Elaby's LiveJournal - 57 Academics

This last month and a half has been one constant stream of activity. Vacationing with Rachel's parents, helping Rachel's mother move her grandmother into a retirement community, weddings, parties, and - of course - work every day of the week. I feel like I've been in "on" mode since the summer solstice, and for me, "on" mode is very tiring. The only time I was able to turn myself in to "off" mode was one weekend where I was so sick I couldn't go anywhere :\

We've had very little time for creative things or for relaxing, but in the midst of it all I've been working on a "comfort writing" project - old-school character bios for my Lord of the Rings Online characters. Researching obscure details about the geography of Middle-earth and making references that only a handful of people are likely to be interested in? Count me in!

( My little crew - they'd make quite the ensemble cast! )

Summer is going by so fast (July already?!), and here are the things I've been up to lately:

The House
Housework, predictably, takes up more of my time than it did when we had the apartment. The big difference is that I don't mind doing it nearly as much as I did there. I sort of enjoy vacuuming, guys. It was SO hard to vacuum at the apartment because there was barely floor space to do it in, and I had to find places to move all the things on the floor before I could really vacuum, and then every few minutes I'd have to stop and cut all the hair out of the carpet attachment. We have no carpets at the house, except for small ones beside our bed, and it makes it SO much easier to keep things clean. Doing the dishes sucks, as it always will, but our sink is so tiny that we do them more often, which makes things easier. I just get more satisfaction out of keeping the house neat than I did the apartment.

We've also been doing a lot of work on the house aside from day-to-day chores. Rachel painted our cellar door a beautiful green, because it's a little short hobbity door, and we're going to put a sign on it that says "Bag End" :D We finished unpacking the temple room yesterday, and it looks so beautiful (see Rachel's post for pictures). I can't wait to start arranging our altars. Rachel had the awesome idea of turning one of the closets into a meditation nook - I love enclosed spaces and a cozy closet decorated with pretty things would be perfect for meditating. I can't wait to make that room into a spiritual haven.

Weaving
I'm working on my second weaving project, a scarf. The warp is black and the weft is a vibrant rainbowy yarn, and the colors have been transitioning really nicely. Scarves go really fast! I'll need more yarn for my next projects. My heddle is a 10 epi heddle (that's how many holes and slots per inch are in the heddle) and I discovered this time that worsted-weight yarn is almost too big to fit through those holes ^^;; So I think I'll confine myself to sock yarn and lighter weights in the future. Weaving is so much fun :3 I find it very fulfilling, and it gives pretty quick results, which is helpful for someone who's just beginning in the craft.

Writing
I've been working, very slowly, on my Camp Nano novel, and I think it's coming along well. It's about Cora, who lives in a treehouse and is self-sustainable and wary of magic because of events in her childhood, and Ellspeth, who goes to an art school in the nearby city and was raised in the wilderness by sentient wolves, and is a secret unlicensed magic-user. There will be exciting locations and attempts to reveal Ellspeth to the authorities and memory-magic, and I'm looking forward to writing it.

LotRO
I love this game so hard. Lord of the Rings is very important to me: it's been a formative influence on me for over twenty years, from my writing to my art to my ideas about storytelling and literary criticism. Almost as much as the characters, the world itself is what keeps me coming back, and getting to run around it and experience it with my own characters at my own pace is incredible. Even if there was no storyline - and the storylines range from epic to routine to fun to adorable - I would get pleasure just from exploring the landscape. Back when I'd never played an MMO before, I don't think I really appreciated the scope of these games. Yeah, Final Fantasy games are normally pretty gigantic, but you can't always just run around them wherever you want. You have story paths you have to follow and places you can't get unless the story has taken you there. Zelda's been the same - you can't just walk somewhere without having followed the story there. In LotRO, you can pretty much go ANYwhere. You may get squished by a troll or scorched to death by a dragon or eaten by a warg that's seventeen levels bigger than you, but you can go there. There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, you can go where you want. The game developers and writers are very meticulous about their lore details, and it's a hardcore Tolkien nerd's dream come true. I've had to defend my choice to play this game to people before (both in terms of dedicating some of my free time to it and in terms of occasionally spending money on it). Video games are, for some reason, seen as "lesser" forms of entertainment by some people. Nobody would give me weird looks or say "I would never spend my time/money doing THAT" if I substituted "going to the movies" for "playing LotRO". And what do you do when you watch a movie? You experience a story, you watch moving pictures, you think about what's going on. When you play video games, you experience a story, watch moving pictures, and think about what's going on - and you're forced to make choices, think critically, make decisions that will effect the outcome. I'm not saying that video games are better or more worth my time than movies or TV shows, but for me, they're on the same level of quality and worth.

Rachel is playing now, actually, and I think I'll be off to join her :3