August is Here! Already?

25 days since I started reading the first Harry Potter book, and now I've just started the fourth - The Goblet of Fire. This puts me 27% through the entire series, so I'm still slightly above a 1% per day rate which is good. I've definitely slowed down over the last few days, and hitting the first 700+ page book (over twice the size of the first two on its own) hasn't helped. Thankfully with Prisoner of Azkaban the overarching plot has started rolling along even faster so I should be able to blast through the larger books with more ease. I really can't believe how much of the content of these books was either left out of the movies or only barely hinted at so that you'd never know anything about it if you hadn't read the books.

This week, Wednesday morning to be exact, GenCon starts and it should be an incredibly fun time! I need to run out to Kinkos (yes it's not called that anymore, I'm sticking it to the man or something...) and get a small number of business cards printed because I didn't get my act together early enough to get a larger number printed beforehand.

That brings me to a different issue / story, Becky and I moved into this house two years ago and I made one of the upstairs bedrooms my "office". During the summer our upper level is consistently 5-10 degrees warmer than the rest of our house. Our bedroom has always had a ceiling fan so that solves the problem, but my office would get uncomfortably hot during the summer and fall so that it was tough for me to be at my computer for any significant period of time. On top of that, when we got our puppy Freyja the office was still inside of "cat territory" so I couldn't keep an eye on the dog and be on my computer at the same time. This resulted in me not being on the computer at home very much, which wasn't a huge problem but it definitely cut into my work on Critical Hits, playing games online, and working in Photoshop (among other things). All of this to get to the point that earlier this year I decided to move my personal computer and desk down to our basement, which is effectively one big gaming room - it has our TV, two sofas, lots of chairs, game consoles, movies, board games, video games, RPG books, and a big table for gaming all accented by a Rohan flag we got several years ago for our apartment hanging on the wall. So as of early this year it also contained my computer, which has been very handy for running D&D (and using Character Builder pre/mid game) but it also allowed Becky and I to spend time together while one of us plays a game on the TV and the other on my computer. Yes, this is how my wife and I spend time together quite often. We love it. :D

So this left us with an empty bedroom upstairs, that in my unemployment remained pretty much as it had been just without my computer and a few more things stored in it. Then in mid June, I got my awesomely awesome job where I'm working from home and needed to set up a home office. Seems pretty damn convenient doesn't it? I'm glad it was! Okay so the point of this story is that then I had to set up a home office upstairs where my old "office" was, this time with a ceiling fan installed to make it bearable (and thank god for that, it's fantastic!) - this meant my "office" environment was moved downstairs, then moved upstairs again, and in that move a LOT of things have gone missing.

So a lot of my time these days is spent trying to find stuff, and I'm not just talking about physical things even though there are a ton of them, but computer files also. See, even worse is that my home computer got some really nasty spyware and viruses on it shortly after I moved it downstairs (basement herp?) and so I had to reformat it. This has led to even MORE shifting around of folders, files, and now I've been trying to get everything back to some semblance of organization again. All of that explains why I didn't get my business cards sent off to be printed before this week. Good story, right?

Oh and then I found $5. Okay, now it's a good story. (If you don't get it, ask and I'll explain. :D)