Flament!

We got the house refinanced on Friday.  The new lower rate is going to result in enough of a monthly difference to almost pay half of a car payment.

Speaking of cars, I sold the red truck.  Got less than I had settled on originally, but I call it a win since when the guy came to pick it up he had some trouble starting it and still drove off with it.

Julie and the kids came into town this weekend for the balloon rally.  The rally was ok, but mostly made everyone just want to go up to Albuquerque for the big one.

And I ran the first session of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  I'll assume there was much and more lamenting going on by Ben and Amy, likely directed at wondering why they had agreed to play this lousy system.  There were little to no flames or princesses.  The characters had been dispatched to a crummy swamp town to bring back or find out what had happened to a merchant who had been dispatched there.  I tried to work in random tables a bunch and it seemed to work ok.  I did have some confusing moments trying to deal with a system that is not directly designed (and only kind of modded) for the type of play encouraged.  There were some generally unexpected and cool moments (both the characters getting mind whammied and almost murdered by a wacky cultist, Ben almost killing one of their friends/henchmen while trying to save the guy) though, and I'm planning on at least six sessions.  Need to do a recap write-up, to allay some of the inevitable, "what happened last time?"

Lamentations of the Swamp People

Ran my first session of Lamentations of the Flame Princess tonight. Went pretty well, but something felt off. Could be it's been a long time since I ran some kind of sandbox game. Could be the system doesn't explicitly support the sort of game it seems to be trying to emulate. Anyway, I ran with a Cthulhu meets Swamp People theme and tried to work as many tables from Vornheim in as I could while they were investigating in town. I think that latter part worked the well.

Housings

Heard back from the bank about refinancing our house.  The deal's good to go, but the appraisal seems to have come in fairly low, which is not super happy news.  That means after being in the house for over 6 years we have very little equity, and not near enough to finally get out from under PMI.  The refinance should still reduce our mortgage payment in the short term, which was our goal in the first place, but the whole process has shed light on just how much the housing dump has hit us.  Again, we're not getting hit hard, but mostly because we're not planning on moving any time soon.
In other house news, we had some rain the other night and some dripped down the exhaust and shorted out the flame sensor on the furnace.  This meant we spent the night without heat.  We put a small electric heater in the kids room and bundled up.  I tried the furnace again in the morning just before I was going to call in for a repair and it had dried out and is working fine.  Need to get some folks out to give us some estimates on converting the place to refrigerated air, which would likely involve a furnace replacement as well.

Restarted Burrito Quest last Friday.  We're doing a vegetarian trek, what with Ben's dietary mores.  In the process of processing the recording I discovered that I had never posted the 12th episode from BQ3.  So, two recordings need to go up and I'm already almost a week behind.  More of the same.

Gaming last Friday was mostly us sitting around wondering what to game.  I offered to run something and Ben seemed intrigued by the opportunity to play again.  Going to run some Lamentations of the Flame Princess starting (maybe) on Friday.  Should be interesting as it's a old school D&D revision that really doesn't provide much in the way of specific and/or useful bits for how to run it.  I haven't run something that was strictly sandbox in, well, maybe never.  It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Yeasty and Lacking

I decanted some of my first Mr. Beer batch when Dad was in town, but it was way too soon and I'd hoped the flavor and clarity would improve with more bottle time, both on the shelf and in the fridge.  I took some to Carl-Bad and it was similar to that first opening, somewhat cloudy and with a yeast flavor I'm not totally fond of.  Even more fridge time has improved the clarity immensely, but there is still an off note on the flavor.  Not undrinkable, but I hope the second batch turns out better.  And Isaac gifted me some cash to get some more brews.  Thanks, Saac!

Speaking of Xmans.  We did pretty shabbily on the gifting to friends front.  I managed to get Legend of Drizzt boardgame for Ben and Amy but aside from that we had nothing to reciprocate with.  Not that it's strictly necessary, but still, this tarnishes our track record for gifting to pals.  We'll have to see what we can do to remedy the situation.

Thanks to Sage and Sarah for the Woodford Reserve.

Family Times

Christmas went off well.  The new van was delivered on Thursday and we immediately packed it up and took off for Carl-Bad.  Luckily leaving a day early got us ahead of the storm.  I heard at least one coworker who headed out for Carl-Bad Friday morning say it turned the three hour drive into seven.  It started snowing Thursday night and kept it up for two days straight.  While there I got a look at Rocky's still and talked moonshining with him, built a snowman and snow fort with Ross, ate some delicious brisket (twice), got some gifts (beer, a necklace, and flatware), and generally had a good time around family.  Having kids of my own now I think having that kind of family time, like we did when I was a kid and we'd visit Mississippi, is getting more important.  Maybe we should have trucked on up to Colorado like last year.  Ah, well, next maybe next time.

 

We got back in Xmas afternoon.  Got things squared away and even managed to fit the van in the garage with my car, but only just.  Until (or maybe unless) we get some stuff moved out of there it looks like I'm parking on the street.  This was the first morning and I've gotten spoilt enough that I probably ought to rediscover skills at things like scraping frost off of windshields.

 

Managed to hang with Saac a little, what with his limited time in town.  Sunday I went over to Ben's and had some beers with the guys while watching very, very crappy movies.  Blew out of work early Monday and met Ben and Isaac for lunch.  There was much lamentation for Heftymetals and times when people who aren't Ben had a lot of free time around the holidays.

Official: Dad

We bought a minivan last night; a 2012 Honda Odyssey.  Truthfully, Carrie did most of the buying.  She texted back and forth with 4 car dealerships, getting them to one-up each other till we came down to (what we hope is) a reasonable price.  These kids are gonna be riding in style.

Whuff

Let's see:
Party at Ben and Amy's house.  I did not Rockband, but I got some quality time in with the grumpy old folks in the back room; my people.  Spent the evening talking movies, comics, books, and whatnot with Tony, Amy, Charles, others, and for a brief time Hon. Bill.  Was nice.

Carrie went out of town to visit Alicia up in Denver, and Dad came into town to help out with the kids.  The two and a half days Carrie was gone went pretty smooth.  Had a good visit with Dad too.  Whenever he comes in to town he gets me off my ass and moving, at least a little more than I was.  After Carrie got back we got out twice, once with the kids on the desert trail in the middle of a neighborhood over in Sonoma Ranch, and once taking Piper up to the levee.  We also watched probably the funniest episode of It's Always Sunny ever ("Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games").  Dad cooked a lot and I even cracked open one of my homebrews before he left.  It was early, but it still tasted pretty good, if a little yeasty.  I wanted to open one while he was in town, what with him buying me the Mr. Beer kit and all.  I'm letting them sit for longer than the kit tells you to, but more in line with what some of the fan communities makes better beer.  We'll have homebrew for Xmas at the very least.

Things with the kids are good.  We are having some small issues with them not wanting to eat, but it could be they don't like the high chairs anymore.  At daycare they sit them in chairs at a table.  Anyway, we got them a chair and table set for Xmas, so we'll see.  We set up the Xmas tree and decorated while they were napping last Saturday.  When they got up they were mesmerized and adorable.  For safety, we extended the fence we have in front of the entertainment center and made a space in the corner for the tree.  Seems to be working pretty well so far.  Oh, and so far this week they have slept through the night, without waking up once, every night.  Nice.

More holidays coming.  Carrie and I are taking the kids to Carl-Bad for Xmas, coming back Xmas day.  Aside from that I'm only taking a few days off around New Years, since Jon's likely not coming down this way.