Friday, August 17, 2007

Missing GenCon

GenCon Indy is this weekend and I'm a little bummed, especially since I'm missing my long lost (due to baby) EN World friends and all the D&D 4e madness. Instead I'll be spending the week with the family in Hilton Head. Since I'll be visiting my good friend Professor Pope on the way back, I'll get my D&D fix talking with him. And D&D 4e won't be released until next year anyway.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the new edition. I wasn't much of a D&D fan until Third Edition came along. But I've got over my anti-D&D bias and have learned welcome our Munchkin overlords. Fourth Edition may improve the game. It may even introduce some really kick-ass tools to facilitate player over the Internet. The economics of it bother me a bit, and I'm a bit annoyed at the prospect of shelling out for yet another set of rulebooks.

Anyway, I suspect I'll be blogging more on 4e in the future.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Second Child = Big crunch

Just as I was starting to get the hang of balancing the rearing of one child with my own health, personal interests, and professional development, along comes a second child to make everything that much harder. I used to complain about the difficulty finding time to blog, role play, program, and play computer games. Now, I look back and wish I had it that easy. At least until little Liam gets a little older, I simply cannot imagine that I'll have any significant personal time in coming months.

My weekday schedule is such that I wake up (bleary eyed), throw on workout clothes, get Finn dressed and washed, and pop him in the car. After dropping him off at day care, I head to the gym for a brief workout and then get home with barely enough time to catch a shower before work. Breakfast is luxury and I've been forced to rely on energy bars to get me through the morning. After work, I need to pick up Finn from daycare and fight the parkway traffic to get us home for dinner by 6:30ish. By the time we eat and get the kids ready for bed, it is now 9:00 and I'm too exhausted to even turn on my computer. Mostly I just settle down and read a few chapters in a book before I conk out. Not much luck on weekends either, mostly because the kids still demands too much attention.

My weekend schedule is little better, though for different reasons. I suppose I could steal away for a few hours here and there for small projects. The problem is that weekends are prime time for spending time with my boys (which I'm not about to give up). I suppose I could steal an hour or two here or there, but lately it has been impossible due to a backlog of house projects. I still need to paint Liam's room, for example...

Anyway, I hate to complain too much. I'm starting to settle in to the new lifestyle. I'm too happy being a father of two awesome boys to be bitter about my missing personal time. Instead of complaining, I'm going to try to work within the confines of my tight schedule to work on things that really matter. Whereas I'd usually start a new project on a whim, I now find myself critically examining potential endeavors for how much joy they can bring me. And fortunately, it does look like I'll be resuming gaming in a few weeks. I'm going let other direct episodes of Slaying Solomon until I feel that I can find enough time to write new episodes and I do hope to restart Dragonspire in September.

Where does that leave the blog? Well, my hope is that I can find time to blog more often (and about topics other than my tight schedule). I'm crossing my fingers. At the top of my priority list, however, is getting my photo album running again. I'm experiencing some technical difficulties which would normally take several hours to resolve (if I had several hours to dedicate to the problem). Once that is accomplished, I have a mess of new photos of the kids to post.