Or, the "Second Annual Southeast-Trogland Giant in the Playground Meetup"

The meetup was an unbelievably huge success. Our gathering of 35+ forum members from all over the country (and even from canada!) here in Johnson City was an absolute blast. So many cool people, so little time in the weekend.

A short run-down of the events is as follows:

On thursday night, there were some early arrivals - Ceika, Tantolain, Sir Dustin and Trog. Llama and I made cookies for the meetup on thursday night. Well actually, Ceika made cookies and Llama and I helped.

On friday, I went to pick up our first house guest, Krade, from the bus station. From there we went over to the Stable where we hung out with those gathered, played tetris and watched Dusty (Sir Dustin) run around the room chasing his chew toys.

By friday night, most of the others had arrived. We met in the basement of ginger's church where we had pizza, games & music.

On saturday we went out to the Greenwood Challenge Course, where we had an awesome cookout, played many epic games of kubb, and quite a few went up on the high-ropes course.

On saturday night, many of us met up at the Mid-City Grill - a cool little restaurant downtown that has good, cheap food and an incredibly relaxed atmosphere. Also, they're open till like 5am.

On sunday afternoon, we met here where we intended to have another cookout, but it rained so we had a pretty decent lunchmeat spread and played Wii for most of the afternoon.

Even though most of the people had left by sunday evening, those remaining met up at Robbs place where we hung out, chatted and played the Oots board game. Ok, we played a very small part of the Oots board game.

Which brings us to this afternoon when Krade, the last one still in town, left around 2:30 after playing a rousing game of Grave Robbers from Outer Space.


That was quite a bit of a fly-by, but I couldn't possibly go into all the details of the weekend. You just had to be here. It was awesome. Can't wait till next year... ...though I am glad for some recovery time before then...

It was awesome to get to meet so many cool people, and fantastic to see some of the one's I'd met before again! :-D Words can't describe the coolness.


A gallery has been added for the event on the Gallery page. It contains 107 98 of the best pics from the weekend. :-)


~PS

2 days till the Second Annual Southeast-Trogland GitP Meetup. We're making a lot of last-minute preparations. We've had a bit of a fiasco regarding some t-shirt plans, but i think we've got that pretty much...er...ironed out. Or, at least we *will* have.

Lodgings are pretty much sorted out and the food situation should be taken care of. Sheri & I picked up a couple of things yesterday which should be helpful for saturday's cookout and sunday's hanging out here.

We're expecting something like 40 out-of-towners to be arriving between later tonight and friday evening. This is going to be pretty epic. Also record-setting, i believe.

~PS

Lego Airbus A380 Is Biggest Lego Airplane in the World.

1:25 scale model of an A380 Airbus, which is the largest passenger airplane in the world.

9.5 feet long, 10.5 foot wingspan, 3.2 feet tall. 75,000 (220 lbs) of lego bricks. Took a team of professional legoland model builders 600 hours to build.

Yes, i said 'professional legoland model builders'.

I want that job. Heh.

~PS

This is more of a surrendering than anything, sadly. I've gone ahead and added the three songs I recorded back in february to the Music page - By Moonlight, The Poor Man That I Am and Sleeping In The Willows. My original intent was to finish writing & recording the album they were supposed to be a part of, but it's now almost july and I've yet to do another single thing with it - nor do i feel particularly inspired/motivated to do so.

The original concept entitled Voyages of Ghostships was to be a collection of songs something like ghost stories - in a more concrete or abstract fashion from track to track. I still may expand/complete the project, but for now, I'm considering it somewhat dead in the water.

~PS

I seem to have been pretty busy the last couple-few weeks, but not with anything important or exciting to talk about. Basically, this whole post is something like a "here's why i haven't blogged in a while" excuse...

What i've been up to:

• Work's been really busy, but I've done some cool things. Sadly, this means my own projects get neglected because I don't even want to look at most web sites after 5.

• Been gearing up for the GitP meetup (t minus 8 days), working on a time-consuming illustrator project for it too.

• Mowed the yard again yesterday. Lawn looks good, hopefully I can keep it that way for the meetup and when my parents come down the weekend of July 4th. Means i'll probably have to mow it again before then though...ugh...

• Finally continued one of our current d&d games, though it might be a while before we get to play again.

• Been trying to work on a new roleplaying system and setting. Still in the 'vague' phases, mostly because i have so many ideas that narrowing it down is proving to be difficult.

• Been playing Twilight Princess; just finished the desert temple.

• Played golf a couple of times. That was fun. I did ok. Got a couple of pars even.

• Sheri & I got a wardrobe that we need to stain.


So yeah, the blog, etc, has been neglected lately. The gallery has been updated with a few new pics. Mostly sheri's plants. I really want to go somewhere fun to take pictures. That's on the list....somewhere.

~PS

EDIT: Oh yeah, i forgot another big one - the Spare Room has been cleaned, painted and given window coverings. Also, i changed out several light switches and added a bunch of decorative switch/outlet covers.

Also, I'm behind on my normal blogging / photo-posting / etc. I'll get to some of that soonish. Probably.

~PS

Yeah, and you *really* don't want to know everywhere wii went yesterday looking for this thing. Twice.

Despite the fact that wii never thought wii'd buy a video game console, wii ended up breaking down. After having fun with kev's last weekend and then getting some extra money, Sheri decided what she wanted to spend some of her 'fun' money (+ christmas and birthday money from like the last two years that she never spent) on: she wanted to race with Yoshi (yo-shiii!). So, after a no-less-than-epic search, wii now have a console and the elusive new Mario Kart game. And much fun will be had by all.

I've always enjoyed video games, but they just haven't ranked so high for me in the 'stuff i want to spend money on' hierarchy for the last several years. Thing is, the Wii is just too much fun. The interesting and different interface is really what makes the whole thing for me. If this had been just a 'normal' console, i can pretty much guarantee wii wouldn't have spent the money on it.

So yeah. Anyway, wii also have our eyes on a few other cool-looking games wii've seen for it. I should point out that this is the first console i've owned that can be considered "current" since the original Nintendo came out... ...so wii're pretty excited about the possibility of getting some of the cool games wii've seen coming out.

~PS