Idiomatic Expression

This weekend we went to an open house three houses down, and chated with one of our neighbors about how much we enjoy the neighborhood, and the sturdiness of our 1970’s homes. Then she let me in on the following rumor that had been being passed from neighbor to neighbor for the past 8-9 years. The story goes something like this:

Chris the former owner of our house only paid $55K for the house because the sellers were very motivated and wanted to unload it is as quickly as possible. When Chris moved in there was a gross black stain on the carpet, so she had it replaced. After a year or so the black stain returned, and couldn’t be cleaned away. She then found out that one of the previous owners had died in that spot (perhaps by foul play).

I don’t believe it, and know for a fact that Chris paid more than 55K for the house. However, I am interested enough to dig up the names of previous owners and do a bit of research.

The new galleries are finally finished. There are a couple of new photo sets up. Let me know if you have any problems with the galleries.

With a week and a half of vacation coming up, I picked up a bit of light reading to occupy my time between the eating, hiking, and ATV riding.

• A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Difference Engine by William Gibson
• The Essential Book of Sudoku by Pete Sinden

Quite a bit of brain candy reading to keep me entertained on the plane and relaxed on vacation. I am avoiding anything resembling literature to free my brain cells for a continued attempt to teach myself how to read Chinese Menus.

The Virginia Herpetological Society has conveniantly listed the snakes of Virginia with habitat maps, and nifty skull and crossbone indicators for the venomous ones. In Farfax the only snake that is a real threat to people, is the Copperhead (pictured above).

The recent articles posted on MetaFilter about role playing game history and Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Played a little with things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, Runequest, and the Cyberpunk 2020. One of my favorite games of that time was the Amber RPG a great world thanks to the vision of Roger Zelazny and a great set of rules that threw away the dice and focused on the role playing and the story. The last phase of my RPG playing focused on the White Wolf games mostly Vampire: The Masquerade with a bit of Werewolf: The Apocalypse thrown in for good measure.

Most of the time playing was a lot of fun, but I finally got out of it when everyone I played with seemed more interested in advancing their character statistics and following the exact wording of the rules (including arguments about comma placement) than actually enjoying themselves. Still there is a soft spot in my heart for RPGs and from time to time I think it might be fun to play again with a basic system like the classic D&D game (not the new mis-labeled D&D version 3 which is really AD&D).

Anyone else out there ever play RPGs or still into them?

Katherine, Chris, Blake, and I went to see Elvis Costello featuring Emmylou Harris at Wolftrap last night. It was an amazing performance, and the artists did an amazing job of playing each other’s songs.

Some of the surprises;

• Emmylou Harris had a sandwhich named after her at the Childe Harold, although it no longer appears to be on the menu.
• Elvis Costello sounds great singing country songs and apparently released a country album in 1981.
• Elvis Costello breaking into that famous Santana guitar solo
• Adding the lyrics “Admit that you lied” in the chorus of the Scarlet Tide
• The songs from the Delivery Man are much better when performed live. I will have to give the album another listen.

Now to see if I still think it was worth it after suffering through a monday on 5 hours of sleep.
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