Costumes and Mysteries Solved

I went to work today with the knowledge that today probably wouldn’t be my most productive day ever….because IT’S HALLOWEEN! Happy Halloween, everyone! In the five years I’ve been with my company, Halloween has always been a crazy day filled with food, candy, and costumes. I’ve gotten a little bit of a humbug reputation because I haven’t always participated. The problem in the past has been a high workload that I didn’t think I could or should take a break from. This year I’m working with a full and great team, so I was able to relax a little and have fun.

I’m not one to dress up, but as I think I said recently, I was able to help with costumes a little bit this year. My big project can be seen in this picture of one of our office’s group costumes.

Gru, Dr. Nefario, and the Minions

I knit the Gru scarf! I love how it came out too. I think the group did great with this costume idea, and it seemed to be a big hit. Our company had a costume contest and they let everyone vote for their favorites. Unfortunately, our office didn’t win, but I’ll admit that the competition was fierce.

Our office had other costumes too.

Biker Girlz rule!

Classy Cats

Turtleman

Roller Ghoster of Doom

For lunch, we had an office potluck with a ton of food. Right before we ate, however, I did our murder mystery reveal. We ended up with four winners who guessed everything correctly. Still proud of myself and my group for executing this like we did. I’m hoping to do a Twelve Days of Christmas Treasure Hunt, but I’ll have to see how busy fourth quarter turns out to be.

After work, Jon and I went out to find a few geocaches since the rain from early in the morning had evaporated into a nice sunny evening. We made four finds and had another DNF. One of our finds took us on a walk around part of Cico Park, and now that we have a better idea of what’s going on over there, I think we’re going to try to go back and walk around a little more.

On the way home, we stopped at Sonic for fifty cent corn dogs, then came home to relax for the evening. Tomorrow is Friday and it’s going to be a busy one. A lot of Fridays end up being pretty busy at work. Besides that, I have an eye doctor appointment first thing in the morning, and Jon and I have our first geocaching event tomorrow night, which means meeting other area cachers. Tomorrow is also the first day of NaNoWriMo.

Between housesitting, geocaching, and hanging with people this weekend, I’m hopefully going to find some time to try to get a jump start on my novel.

Off to finish some internetting, and then to bed. Have a great Friday!

A.

Friday’s Delayed Grind

I didn’t get yesterday’s post up because we didn’t get home until about 2 in the morning, and I wasn’t feeling hardcore enough to post a blog that late. It was a good day though, so I’ll give it its own belated post before getting to Saturday’s adventure.

Work stress was low yesterday. I was given the office recognition by another co-worker and asked to do a special project to help with the office costume idea for Halloween. I don’t do costumes. It’s always fun in theory, but I’ve never been able to pull off a good one, and let’s face it…I’m lazy. I have no ambition to prepare and dress up in a possibly uncomfortable costume. I’m okay with helping out. I’m going to keep this project a secret until Halloween so as not to ruin the costume surprise. I picked up the supplies for the project during lunch and have already started on it. Now I just have to make time to finish it.

Jon and I went to Hastings after work to buy new headphones for him before going to the gym. The headphones he picked up broke almost right away, so we had to go back and return them.  I’ve theorized a thing called Hastings Law: one can’t go to Hastings without something going wrong. This stretches to things like certain drinks or food not being available or the bathroom not working. In true form, Hastings Law didn’t let us down (even though I do realize this one should be blamed on the company that makes the headphones, but it still seems fitting).

From there, we went to Terry and Erica’s for gaming. We got a late start, using the first few hours to visit. I did some knitting and we ordered dinner. The game was fun.  This one is Jon’s fourth edition DnD campaign. Our party solved a puzzle, beat up some giant bugs, and took a secret passage to a room where we had to fight some big bads. They almost killed our entire party. There was a good chunk of time where we pretty much figured we’d all be rolling new characters before the next session. But we managed to survive and can now take our current characters with us to the next adventure.

Besides having a late game night, we decided to try to find a cache in the area before heading home. We had no luck. There were a few late night muggles around, including a group of girls who asked if we were looking for something. I just said we were goofing around and that seemed to appease them. I suppose we could have told them what we were doing, but they were staggering a bit. It could have turned into a long, weird, conversation.  We might go back to that one some early Sunday morning, but I think we need the daylight to give it a good go.

We finally got home and crashed out, deciding to set a later alarm instead of the super early one we generally set for weekend adventures.

A.

Gen Con 2013: Costumes

I decided to do a bonus post to show all the costume pictures I took at this year’s Gen Con. I don’t have the patience to cosplay, but I love that so many other people do. It’s one of the best parts of the show, and I made it a point to get more pics this year. At the end of this post, I’ve posted the costume parade again, in case you missed it in a previous post, or in case you just feel like seeing more costumes.

A.

 

Gen Con Day 3: Plan Changes and Becoming a Zombie

After the super late night on Friday, it was tough getting out of bed on Saturday, so we ended up getting a late start. After discussing some options, we decided to change up our plans. We returned some game tickets and took the opportunity to spend more time in the dealer’s room. This time, however, we made a plan. So instead of walking around wherever, we actually mapped where we were going.

We headed back to the computer game demo room so Jon could finish his punch card and enter a drawing for an iPad. Once it opened, we headed to the dealers room. Our organized plan worked well. We demoed some games early and kind of inventoried the things we wanted to buy on Sunday, comparing our wants to our budget. It was kind of a sad comparison.

Dungeon Roll

 One stop we made was at the Albino Dragon Games booth. I like their art and kickstarted one of their alt art decks. We learned a game and bought a coin and the gave us a free carrying bag. Such nice guys!

Lunch was a good opportunity to rest, and I needed it. Day 3 was definitely kicking my butt. Once we ate, I sent Jon back into the craziness and I rested a little bit longer.  I finally let some other con-goers have my seat, and we did one more demo at the AEG booth before finding a place to sit and discuss our plans. The truth was that we were exhausted and the evening events we’d been looking forward to, like our morning events, just didn’t sound worth the wait. So we turned the rest of our tickets in for system credit (head start on next year) and hung around the center long enough to get some more cosplay pictures and see the costume parade.

While I was turning in tickets, Jon got mobbed and turned into a zombie. I was turned shortly after. We ended the day as zombies and managed to tag a few humans before we left the convention center. We knew that was the end of our playing that game, so we found some little zombies (a group of kids between five and maybe ten) to pass our darts off to. They were thrilled! I hope they leveled up before the con was over.

We did get to see the whole costume parade this year, and it was well worth hanging around for. The batteries in my camera lasted long enough for me to get a video from a pretty decent vantage point.

.On the way to the car, Jon noticed that several of the Pathfinder posters had been “vandaleyes-ed.”

 Back at the hotel, I had to adult for a bit to pay bills and verify that we’d have enough money to buy the games we’d decided on. With the extra swag coming home between us and our trip mates, we also needed to do some creative packing for the ride home. The evening was spent uploading pics and recharging from all the craziness.

A.