled across something on her friends list and posted about it yesterday, and I figured I’d take a moment to point you all in that direction. She even made a rare public post about it. Seems that during the recent Convergence (yearly goth convention) in New Orleans one of the attendees was attacked by another, and the attacker is currently on the run from the law. You can check out the links for yourself and see the proof if you want (Krys even called the New Orleans Police Department and got a case number to verify that it was legit). Fair warning if you go, though. The picture of her face after the attack is pretty graphic. In any case, if you have a moment pop on over and take a look. See if you know the guy in question, and if you have any information about his whereabouts contact the proper authorities. I’m not going to make any broad, sweeping statements about him or the situation – but he does have a warrant out for his arrest. The rest is up to the courts to decide.

Umm…I think that’s all I’ve got for now.

Today I’m giving away my sister at her wedding.

My first memory of Kimmie is not the most pleasant one. It was during one of the summers I spent with my father in Mississippi after the divorce. I was playing with her, shortly after she’d eaten. I was holding her over my head and jiggling her, and making her giggle her head off.

She puked in my face.

Shoot to about 10 years later. I’m 18, in college at the University of Alabama, and occasionally popping over to visit my Dad and his family in Vicksburg (amusing side note – The first time I went, Dad didn’t recognize me when I walked up…it had been that long since we saw each other). Kim, her sister Karen, and a friend of theirs are boy band obsessed young girls. I distinctly remember a conversation in which I was informed that they would love the Back Street Boys “forever,” despite my insistence that they were nothing but a flash in the pan and would be a shitty footnote in musical history soon.

I was right. Neener neener.

A few years pass. Dad gets a divorce and sobers up. I’m living in Florida again, and he brings my sisters to visit a few times. We do the parks, hang out a bit, and have a good time.

One one of these trips, Kim makes a comment about how unhappy she is with her living situation. I offhandedly tell her that if things are that bad she can come live with me.

A year later, I get a phone call from my Dad. “Did you mean it when you said that?”

At 15 years old, Kim moves down here. She moves into a house with a brother she hardly knows, his wife (who, despite being supportive and never really letting on, wasn’t really all that keen about taking on a teenager), and their very young son. To say she wasn’t exactly thrilled about the situation in the beginning is an understatement. She spent a lot of time on the phone with her friends back home. Remember, friends, at this point in the game there were no unlimited long distance plans. Dad shelled out thousands of dollars in that first year in phone bills alone. She eventually warmed up to us, and Florida. She made new friends. Things were going pretty good. But then the opportunity came around to move back to Mississippi and live with Dad again.

But he died.

At this point a lot of people assumed she would move back up north. She didn’t, though. She stayed with us, and she prospered. She graduated from high school, got a job, and made a life for herself here. She made some bad choices. She made some good ones. All in all, I think the good outweighed the bad. Was the path she took the one that her Father and I wanted her to? No, not really. But that was never our choice to make. We gave her the chance to choose her own way, and she did.

Let’s be frank here for a moment. The environment she left when she came here was not a good one. Most of her friends were heavily into drugs and many of the girls were pregnant before they left high school. When she moved in with me, that was all she knew – and it was what she thought was normal. Several years later, after going back for a visit, she told me that she couldn’t even relate to those people anymore. That she couldn’t contemplate living her life that way.

I’m proud of that. If I did nothing else for Kim, I gave her a chance at something better for herself. She has not ended up working a dead end job, burying her pain and misery in drugs, and gambling all of her money away in the false belief that it’s the only way she’s going to ever have a better life. She believes in herself. She has hopes. She has dreams. She has a family, now. She has a beautiful daughter, a step-daughter who calls her “Mom,” and another on the way. She has a picked a good man to be her husband. A man with an easy smile and a kind heart. And hey, a bald guy with a goatee. You can’t go wrong there, can you? They’ll have their ups and downs, assuredly, and they both have a lot of growing up to do…But, as our Father liked to say, they’re “good people.” As long as you’re working from that foundation, you’ve got a great start.

I only wish Dad was going to be here today. While I’m giving her away, and playing the role of the Father of the Bride, it’s not my place. I just hope I do him justice in my representation of him.

—

There is more I could say here. There’s always more, isn’t there? It’s not all pretty, though, and today isn’t a day for that kind of rant. Maybe some other time, when this is all said and done and we can take a collective breath and gather our thoughts properly.

My comments, as such, will be limited to this – My sisterly pride is not limited to Kim today. I am proud of my youngest sister, Karen, for beating the odds and turning a teenage pregnancy into a solid marriage with two beautiful children. I am, as always, proud to be related to my older sister Lu. Sometimes I wonder how she has anything left for herself, considering how much she does for everyone around her. She’s been there for Kim through this whole wedding process, and she doesn’t even have an official “job” at the wedding. Hell, she didn’t even get to go to the rehearsal dinner – She was watching the babies so that everyone else could. For that matter, while I’m throwing out mad props, our Mom has been busting her ass for Kim to make sure she has the best wedding she could possibly have. And Mom isn’t even related to her, at all. I don’t know what Kim has planned to thank the two of them, but I can only hope it’s something special. They definitely deserve it.

I’ve got a wonderful family. I really, really do.