S'up?!

Shit.

Condolences to the family.

Holy crap, Andy. Every teacher's greatest fear. . . So sorry.

I graduated in May with a masters in advertising and have been on the job hunt ever since. Our lease in Austin ended at the end of July, and since we didn't want to spend all our savings on rent with no job, we've been homeless and bumming around the USA ever since.

We put our stuff in a storage unit and stayed with my sister-in-law in Round Rock for a while. We visited my parents in Iowa then went back to Texas when my sister-in-law had her baby. Waited around for a while to hear "no" from the places I interviewed with in Texas and then we hit the road.

We made stops in Shreveport, LA, to visit some friends. Then went to my brother's in Nashville and then my other brother in Cary, NC. My brother in NC is a gamer so that was fun. We played a lot of Mage Knight, Netrunner and other stuff. Then we came up to Pittsburgh to stay with my in-laws indefinitely.

There have been highs, but a lot of lows. I've never been unemployed before, and it's only been 5 months, but it's been tough for me. Especially seeing other people from my program get jobs while I search, apply and interview to no avail.

Our son is 7 months old now and army crawling around like crazy, so that's a whole new set of challenges. And teething. It's fun though.

Worst uncertainty ever Metalface, good luck to you.

Got the games unpacked. Closed on the old house. Bought awesome leather recliners with built-in trays for the media room/theater. Sandi is getting someone to build custom bookshelves for the library, and prepping to have the room tiled.

Which also means we've had guests. One movie night, a boardgame day, 3 artemis games, and 3 RPG sessions so far.

And we've been playing Borderlands 2 in the Media room. I have an awesome setup for X360 co-op games. 2 xboxes, a 40 inch LED TV, and the projection screen on opposite walls. Sandi and I sit next to each other facing opposite directions. The Maya Siren isn't nearly as deadly as Lilith was, and Sandi dearly misses Bloodwing. "Someone's gonna get a treat!"

The place is still messy, and there are tons of boxes in scattered rooms which we are sorting through.

I've started pimping two copies of Battle Beyond Space. That'll be easier when I find my paints. They are in a box.

Ha, I never would have thought of that coop setup.

I opened a climbing gym. It's been pretty awesome so far but I work like 90 hours a week. The plus side is that much of the work is hanging around, climbing and telling people what to do so it's not that bad at all. One of the kids I coach took first place at the season opening regional comp last week and a bunch of our other kids did great too, so that's cool.

We went to Josh Look's place last week and X-Wing is pretty sweet. Billy Z is coming soon for the Zavos Holiday Special. Let me know if you wanna hang out! Pete, you should meet us at Silverball in Asbury Park!

WotC bailed on NY Comic Con this year and no one else had a good enough offer for me to justify taking the time off to go down there for it and that was a pretty big bummer. But if missing comic con is the biggest bummer of my last few months, then life is ruling pretty hard.

I miss you dudes.

Booya! Just got a job! Back in Austin for me in the family!

metalface13 wrote: Booya! Just got a job! Back in Austin for me in the family!

fantastic news!

As I said on the previous page, my old house(s) is now an art project, and we went to the opening the other night. One fact about it all I left out in the last post was that it is actually 2 houses next door to each other, one we lived in for 4 years and the other for 7 years. This is one of my old bedrooms:
.

Luckily of the writing we had done on the walls, much of it was whitewashed over, and the stuff left wasn't too bad. My beautiful picture of a robot had vanished, but weirdly a couple of the more personal things they tried to paint over bled through (like my memoriam to our dead cat and the spot I proposed to my wife). It was as though they had tried to erase the past, but history fought back.

At the exhibition one thing fascinated me, and has been obsessing me for the last couple of days. I found this on the front door of the house we were in for the shorter time in my writing:

This was really intriguing because:
a) I had no memory of writing anything on this door
b) I had no idea what the hell it means (can't fathom why would I feel a front door's main purpose is to "keep the bad (people) out", although I quite like the inadvertent edit to take out the word people).

Two days of obsessing about it and I have the answer, and it is stranger than just my memory being false. I wrote this on a different door in the other house (it was on a security door blocking the bedrooms from the rest of the house). Why the hell would someone move my graffiti?