Dark,
The traditional gift theme for the first wedding anniversary is paper. The modern gift
theme is clocks.
For my first, I slipped a fortune cookie in my pocket from a Chinese restaurant, then steamed it open and replaced the message with a Brailled one that I wrote.
"May  the world be open before you as a table
set for a delicious feast."

Lol Phil as Cae said, was it a particularly large cookie?
One thing I'd love to get my lady for our first wedding anniversary is a great serpent Ais sidai ring from Wheel of time. No it's not traditional to give rings at a wedding anniversary, but then again I don't know where weaves of the one power fall in terms of the hole paper, tin, jewelary malarchy anyway .

Unfortunately I'm not sure where to get one at the second but it is something I'd like to see about since my lady loves! the wheel of time, ---- quite surprising given we have a marriage entirely free from spanking and mistrust .

"Nocturnus, lol I told Mrs. Dark about your kitten and she alternated between @aaaah cute!@ and profuse laughter .

Maybe you'll be running into her on Alter at some point. actually I need to get backt o Alter myself and probably once Mrs. Dark starts I'll head online at the same time to fill in questions.
For the article, that would be very cool so if you feel like trying again despite feline depredations, and life based time constraints feel free.

Myself unfortunately I've just finished one of the most upside down 24 hour periods ever! when I was literally awake all night and asleep all day, but hay, such is life, and at least I've got plenty of other things sorted out in the mean time, including getting a working install of Winamp on my windows 10 machine since while I've enjoyed Vlc for dvds I am just finding it's lack in some conveniences in playback options for audio (not to mention it's inability to play crazy game music formats), to be a bit of a problem.

Well I still continue to fade in and out of existence, at least as far as the audio games scene is concerned.  As soon as the weather outside started to warm up, life yanked me away from the computer.

    I've spent time working on my garden, which now has a 15 foot long section growing potatoes.  I've been growing them each year, but this is their first year in a new location in my yard.  I want to see if the soil in this spot helps them grow better than their traditional spot.  It's still amazing to me that store-bought potatoes tend to go bad after a few weeks in my fridge, but when I harvest my home-grown potatoes each October they don't rot all the way through winter and I'm able to plant them in the spring.  I started to wonder if the refrigeration was what kills my store bought ones, since the ones I grow just sit in a cardboard box in my basement until next planting season, but a nasty disaster proved to me that keeping store bought ones without refrigeration is not the answer.  For a day Jennifer and I could smell this stench of death in the house, and it turned out the store bought potatoes had begun to rot on the shelf in our basement, and the smell had drifted upstairs.  That was unpleasant.

    We've been growing raspberry bushes for a few years, and last year I started the long process of cutting and rooting new plants along the fence on one side of our yard.  The goal is to have more raspberries grow each summer, but also to have it become a sort of privacy fence on that side.  The bushes take at least 1 year to grow, so this has been the sort of project where you have to just keep telling yourself that the work will pay off.  Finally this summer I can see the progress since the line of new plants is about a foot tall.  I have, and will have to continue my cutting/rooting efforts this summer too, in order to fill in all of the gaps along the fence.

    2 years ago the pipe leading to my garden hose froze during the winter without us knowing.  When we tried to water the front garden it ended up flooding one room of our basement and causing a huge headache.  As the relatively lazy person I am, I capped off the broken pipe and figured I would get around to fixing it later in the summer... which never happened.

    We have a garden hose on the side of our house too, which turned in to the only one we used after that pipe had split.  There was no urgent need to undertake the whole repair process/cost when we didn't need to use that front hose anyway.  Well this spring when I first turned on the side garden hose, the water pressure seemed low.  I spent several minutes trying to figure out where on earth my hose was kinked until I had that sudden sinking feeling in my stomach... this was similar to what had happened a few years ago!  Sure enough, the side pipe had frozen and split in the winter, and our entire laundry room was flooded.  The worst part about it was that I had a shelf filled with hard drives, power supplies, and other electronics that were all destroyed.  Related to this I had a power supply go bad a few weeks ago (anyone remember the Swamp server going offline?), and without my wall of spares I had to quickly fix it with one yanked from another, less-used computer.

    I have replaced the pipe for the side garden hose already, but as it turns out, the pipe to the front hose is a little different.  There is an elbow right where I would need to cut, in order to fix it the same way I fixed the side pipe.  It figures that I bought 2 of everything when I set out to do this repair, believing that the same parts would let me fix both spots.  Receipt is long gone so that was money down the drain. 

    The roof of my garage has been in bad shape for years and last fall it finally sprang a few leaks that were beyond the usual quick-fix.  The time had come to just tear the whole thing off, except it had already gotten far too cold out.  Since about November my garage has had a huge blue tarp fastened over it to keep the rain out, and I'm still trying to find the time to work on that.  The entire roof has to come off, down to the boards themselves being replaced, and then of course it must be re-shingled.  I expect that to be a solid 2 days worth of work, and probably a few extra just for clean up afterwards.  Yay.

    I tend to be the go-to guy for family and friends when things fall apart, so I've had quite a few projects going on outside of my own home.  I've fixed a fence, helped change out plumbing in a bathroom, installed I'd say a dozen light fixtures at my in-laws', and am currently trying to finish up a huge project in a basement.  Oh, I also got to take apart an industrial deli meat slicer to repair it, which was something I'd never worked on before and was pretty cool.  I only cut myself once on it!  yay! 

    My sister in law's wiring in her basement was down right dangerous.  I was originally recruited to install new lighting throughout the basement, but after uncovering death trap after death trap with the wiring, the project grew.  What ended up happening was I tore out the entire basement ceiling (and some walls), made sense of and removed all of the wiring in the entire thing, hung new lights, and rewired the whole thing from scratch.  Even the breaker box itself was a mess.

    The person who had owned her house 30 years ago had apparently considered himself to be an electrician.  I'm not sure how many here have any sort of electrical experience, but he had wired the entire basement (minus the furnace and 2 of the electrical sockets) to run off of a single 15 amp breaker, and using 14-gauge wire which is only meant to be used on overhead lighting.  Places inside the walls had literally burned over the years, smoldering and even severing some wires in 2!  The circuit breaker probably tripped left and right, which would have told the guy there was a big problem with what he had done.  His solution was to drill up to the main floor and tie the single large basement circuit into some of the circuits upstairs.  To cut the power to the basement multiple breakers had to be turned off.  It was a nightmare to untangle, and quite dangerous.

    I've only been able to go over and work on that project maybe a day or 2 each week, so we're now approaching month #2.  I still have a few more electrical sockets to wire in, and a bit more cleaning up.  I hope it can be finished in a day, or perhaps 2 if anything pops up to slow down progress.  I'm glad things are now safer for them in the house, but I'm sure it bothers them knowing that everything outside the basement is still potentially wired wrong by that previous owner.  Without literally tearing open each wall of their house, there is no way I can diagnose or fix any other hidden problems.  They'll just have to hope for the best.

    When her basement is finished, my next project will be my garage roof, and then a few other projects that have more recently been added on to my growing list.  My in-law's need a new custom sized door put on their garage since the old one is falling apart, my other sister-in-law needs her privacy fence repaired in about a bazillion places (plus a few new fence posts put in), and my nephews have a new swing set but someone needs to put it together in their backyard. 

Oh yeah, and some people may have wanted me to work on audio game stuff.  ROFL!

wel, let's stepp in here then. my biggest problem for now is that for some reason swamp is changing my derektion whenever i log on to the game and start using the mous. i'm using a dell laptop windows10 64bit. first i thought it was the touchpad but touchpad is disabled and it still does it. i tried putting something on it my phone but it sitll does it. whenever i move my external mous it does that thing. i also tried deleting the progress file but didn't help. so. i wanna get back to it but currently i'm not able to, any help?
only thing i won't do is uninstalling my touchpad drivers

oh, so maximise the window would help then? or how will you get swamp to run in fool screan mode

@Sito, Swamp is awesome, I need to get back to it myself, as I've loved playing it on every occasion I tried, but haven't been able to do it successively, however now I have a desktop and an actual mouse (since playing on a laptop trackpad didnt' do it).

@Aprone, wow! you sound quite the handy man. I always admire people who can do sort of practical stuff like this, since I find myself that clumsiness combined with lack of eyeballs does rather get in the way, changing lightbulbs is about my limit, though fortunately one of the advantages in having the council as my landlord is that most plumbing and electrician type issues, ---- not to mention taking care of the lawn are done by them directly, though some of their priorities can be a little nuts!

I recall a couple of months ago several light fittings in my flat needed replacing (not just the bulbs, but the hole socket they go in). When it was just the one in the bathroom I didn't bother, since it's not as if you need lots of light to take a bath,  but when both the living room and kitchen went in rapid succession I something needed doing.

the council initially told me  waiting time for an electrician would be over a month. When however they found out one of the broken light fixtures was the one in the kitchen they instantly said "wow! a food preparation area is a priority, as preparing food in the dark is a health hazard! someone will be around to fix the kitchin light fitting tomorrow, --- but the bathroom will have to wait"

I did actually point out to them that Mrs. Dark is totally blind and I am mostly blind and probably use my other senses as much as my vision anyway, (I thought it was only fair), but they were absolutely adamant on the subject, also absolutely adamant on the fact that the electrician could only! fix the kitchen fixture and the others would have to wait for another appointment  .

As it happened the  electrician was a jolly nice chap (as is quite with the council maintenance people), and was quite happy to replace all the light fixtures in one go (he was actually quite amused about the council's regulations) .

So I hoep this teaches everyone on the forum that you must! turn the lights on in the kitchen, --- -whether you can see them or not! .

As for me I've not got too much extra to report, though I will say the new Alter event sounds great. My lady loves angels so it's come at the right time.
I also have undertaken a couple more quests and intend to get back into the game on a regular basis, picking up where I left off, particularly since I do fancy having a go at these crafting skills (indeed methinks the Alteraeon entry in the db might need updating with details).

So a couple months ago, I got some peppermint, rosemary, and lavender plants, hoping to ward off the vampiric swarms. While I have yet to lose sleep at the whim of whiny blood-sucking hellspawn, my plants are kinda dying, and I do not know why. I have 3 inside, mositioned to get light from the kitchen window, and 3 others on the porch. It has been very rainy and cloudy for the past week, but this was a problem for most of May. I have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it

Any game development progress has slowed to a crawl, because of what I am hereby dubbing Chaos Lag. It mysteriously started slowing down in the first week of May, and got worse as time went on. Speed tests and tweaks to reduce the infant mortality rate (it's a computing term!) have been fruitless, as it keeps telling me weird things like it taking 21ms to play a sound (but only when there's attacking involved), it's significantly faster to chain geometric transformation methods than to call them separately, but only if nothing else is happening. It's all very confusing and I can hardly diagnose it for more than 2 hours at a time before I run out of ideas and reboot.

Speaking of the weather... I don't remember the last day it was dry enough to go anywhere. I should probably invest in some good boots, but I don't wanna.

yeh, thanks, the problem is fixed now. awesome that i can return back and play. but i've lost some skills heh. it's just bad when you're being reminded of how much you really forget if you don't do a certain task many times

I'm getting ready to sell off two macs, a braille sense, and a dell latitude with both NVDA and JAWS installed on it... I dread doing this but desperately need the money and hope someone will bite once I put these up.  Between being sick and having to deal with said sickness over the past week on top of dealing with three hungry mouthes not including my wife and myself, we're past the zero and into the negative ranges where money's concerned.  We had just barely recovered from an astronomically high water bill and an AC repair bill and then got hit with this bunch of junk.  I can't believe I'm resorting to selling, but when you really don't have a job, and you don't want to keep asking for handouts and sounding like the world's greatest loser always getting hit by tragic this and that bla bla bla, you end up where I am now.  That'll take me down to a used desktop who's integrity I can't be certain of and a lenovo thinkpad with a finiky battery, but for the time being, they're still running, and I dare say that even with these I have more than enough.  At this point, I'm more interested in paying my bills than I am in sentimental value.
Getting back to the sickness thing, I don't remember a time when I wanted to encase my face in an ice cube as I have this past week; it honestly felt like I was walking around with a radiant ball of hheat in my skull that thoroughly cooked me from the inside out!  I could feel my veins pulsing, and with every pulse I felt pain and heat just pouring and washing over me in a suffocating rhythmic, seemingly endless cycle of doom!  I'd kick the covers off, and the cold would press in on me from all sides while my face somehow continued to burn and sweat drenched me from head to foot and made my bed a nightmare and a half.  Add a stuffy nose and nausea, and somehow having to take care of 3 children, while not wanting to eat a thing, and your wife is sick as well... I got nothing, absolutely nothing done this week other than learning how fast I could run and hold in my guts in the process because I didn't want to projectile launch them anywhere else in the house other than the nearest toilet.  When I finally did hit the toilet, literally, with my elbo, as I was coming down to toss whatever made its way up, I threw away all my morality and was violently, bone twichingly, nerve rackingly, monstrosly sick.  My wife says I scared the girls; I know I scared myself.  So forceful was the action that I lost my voice for the next couple of days and couldn't swallow much of anything to boot.  Today, I consider myself fortunate to still be alive and have a loving family, because the last 7 days since writing post 2 on this topic have been as close to hell as I've ever been or imagined here on earth.  Bored out of my skull with tons to do but no energy to do a thing, mostly unable to talk, sick and tired of being sick and tired, curled up into a sometimes flaming, sometimes freezing ball of... what, coldfire?  I don't know.  Toss in the thunderstorms and the power going out a few times and, uh, yeah.
they say the grass is greener on the other side, but crossing the fence just to get there is a hard process; why'd they build that freaking fence anyway?  They say there's silver linings within the black clouds, but seriously!  Florida, what the blazes are you doing to me!
And now that I've posted these mostly morbid memories of a week that has come and gone, I must try and  satisfy my hunger.  Thankfully, that shouldn't involve too much food for awhile.

Dark,
Some women like the sound of a twenty a day smoker.
She probably imagined you as a sexy scruff take charge whisky drinking rebel.

Well rebel certainly given I'm not a fan of much mainstream, wisky drinking, ---- on occasion if it's a good wisky.
"scruff?" Well isn't that just a slob with attitude?
As to take charge, that is something I do not do. After all I don't have a compatible port for a standard 15 amp wall plug or even a place one can plug a usb charging cable.

I did hear apple were were trying something with their new "human interface", but it wasn't popular, in fact when the idea was proposed most people told them to stick it up their you know what .

Glad things are fun mariaespino, when you say washing dishes, do you mean as a job at a restaurant or generally? I tend to find it's me that usually does the washing up for myself and mrs. Dark while she tends to try and put things away, mostly because I mind doing it considerably less than she does.

Well things for me are fun. I've been doing a lot of playing alter, and Mrs. dark even had her first try. She found the experience somewhat confusing both in terms of mapping and not realizing to miss off room descriptions for combat, still she's going to give it another go and see if she can track down the carver shaman for the first quest. Actually she's being quite hard on herself for not getting along better, but since she's never played a computer rpg before, or indeed any sort of text game there is going to be a learning curve, though she does enjoy the sounds, music, quests etc.

She's a druid cleric.

As for me I'm enjoying getting back to the game, there are some new things on Arcase I need to take care of, particularly the ghost orcs quests, though annoyingly my minians keep attacking the slaves which is a pain.

I've sent off a couple of new book reviews and am now reading Belgarath the sorcerer by david eddings.

I read  before many years ago but as I recently redid the main series it occurred to me to do the prequals.
On the one hand it is fun, on the other, Polgara is really! rather irritating.
What amuses me is that some of the more sexist and rather idiotic bits come across as sort of adorable rather than annoying, for example when Belgarath's wife tells him she likes him to say sher loves her, and he complains "I will never understand women" .

I wasn't going to write a review of the book, but since it seems fantasybookreview.co.uk don't have any reviews of them I might do one after all.

q