Miscellaneous Ramblings

I haven’t written much in the last several weeks because I’ve had two colds, been out of town for nearly three weeks, been busy catching up on my eBay shop-keeping, not been in the mood to write anything, blah, blah, blah.

Then, this week we had The Incident of the Nail in the Washing Machine. Now, that’s a tale I’m itching to exercise my keyboard on. But, we still don’t know the ending of this story so we’re waiting to see what happens before we write about it. For now, suffice to say, no laundry is getting done.

Africa
My sister summited Mount Kilimanjaro (I checked my Websters, to summit can be a verb but the context seems to be confined to mountaineering and summit conference attendance) on Tuesday and she also made it back down (nadired, I suppose you could say.) Today she starts the Safari portion of her African Adventure with a visit to Tarangire National Park.

Netherlands and Germany
I’ve started planning this summer’s trip to Europe, actually, just the Germany portion. The Dutch segment has already been taken care of, mainly by my sister. For that piece I just have to buy airline tickets and figure out which trains to catch to get from Schiphol to where we're staying. In Germany, more extensive planning is still required. I am thinking along the lines of castles, rivers and mountains. The itinerary will likely include a Rhine cruise, Rhine valley castle viewing, and two or three of King Ludwig’s castles in the Bavarian Alps near Füssen. It got too difficult to figure out just by searching on the web so after getting sore feet by standing more than 45 minutes in front of the travel books section in Chapters, I ended up buying one of those over-priced guide books, The Rough Guide To Germany. Well at least it was on sale. There are some things that are still easier to do with a book in the hand vs. online.

Lewiscraft
My local craft store is closing and selling off their entire inventory. All the best wool was already gone but I did manage to pick up several balls of an interesting boucle yarn that I’m thinking of crocheting a few scarves from. I googled Lewiscraft and found out the company’s gone bankrupt and is closing all its stores. I thought there has been resurgence in crafting lately? Maybe Michaels, that big box craft store from the States is pushing out all the smaller competitors? Maybe crafty types are buying all their craft stuff on eBay? I know I’ve been turning to eBay for hard-to-find items like lilac-coloured Aida, unusual cross stitch patterns, etc.

Dominion Homes
Yep, that’s that troubled home builder stock I bought a few months ago. They’re still mired in muck, suffering from declining revenues and generally looking pretty pathetic. The U.S. housing market is bad and getting worse. Despite all of this DHOM’s stock price is holding amazingly steady. Well, OK it has slid downhill a bit. I guess they took their really big hit last year and investors are treating them like they are already as low as they deserve to be. We’ll see… Q1 financials are due out May 8th.

Taxes
Mine’s done. Hurrah! It’s raining today and The Big Guy can’t hammer away at the outside of the house in the pouring rain. He also can’t do any more work on the washing machine since he can’t put back together what he’s already taken apart. So he started working on his taxes. He’s making disgusted noises about a T5008 slip. Claims it must be in error. Unlikely since this particular T5008 is a replacement for an earlier one that did have an error. I asked him if he calculated the adjusted cost base. I also offered to have a look at it for him. He got all huffy and stomped off.

Wedding Planning
J. and T. have sent out a formal email announcing their wedding date so that makes it really official. Now J. and I are trying to schedule some time to go look at wedding dresses. It seems to be difficult to coordinate the somewhat sparse free time on our schedules. How can two people, neither of them working, both be so busy?

Costa Rica
In fact, we’ve been so busy that we haven’t seen each other face to face for a couple of months and so J. didn’t give me the big news until this week that she and T. are moving to Costa Rica. I can’t figure out if I’m sad or happy about this yet. On the one hand, my best friend is moving far, far away. On the other hand, I’ll be able to add Costa Rica to my most favoured travel destinations list and I’ll have somewhere cheap to stay when I go there.

Oblivion
It’s finally out! The next chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga!


I’ve played all the major releases in the series so far: Arena (I was still working at Digital in 1994 when I first played Arena), Daggerfall in 1996, Morrowind in 2002, as well as the Morrowind expansion sets, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. I spent some time this week reading Oblivion reviews, looking at screen shots, and watching the first sales on eBay before finally reading the System Requirements and realizing my graphics card is not going to be good enough. I just hate it when my otherwise perfectly-good computer can’t run the game I absolutely positively must have! And, yes, this has happened to me before. And yes, I did end up buying a new computer configured especially for running graphics-intensive games.

Unfortunately, my income is no longer what it used to be.

OK, here’s the plan. Take care of the trip to Europe first. Make a bunch of money on the Dominion Homes stock. Buy a hot new game-playing computer. Play Oblivion.

Of course, I could just upgrade the graphics card.

Hey! It would also cost less if I bought an Xbox and got the version of the game that runs on it...