Birthday Burgers, Proximate Relatives, Revision Deadline

And now, your general update on my wacky life.

Happy birthday to my son, who turns the ripe old age of 6 today! We spent the day having doughnuts with his class, visiting Burger King and Toys R' Us, and later playing with various bits of birthday-related booty and growing large on Alton Brown's "manly" sliders, homemade sweet potato fries and dark chocolate cake. All in all, a great time. ;)

I find myself going in cycles when it comes to food. Every time I get serious about trying to get fit and lose weight, I somehow wind up consuming my body weight in burgers and not getting to work out at all over the course of an entire week. I have somehow managed to lose roughly 7 pounds since the end of February (an accomplishment I am very proud of), but since I haven't worked out at all this week and ate at Burger King today, I think I may be back down to having lost only 2 pounds....but oh, well.

My Mom is moving to town, which will be fun: my wife and I have been trying to get our parents to move out to Washington since we arrived some 4 1/2 years ago. (Since my mom is getting here before hers, I'm pretty sure the DW owes me a plush banana.) My brother-in-law will also be coming into town for about a week: it'll be nice to have a fellow rivet-head* about.

In the meantime, various tax returns, company bonuses and funds from article writing have given us a nice financial push; my children continue to demand more attention and care than actually exists in the known universe; and my wife is as beautiful as ever. I'm hard (mostly hard) at work revising "Darker Sunset", with a self-imposed deadline of September 15th of this year. We'll see..it would be very nice to get the revision/type-up done once and for all so that I can actually work on getting this damned thing published.

*A rivethead is someone that listens to Industrial Music, particularly aggro-industrial music. If you actually needed to read this footnote, consider yourself lame.

Part 2 of My Latest DDM Article is Up

Check it out here.

RIP Gary Gygax

Thank you, Gary, for creating such an exciting and enjoyable hobby. D&D brought me together with people in the way few other things have. D&D was how my family spent their nights when we first moved to a city far from home; it was how I exercised my mind and relaxed all through school; it was the one thing that my friends could all share, even when we felt ourselves growing apart.

Thanks, Gary -- and I wish you nothing but natural 20s at that big gaming table in the sky.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome