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Well, hiya. It's been a while, so I thought I'd try to churn something out, instead of sitting at the computer wondering when exactly I the Internet stopped being quite so neat-o keen for me. :P

Liz was sick for about a week. Bad sick. She'd lie in bed doing nothing, drinking a little water every once in a while, and taking the mostly useless painkillers every four hours. Not eating, not able to do anything because her head hurt so bad, not wanting to really talk about anything, nothing. That was how I spent last weekend. Wondering what the fuck was wrong with my wife that the ER seemed to patently misdiagnose (They diagnosed a sinus infection, on the basis that there "seemed to possibly be something in the X-rays." However, since she didn't seem to have any of what I'd consider obvious symptoms of a sinus infection, (like, a runny nose at any time lately) it really didn't seem too accurate) what was wrong with her.

Anyway, we went to the doctor on Monday, and he basically threw his arms in the air and said, "Well, heck if I know! Have some more antibiotics, and, here you said you were having trouble sleeping, have some sleeping pills. NEXT!" Moron. Liz says that people are so hard to diagnose, inaccurate results are to be expected. I think that he probably just couldn't tell quickly what the problem was and had an afternoon tee time he didn't want to miss. But that's just my opinion.

During the week was pretty damn shitty as well, to tell the truth. Liz was still sick for the first half of it, which sucked, and I was put on a panicky, we-need-this-done-NOW sort of project at work that no one liked when they first did it over two years ago. I was at work until 9PM on Wednesday night. My manager type is being really nice about things, and suggesting I fudge things and take Monday off, but I can't, since Monday they're demoing it, and I need to be at my desk in case something breaks, I can try to diagnose it over the phone. We'll see if I can do better than Liz's doctor did.

And, sort of on top of all this, KT's grandfather died Thursday night. We found out about it on Friday morning, and went over that night to keep KT company while Kevin was at work. KT seems to be doing fairly well, but she's going up to Lynchburg this weekend to be with her distraught mother, whom I hope she weathers okay. KT and her mother sometimes seem to resonate off each other in an odd sort of way. One gets sick, the other gets sick. One gets happy, the other gets happy. Anyway, it's KT's stepfather's birthday today (although I think she thinks of him as 'Steve', and not 'my stepfather'), so that could perk things up considerably.

We had the Heroes game last night. I still don't remember anyone's names. Actually, I remember Liz's character's superhero name is the Weatherman, because I suggested it (yes, that's a Stormwatch reference, for those who get it), and her character's real name is Geoffrey Jefferson. Or Jeff-Jeff. I'd try to shorten it to JJ, but it's really GJ, and that just doesn't sound right. So I've been calling everyone's characters "Hey" As in "Hey, can you come over here and take a look at this?" Greg is the green Muslim woman, and Kevin is the psionic guy. That's okay, though. I doubt any of them know my character's name either (just for the record, it's Joshua Alexander Carter III, hero name Halo).

When we got to KT's house that night, we brought our comics in from the Cube. While we waited for things to get rolling, I read comics. Liz was getting a teensy bit irritated with me, I think, since I really wasn't paying a lot of attention to the pre-game festivities of such things as when KT & Kevin put in The 13th Warrior, and started scanning through the subtitles, looking for names. I was catching about 10% of the conversations, and every now and then would ask a question about things to try to get a better understanding of what was going on. Unfortunately, I kept getting these wordy answers, and by the time the responder was actually answering the question, I was reading comics again (for the record, this week's haul was TRANSMETROPOLITAN: I HATE IT HERE, PUNISHER #3, BOOKS OF MAGIC #73, FORTUNE & GLORY #1 and #3, and a used TPB of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN).

Anyway, so for the pre-game tangents, I was reading through most of them, and was actually timing things rather well, because I was on the last five pages or so of the DAREDEVIL TPB when Liz started saying, "Matt, put the comic down, we're about ready to start. Matt, we're going to get going..."

I finished and put the comic down. "Okay. Ready to go!" And that was when Greg looked up and said in a hopeful tone, "KT, you still have my character sheet, right?"

Perfect timing. What do I tell you?

So, after a bit, Greg found his character sheet, and off we went on the actual adventure. We got everyone down to the deep sea lab thingee, got introduced to the crew of the ship (Doctor... Doctor... Doctor... Doctor...), and went on a little SCUBA trip around the lab. I think KT did that to sort of introduce to some of the underwater creature's she'd found in her research, and to reassure us that despite the fact that we've only got 55% in SCUBA, we're not going to die.

For me, this goes back to the Felix in a parachute fiasco from the last Heroes game KT ran, back in college. Since we were all (except KT) in college, we sometimes missed games because we had papers to write, work to do, etc. I missed one game for a similar reason, and the group had Gone Off Somewhere (I want to say Russia, near the Finnish border), and left old Felix (my charming character) behind to guard the horses or something. I asked KT how I was going to get in to the game that week, and she thought about it for a bit and said, "Hmmm... you've got parachuting? You can just parachute in." When I pointed out that my parachute score was only 44%, I asked her what would happen if I blew the roll (thinking, as I did, that catastrophe wouldn't make sense, otherwise more than half of parachute jumps for all jumpers would end quite sloppily). She shrugged "Nothing too bad. You miss the spot you're jumping for or something." Thus emboldened, I looked forward to the game.

The game came, and the plane flew over the area. I jumped. "Okay, make your roll." I rolled. Something like a 76. Failure, but nothing critical. "76. I blow it." "Okay, roll one more time." I roll. Again, failure, but non-critical. Say a 76 again. "76. I don't get it again."

KT got a grouched look in her eyes. "Fine." She rolled handfuls of dice, consulted on tables, and looked up at me. "You almost break your leg. You take 35 points of damage, and your speed is at one-quarter until you see a doctor or do something to fix it."

!!

So, my speedster character sort of limped through the rest of that adventure, and I tucked away in the back of my head that another thing that bothered me about Heroes Unltd. was how easy it was to screw up at something.

So, we SCUBAed around successfully, not dying. We went to investigate the thing we were sent there to look at (an object that fell from space onto the site of the WWII Battle of Midway, near the wrecks of the Akagi, the Kaga, and the Soryu). We poked around it a little tried to make contact with it (it seems to be a ship or escape pod or something), tried to gather things we thought might be clues, and returned to the lab. Not too bad, but nothing really va-va-voom happened that has me on absolute pins and needles until the next game.

Well, that's all I can ramble on about for now. Talk to you later!