January 2009 Archives

A few years back Phlome and Ninsianna asked if I would officiate their wedding. I went online and and got ordained as a minister from the Universal Life Church. Since then I have married a total of 3 more couples: Khuul and his wife, J&H, who I met through Demigoblin, and the most recent one this past weekend. The groom is a close friend of my brothers, who I have known since he was in preschool so I was happy to officiate their wedding. I did explain to them that I was not a real minister and that they would need to provide a ceremony for the wedding. I had performed a ceremony for Phlome and Ninsi, which they had written. The other two weddings were mostly just filling out the paper work.

The couple sent me a ceremony before-hand and it seemed reasonably complete. We filled in some details during rehearsal. There was one small thing though that all of us forgot. In a traditional wedding, after the father presents the bride, the minster tells everyone to take their seats. This was not in the service as written, and having performed all of one wedding previously, I did not think to inform everyone they could be seated. So everyone stood the entire ceremony, which was okay I guess, it was pretty short.

Congratulations to the new bride and Groom!

I've got my 5th wedding coming up this October for Banelord and his fiancee. Who knew becoming an online minster would come to this?

Way back in September or maybe August, my brother and I were playing 40k and thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could get everyone together for a big 40k tournament one weekend. Well we settled on Jan 17th and somehow the idea never died on the vine. 8 people showed up at my place this weekend for the First Annual 40k Tournament! It was a resounding success!

We had the first two games on Saturday. I was sure we would run out of time or be playing late into the night just to get two games in but having 2.5 hours per game worked out great. Only a few games even went to the time limit. There was much beer drinking during the games on Saturday and even more at the post-game cookout. There may have been a little too much beer drinking for some people. The first game on Sunday was a little subdued compared to Saturday. One player wasn't even able to make it to his first game.

For those of you that are into 40k here are the armies:

Ork Speed Freeks
2 Tau
2 Necron
Dark Eldar
Grey Knights
Black Templars

The Tau seemed to be the dominating force with a combined total of 5 wins, 1 Draw, and two losses.

You can check out pictures of the event here.

This winner received this awesomely cool framed picture, and of course, 1 crunchy taco.

Well I've been seriously ill since about this time last week. I woke up last Thursday night feeling like I had a fever. I took my temperature but it was normal. I still ended up being awake for about 2 hours though. The next morning I felt fine, so we went to the gym. When we got back I started feeling like I had a fever again, this time the thermometer showed a slight fever. I took some ibuprofen and it went away completely. I still felt fine the next morning, so I went over to Marc's to help demolish his kitchen. That went well with no signs of fever of flu. Then on the way home I started shivering so bad I could barley drive. I took my temp and it was over 102! I ran a fever constantly until just yesterday. That is the sickest I have been since Chemo. BLEAH!

In other news, the whole crew here is getting ready for the big 40k tournament! We actually ended up having way more people than I expected so it should be great!
Half of the players are staying with me and the other half live local so the house will be 40k madness all weekend. I had to go and buy a new board to make a 4th game table yesterday so we'd have enough room. I'll try and post pictures next week.

It's pretty slow here at work right now. The corp. did away with the larger corporate structure that my group was a part of but not my individual group. Don't worry, that's normal corporate restructuring, my job is fine. However, until they decide where to "put" us in the new structure its hard to get started on any new projects. I'm working on wrapping up a few things from last year but right now its kinda slow. Normally, I wouldn't mind, for the past 3 yeas I've used this extra time to work ahead on my Masters, so that when I did get busy at work, I wouldn't get behind. However, the masters is finished, finally. So I've pretty much been entertaining myself with facebook games.

And I just found out that Ellanna got a job! WOO HOO!

Well they holidays were great this year. I was off work for two whole weeks and we spent the entire first week back in Oklahoma visiting the family and friends.

The Wii seemed to be the Christmas gift of the year. Not only did I get one, but so did my brother Halo and Reptile. We've been playing boomblox lately. It's sorta like Jenga but you are trying and knock down the towers of blocks rather than trying not to knock them down. Like most Wii games its way more fun than it sounds. Dre is totally addicted.

Apart for the WII my favorite gifts would have to be the Kuerig Coffee maker, and from Halo, nearly every D&D book I did not already own. :)

Got to see lots of old friends while I was home, or as ER put it, "friends that he has had for a considerable amount of time, yet the length of the friendship is in no way reflective of said friends' ages" In any case it was great to get to visit with everyone.

We made the rounds at New Years, starting with Dinner and drinks at the Bavarian Grill and ending up at the Panoptikon Party downtown.

I think we meant to work on the house some but really all that got done was trimming the trees and taking up all the Christmas decorations. I'm okay with that.

I got this Christmas card from my friend Lorin. I love the Star Wars theme! Lots to write about from the holidays but I'll get to that later.

You can check out more of Lorin's art here.