8am Parade of Cars

I guess they all start work at 8:30-9am cause every single day there seems to be a coordinated exodus from the houses along the back alleyway. I swear there aren't that many properties along the alley though, so I have no idea where they're all coming from, whether they're taking shortcuts of if there's a secret Stepford-esque society I don't know about lurking somewhere in the maze of houses that is my neighbourhood. I'd believe it too. If you walk down one of the centre walkways in that area it's this eerie line of identically built, but slightly different coloured houses and it's quiet aside from the occasional child or dog in the backyards staring out at you with beady little eyes. Whatever it is, it's unsettling.

Anyway I'm like the antithesis of this orderly manifestation. Aside from the off-chance I'm up in time to witness the Parade of Cars, I'm usually the one who's running out of the house late with their hands full pulling on a jacket and trying to juggle my pack, keys and coffee, leaving laundry on the roof of my car, using the air conditioning/heat to dry my hair and eating week-old cookies from the package I left in my car on the way to work.

And these are on the days where I'm not carrying electronics out to the car, or having birds fly into my vehicle, or carting puppies around, or learning that someone took a dump in one of the cars.

I'm super healthy and organized.

While it's still Calgary's rainy, cool months, the season is fast approaching where I'll need to keep the windows open overnight. It'll be too hot in the house otherwise and we all know what that means: Shit that Happens in the Park is about to begin. It is with mixed feelings that I announce this will be the last summer witnessing the events in the park as I am moving again around September. I'll be taking up residence in my grandparent's old house as they have moved to a senior's assisted living home. The neighbourhood is almost deafening in it's quietness every time I've visited and is on a tiny side-road vs at the end of a major roadway. This means no more nights of people screaming about Pokemon in the sound-dish of a park outside, no more creepy singing swing lady, no more people turning around on a narrow one way street and bursting their tires on the curb, and no more street racers turning the greenspace in front of the house into a crash-test course. There is promise of trolling an overly nosey neighbour on the horizon though. This also may mean the return of the Crows as I think that the new neighbourhood is infested with them. Maybe I'll make friends with them this time and have a legion of birds at my commend.

So what does the rest of the spring and summer look like for me?

Well, I may be officially joining Mesk's Starsworn campaign with a regular character vs playing as an array of NPCs. This depends on the availability of the others joining, but either way, I need to seriously think about a character in any case.

Speaking of D&D, going to try to set up a session every other Sunday with Nick and Shauna to get through our own campaigns and make a bit of progress. I still need to produce the videos for these.

I'm going to try and make the RPG playable as one of my top priorities. I have a massive backlog of video, so I don't need to worry about not having any videos to release. The problem is a lot of this video is un-edited, so I really need to get working on the backlog. Top priorities for editing/recording right now are Resident Evil 7, Sonic 2006 and Outlast 2. I still have another special video I'm trying to produce, but, I need the Deletion Ceremony for Evil Within to happen first, which requires Shauna and I to finish re-watching the series (there are reasons).

I've made a lot of progress on writing this year, so that will likely continue. I have identified a number of issues with the narrative that I will go back to fix in the coming weeks. Really, what I need to do is get my documents organized because all of the work is spilt into about 10 pieces over a number of files in about 3 places.

As for current releases, Pillars of Eternity and Dishonored 2 should remain pretty regular. RE7 and Sonic 2006 will be the other ones posted as I finish them. Other than that, I have made it this week's project to get the rest of the Riven videos on YouTube with timestamps as I have left that project stagnant for too long.

Middle of August I'm checking out and disappearing for two weeks. Going to keep contact down to a small group of people and actually take some time to relax for once (I'll likely prep videos to release for two weeks and just press the "publish" button periodically...but it's not like I've been super regular with releases lately anyway).

What does right now look like?

Chaos mostly. Sitting back and watching the fallout of some of the events at work, because there's a lot of things I simply can't do anything about at the moment. One is just watching a person who has been cheating/boosting their work get caught and burned...the other is a little more disheartening. The latter is hard because I want to see these project succeed so badly, but things have been difficult, through no real fault of the particular person I'm working with on the client side. Also saying goodbye (hopefully temporarily) to a friend at work as she leaves to have her baby, but, with a company this small, anyone leaving at this point is kind of sad. I'm lucky I work with some great people.

As for what else is going on...dodgeball has a couple weeks left and then I'm joining in the Teddy for a Toonie tournament. I've checked out of my one job for the summer (aside from one final random shift...but meh). I have yet to decide if I will return in September (probably will just for Tuesday nights). Took a first aid and CPR course over this past weekend, which is probably why I have no idea what day it is most of the time this week. Now I have Stayin' Alive perpetually stuck in my head and know what happens when your eyeball falls out and is still attached by the optic nerve (you can totally still see out of it). Uhhhh all caught up on Game of Thrones, much to Shauna's delight. Carlo intends to do a final session playtest for his Fickle RPG, but not this week cause he's sick. Friday might get more recording done, Saturday is fooooood, Sunday is fooooood and also HKS' final session of pre-campaign Starsworn stuff and then Monday going to be playing Outlast 2 with Shauna in afternoon and evening.

So I'm busy and stressed, but still going. Really looking forward to those August weeks out in the boonies.