Royce's Random Thoughts

Author and game designer Aaron Allston collapsed and died of a massive heart attack, February 27th

While most of Allson's recent fame was in his series of Star Wars novels, I knew him best as one of the most prolific contributors to SJG's Car Wars automobile combat board game. Back in the 80's he was Steve Jackson Games to me, more so than Evil Stevie.

His loss takes away another fond creator of worlds from my childhood, along with John M. Ford several years ago.

Yesterday I was supposed to take the day off to chaperone Thomas and Georgia on a daycare field trip to the National Zoo, which I'd never visited. Here's what actually happened.

1. Get to daycare to find out the trip had been cancelled because of the rain.

2. Leave Tom and Georgia at daycare because every day off I take I don't get paid, so I had to hump it to work.

3. Change, drive to work, make an unexpected detour because someone had gotten shot in the apartment building in front of the parking lot I use, so the cops had the street blocked off.

4. Got to work, finally. Boss appreciated me coming in so unexpectedly so much (one of my co-workers was leaving at noon) that she didn't dock me for coming in an hour and half late.

5. Computer has a breakdown while booting up, so I'm more like two hours late starting work.

6. Get an email from Tracy noting that Thomas was having a meltdown at daycare because of the unexpected changes in the schedule. Sigh.

Blargh.

Went to bed at 9:30pm only to wake up at 1:30am thanks to a combination of indigestion and the bedroom being too hot. Went back to bed after a 1/2 hour and tossed and turned until 4:30am when I gave up and got out of bed. Now I'm at the office, it's not even 8:30 yet and it's already uncomfortably hot in here.

In a not entirely a coincidence, the current bit I'm writing on Shadow of the Red Vixen has our heroes making the mistake of visiting the wrong hemisphere of the Earth for the tiem of year, and finding that Mount Rushmore in January is just a trifle chilly.

Long day is going to be looooooong.

Tracy car wouldn't start yesterday morning. So when I got home I called AAA to give it a jump because I figured it had been sitting there since Friday in the cold and the battery needed to be charged.

No, couldn't be that simple. Instead the AAA guy pointed out that there's a thing in the engine called a Tensioner Spring that holds the belt running from the engine to the alternator tight, but it was loose now and needed to be replaced. So I had it towed to our car shop and it'll be looked at this morning.

That's on top of the back somehow processing my last paycheck for only $250 instead of $500 (which was bad enough because dof all the damned furlough days I had in December.) And this morning I couldn't find the home equity checkbook to cover whatever the shop is going gouge us to fix Tracy's car. So I need to arrage the transfer over the phone and God help me if they need me to show in person to arrange because then I need to take off time from work which I can't afford to do.

Since Thanksgiving, it seems like it's been one crisis after another. I've had to get extremely expensive repairs on my car twice. I've had that scare with my heart. Christmas was just one anxious rush. The kids have been ill. My mother went into the hosptital to have her appendix it out and I'm scared to death I'm going to have to ask for money again while she's recovering from that.

Oh, yeah, and my jobs sucks but I can't afford to leave it and I've got no appreciable skills to get a better one.

I feel like there's a vice around my chest right now. I was breaking into sobbing fits while I was driving into work. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't what I'm going to do. I just want it to stop. Everything just STOP.

So this morning I started a software update for my PS3. At 99% that installation stalled out and I couldn't enter Safe Mode to stop the update process. After calling the Sony help line, they couldn't help either and decided it would have to sent in for service.

The problem is that the extended service plan is stating Tracy bought the PS3 unit from NewEgg on September 17th, 2010, when she actually bought it March 7th, 2011, nearly six months later, making it seem like the service plan has expired. NewEgg is trying to argue it isn't their problem, even though they would have been the one to scan it, and are demanding the service contract number (which naturally I can't find). So far I've sent them the incident number from Sony to confirm everything I'd already said, and they're trying a little less hard to weasel out responsibility.

But in the meantime we don't have a working PS3 and Daddy is Not Happy.

I had 87.85 dollars in my PayPal account, which was going to be used when I hit the $100 mark to buy a LEGO set I was drooling over.

Now it's going to go towards replacing a brake pad on my van. :(

So I got the news before lunch that we have to take 40 hours of mandatory unpaid leave this quarter and another the next quarter. This quarter I'm covered. I was already going to take five days off for a vacation at the end of August. I've got the time so I'll still be paid. But now I have to find another five days to take off between 9/1 and 12/1. The only bright spot is that I don't have to take them all at once.

This is turning into one of Those Days.