The last few weeks have been interesting. Not great, but not totally horrible either. This weekend has been pretty good. I went to a friend's place on Saturday. It gave us a chance to visit/catch up, and then we had a nice pot luck dinner combined with gaming.
That was a cool bit because we finally completed a D&D module/campaign we've been working on for the last 2 1/2 years. Yeah I know that's a looong time, but we only place about every six weeks. And, it's only the second time we've actually completed a module/campaign. The DM is waaaayyy into role playing, so that often causes things to go off in crazy directions.so we may end up jumping into a different module or things get so convoluted that we just can't keep the moment. It's been awhile where all of us in the group have actually had time - consistently - to keep things up. Often in the past we'd fall out of playing because someone would have a baby or would change jobs or some other crazy life event would happen that would cause us to put the game on the shelf for a few years. So, we cracked a bottle of mead and celebrated.
The mead our friend brought was awesome by the way:
It's from the Mount Hope Winery in PA (around Scranton), and it was delicious. They have a lot of other great wines there too. And it is the host of the Celtic Fling and PA Renaissance Festival. The Fling is amazing, but I've heard the Ren Faire is only soso. A great Ren Faie is the Maryland Renaissance Festival. That opens up next week, and we will be going.
A bunch of the in-laws will be in town, but I suppose I can suffer through that to attend an amazing Fest lol
The in-laws aren't THAT bad, but they are fairly pessimistic and cynical. Ugh. I'll just have to go to my happy place
I've been hitting the gym the past six weeks or so. I've been working with a trainer once a week too. I don't know, I think it's helping. I seem to be about 10# lighter over all, and I am lifting a bit more weight on most of the machines. My cardio seems to be doing better to. I know they say that muscle weighs more, so as you put muscle on you may not lose as much weight overall. Still, it would be nice to see a little more definitive results.
A before an after so far for anyone interested:
Work is getting weird. It seems that there are some big changes coming down the pipe. I know that we had to chop $1.5M from our budget, and I have no idea how they are doing it. It has been very hush hush from the people involved over the past few months. But the Board passed the budget, so I guess we'll be finding out soon. I personally know something is coming because I was apparently one of the chess pieces that need to be moved before everything could be announced. No official announcement yet, so just trust me it's going be quite a shake up.
It looks like it mean a little bit more travel for me too. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I always enjoy traveling. Speaking of which, plans aren't final in that I've booked my flight, but it looks like I'll be out to visit U of WA and Oregon State Univ the week of 23 Sept. If any of my SG friends from out there want to rty and get together for coffee, dinner, a few drinks, outing, PM me so I can make sure to work it into my schedule. It looks like I'll be out there during the week: Arrive SEA-TAC on Monday sometime and probably head back Thurs, maybe Fri.
In other travel news, I may be headed to San Diego the first week of Sept for work, and then I'll be in Chicago on vaca the week of 16 Sept. So my Sept is going to be pretty full of travel. I hope my kitties don't forget who I am. And I know that Merlin waits for me to get home everyday, so hopefully he won't get tooo mad that I'll be gone for most of the month. Hopefully the catsitters will keep him fairly entertained.
Okay, it looks like I'm getting a little long winded. Thanks for reading 
Have a great week all!
