After swearing for 15 years I would never ever do it, I played Axis and Allies today. The Spousal Unit to Be set up on the extra bed in my dorm room bed once, and after about an hour of trying to parse the rules I got exasperated, sat down on the bed beside it, destroyed Asia and half of Europe, and declared victory. I wasn’t going to play that game ever ever ever. I also never have succombed to Risk or almost any other war games of the board sort. Chess and checkers notwithstanding, of course.

Anyway, my friends are over, and peer pressure does work on me on rare occasions, depending on the peers. And, darnit, of course I had a little bit of fun at it, too, after my brain stopped hurting from so many rules all at once. Sooo many rules! We stopped after about 6 hours of gameplay or so, because my attention span had enough, but maybe it wouldn’t be incredibly awful later now that I know the rules. Or… maaaaaybe I’d deign to play Risk. If Jared didn’t bring any blue decks over. I’m not promising anything though.

Such an obvious solution was staring me in the face.  I’d been twisting this idea around, inside and out, and the easy thing to do is right there.  I’ll homeschool myself!  So, for the next quarter, I’m back to school, but at home.  Since my brain is really kind of fried right now, I figure this will be a good way to ease myself into the whole rigorous world  of academia once more anyway.  I’m really excited, honestly, but I also know I’ve been absentminded and foggy lately.

I figure I’ll start with the basics and work my way forward.  If it’s easy, then I’ll just fly through it.  Thrift stores around here should have text books that will do me well, on top of what I find online to help me. A friend of mine referred me to a Cliffs Notes homework help page to help me brush up.  I’m trying to ignore the spectre of Dr. Vance who is in the back of my head yelling, “These are terrible.  They contain factual errors!”  Another friend pointed me in the direction that lead to some free online Aeronautics and Astronautics courses and lectures from MIT and St. Petersburg College.  I’m trying to remain hopeful that these will be of use to me.

The main thing, though, is the schedule.  The structure of my typical day is nonexistant.  I just do what I need to do, when I feel like doing it.  Right now, I really need a more rigid schedule.  It doesn’t have to be ironclad, but I keep trying to drift through life.  If it weren’t for that coffee addiction that I’m cultivating, I don’t know what I’d be doing.  I considered getting a part time job, because of course more money would be nice, but I know that I would use that as an excuse to keep from doing this.  To that end, I have worked in plans to address the money issue in other ways, without going out and getting a boss.

I’m so excited; I have a real plan!  It’s a very simple one, and doesn’t address much more than the next few months.  I’m aware there will be distractions, or times my decisions will be all wrong, and I’ll have to rethink everything. The important thing right now is that I’m moving.

Planning errors were our biggest downfall. I knew there were events in downtown Atlanta, but I was actually using this as a way to get away from college football — specifically the Alabama/Virginia Tech game. See, my brother Lauren was all about Alabama football, and he was living in Hokey territory. It was a badge of honor to him to piss off Tech fans around him. This game was something we’d been looking forward to for most of the year. So, I was glad I’d be at a convention and a baseball game, to avoid that first hard game of the season.  Yeah, guess where they played? The Georgia Dome, because that’s a natural venue for that game. But you already knew this, didn’t you? This is what I get for avoiding the news. I started seeing Virginia Tech jerseys everywhere. It was like a sledgehammer to my gut.  An emotional booby trap.

There were other issues, of course. We shouldn’t have taken the kids, or should have taken them straight to the daycare services. There were a million people there, and the kids were well behaved, but constantly on the verge of being lost or trampled. I shouldn’t have allowed us to get double booked with the ball game, because we had the bright idea of avoiding the 10 minutes a block traffic and hoofed it to Turner Stadium. We should have tattooed a map of downtown Atlanta to one of us. I mean, there were henna artists right there. They’d have done it for no more than $20.

The line was long, and we should have brought more cash to pay for tickets. That would have saved us two hours. In fact, we should have started out with cash and credit, because we finally found ourselves a parking space and it took credit.  All in all, we missed out on a hugely fun time because the expectations were too high, we didn’t plan well enough, and we kept wandering in circles and trying to keep the kids from being bored to death. Also, because I kept bursting into tears and apologising for being an angry, broken person.

I hate that I don’t have much shiny stuff to tell everyone, but I know people want to know what I saw. We went to one presentation by Lucasfilm, which was very exciting for the boys.  It highlighted the upcoming Season 2 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Old Republic MMORPG coming out soon. That looked really wicked.

The cosplay was colorful and varied.  For a bunch of introverts, I saw tons of skin and self-confidence.  There were steampunk, anime, comic book, period, and any other types of costumes you can think of.  There were even two Coralines that I saw.  No, we don’t have a lot of pictures.  Refer back to me trying to keep the kids from being trampled and general crowd panic.

There were some really cool vendors.  We wanted to find some dice, but there were no GameScience anywhere.  In fact, the only dice to be had were Chessex.  I wouldn’t be caught rolling those things, but they didn’t have a decent collection of dicebags, either.  That was a big disappointment.  Maybe next year I can represent GameScience, and if I learn to sew or leatherwork between then and now, I can provide those as well.  There was certainly a market for them that wasn’t filled.

There were some spectacular artists, my favorite being Kevin Dyer.   His artwork is made of cast paper, and he relies heavily on Celtic themes.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but I loved all the Celtic Knots and dragons and trees. I want one of everything, and a house big enough to house it along with my Ansel Adams prints that I will own one day.

OH!  I do have one encounter with someone nifty in particular.  I had to say “excuse me” because I almost bumped into this dude in a pink dress, with a white mohawk and black corset that matched his combat boots.  I think it was Malcolm McDowell, from A Clockwork Orange and Heroes.  So that did send my tummy swimming a bit.  For a few moments I was very excited.  But then Red Chief almost plowed into him and I thought the earth was going to swallow me whole, so we walked away.

Next year we’ll be much more prepared, and I’ll regale you with all sorts of stories.  If anyone else went, I’d love to know more of what happened around the Con.  I know that there were four buildings and days of events, so we missed out on a lot.  I’d love to hear about it.

We do have a Braves game we’re going to Saturday night, though. So we’ll miss the aquarium event, which kind of bites, but we’ll have fun anyway.  My Mom is a huge Reds fan, and the rest of my family are Braves fans. (I hate baseball, but I’m a trooper.) So, it’s a tradition to go to at least one Reds vs. Braves game every year.  There’s only one this year. It often falls on the weekend of Dragon*Con, and we see all the people dressed up in their costumes as we drive through downtown and pine for the fjords.

So are you going?  Would you like to meet up?  Let me know.   I’d love to at least be on the lookout for crazy internet people to dying to mug me in a very public, crowded venue.  Plus, there’s gonna be Felicia Day, Bill Shatner, and Patrick Stewart!   And others!  Go look!