2014-08-21:

Fri:

Not much to tell today. First job was a piece of bad RAM causing a bit of trouble at boot time. I was also to install 8.1 on a Mac so the girl going to collage could "have a pc" but still have the machine she wanted for web stuff and things. Turns out Staples doesn't sell win8 in the stores? What, is MS so badly off they can't pay for shelf space? Or can't they justify it because even they know no-one is going to buy it?

Then reading, got all three guns half done, at least the gross two tone coloration so the detail work can go on. (using gross here as gross/fine not that it look gross or anything, which is probably does because I'm the one doing it.)

Then out at 5:00 to head to my parent's house, drop some stuff off, and then to my 6:00 which was just a yearly tuneup, basically. According to the ccleaner file I always save it was just about a year ago that I was there. Talked about a new laptop for them, got their vacuum cleaner working, you know, the usual.

Sat:
Got back into writing Susan's Chronicles. It was all thanks to a review which stated "NEXT CHAPTER PLEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAASE!" which made me think maybe there was someone out there really enjoying my stuff.

So I wrote chapter two. I was going to do a job, but sadly it was canceled because the router hadn't yet arrived.

Then left for game.

Game went… oh boy. Yeah, not great, sadly. It was just a lot of little things that added up.

First was the (remains) of the mansion we were heading towards. It was basically blown away totally, "like a bomb went off inside" as Sean put it. So already I'm nervous we're facing something really powerful here.
Next is the crater we see, and as Stan's character makes "climbing" checks to get down it, he falls and nearly kills himself. Yeah, we can't just slide down the sides, we have to almost die on a rock.
Now at the bottom of said crater is a pool of lava! So right there my tiny Japanese girl wants nothing to do with the killer hole in the ground with fire at the bottom, because she is not immune to falling and bashing her head and falling in lava and dying.

So the two people now down there walk the tunnel. They are immune to the fire. As they do, a rock is thrown by the enormous rock creature inside, at the guy on point. It misses him, (Sean) but still somehow hits the other guy (Stan) and kills him dead. Great! That comes hurtling out of the entrance with his remains so now the little Japanese girl is basically terrified of whatever is down there.

Then she gets knocked off the edge by a ground shaking attack by the creature and gets 6/10 killed on the way down. The winged guy, having no combat skills not that he could hurt this thing made of solid rock, gets out of there and I heal myself. Three angels throw themselves at the thing and are swiftly despatched.

With our teammate dead (a first, by the way. First player death I've ever seen.) we have no interest in going down said hole again, and just watch it to make sure the creature doesn't get out.

The Foundation shows up and takes care of it.

To be fair, I should have warded the two that went down there to the hilt before they left. Both with Armor of Magic and Ignore. Of course, that would mean they would have walked into the cave, seen the trinket Sean wanted us to find, and walked out again. We still wouldn't have been able to directly deal with the creature, but maybe we could have had a planning session at the very worst to see how we could deal with it. So I partly blame myself. The trouble with that plan is, it's a Trope. Has its own page on the web and everything. It's called "Robert solves the party's problems." When Nyasa the magic using unicorn had the trope, people got upset about it. So now I'm trying to stay back and let them use their abilities and skills rather than mine. I see now how that's working out.

On the other hand, they could have snuck down the tunnel, and been quiet. And Stan wanted to bring in a more combat oriented character, because really it's a combat oriented game and we don't have one. And I admit, being a Breath Stealer is hard, because the only powers they get are what creatures we happen to fight and not kill, so he can take their energy. And that's been made so difficult, he didn't even want to bother getting free energy when we had bodies for him. Really! Last adventure we had a corpse he could have just walked over to and got energy, and didn't.

So yeah, many things could have gone differently, didn't, and that was sort of the end of that.

Then we played some Cards Against Humanity and left at 12:30.

On the bright side, I got 1/3 of Chapter 3 written while they were out firing guns in the woods. That's something, right?

Sun:
Got up rather late.

Finished chapter 3, cut the lawn. Played a bit of Pony Fantasy 6, and made the few phone calls I had gotten from Friday. Didn't get any today or yesterday, I fear.

Mon:
Did three whole jobs today. Well, two and a half.

First went shopping, of course. No surprises there.

Then right after I ate I went to my 12:00. Just a cleanout, which went smoothy.
Then at 2:00 some minor things like hooking up a scanner, answering some questions, that sort of thing.

I had gotten a call by the accountant guy, but pretty much everything was working when I got there. He did have a question about a password being remembered, so I cleared that up for him at least.

Got a fair number of calls today, as well, resulting in four, yes four, count them four jobs. I expect two of them will be the sort of "why am I even here" jobs I despise, but jobs! I mean that's the work of a half a week from July. Let's hope it keeps up.

Finished chapter 5!

Tues:
Very satisfying first appointment. Wish more were like this, where I help someone not exactly with a computer, but with a problem in their lives that happens to involve a computer. She wanted her SMS messages printed from a iPhone for a court case, so I found a program that would do it. Also reset a bunch of her passwords, and answered some questions.

The two short ones were just that. The one was getting a movie off a Windows Phone. The movie was upside down. Because, yeah, someone would want their movie to be upside down. The screen didn't flash a little "you are holding it wrong, are you sure that is what you want to do?" message before they started recording? Windows Media Player played it wrong side up, but Quicktime played it okay. Of course you can't do full screen without "pro." When are they going to drop that, anyway? We haven't gotten an update to "pro" in years, though it still works, and is still useful.

Oh well. The next one was just editing a document for him, he thought it was the printer. Uh, no, whatever is on the screen is what you're going to get. I made him a spreadsheet for any more, seems more logical to me.

Came back here, waited for my 4:00. She called at 3:30 Windows 8 wasn't there yet, so she was driving out to staples. This whole situation could have been avoided if she had called me after buying the MacBook and saying "I got the MacBook, can you order Windows?" But with no indication of what she wanted, I didn't want to be stuck with a copy so I didn't order it. Silly.

Made the CDs from a webcast a few days ago instead.

Worked on chapter 5, I remembered last night I wanted to add a little more to it. So I did that.

Got out to see the lady who wanted 8.1 on the 2 MacBooks. Of course she didn't have internet in the house, which I forgot you needed to download the driver stuff for windows. More then a gigabyte of it! Sheesh. So I brought them back here and did it. Apart from the downloading and transferring stuff to flash drives, it went fine.

Met her at the sad remnants of the Medley Center to give them back.

Not many calls today, but the lady who ordered the router got it in, so I'm going over to finish that job tomorrow.

As it stands, I've collected more this week, in two days, than I deposited last week. Let's keep that up.

Wed:
Just the one job today, which gave me a bit of a problem because I didn't exactly know how the weird power line ethernet adapter they had worked. I figured the device would get an IP address, then further devices down the line would get one. Nope. I had to physically tell the little music box thing to connect to ethernet again before it would work. At least it wasn't long after 10.9 was done installing that I worked that out. She's going to Russia for school. Wish her luck.

Otherwise I did some writing. Got through chapter 7, I'm just whipping through them.

Not many calls. The first person solved their issue, probably just resetting their router.
Got two others, didn't reach one person. The other wants Saturday.

So I have just the one for tomorrow, late, finishing up some stuff with a person from yesterday.

Thurs:
Just the one job, which went okay. Her blue ray player won't get netflix anymore, so I tried updating it. It wouldn't update. I downloaded the update and applied it. Still didn't work. Tried a different cable, tried the wireless, nothing. It knows it's online, it just won't "update" so now netflix won't work.
Also looked at a printer. Insists the black cartridge is empty or missing. Even when other cartridges are also missing. It doesn't care about them, only black.
But I did figure some things out for her, so the additional two hours there was well spent?

Otherwise, did more painting of the guns, not much though. One is all shiny on the top in various places. Never had paint do that before.

And wrote. Got half way through chapter 9.

No jobs for tomorrow? And the week started out so promising too. I do have the one for Saturday. And someone emailed me, so I may get out there tomorrow.

I did schedule a job, but it's for next week. Monday. So I have two that day now.

Tried to get an appointment for a recall done on my car. Apparently the place doesn't have the parts. So that's out for the moment. Didn't want to get my tire fixed anyway. (which I would have had them do at the same time)

Rained a little.

As far as the future, game on Saturday, the wanderer game at 7:00. Haven't done that one in a while.

That's the only exciting thing, I guess.

August is going fast, hope you like seeing changing leaves because it won't be long now.