Powers Be Creepin'

I've talked a couple of times (here and here) about the table-top RPG I'm currently playing, where I play a reporter-turned-demon-hunter named Eddie Mendoza. And I mentioned my abuse of some experimental new rules that turned Eddie into a terror with a pistol, but I didn't go very far into the odd effect that has had on the game.

First, some history: the game is loosely based on the Chaosium Basic Rules, with lots of modifications thrown in from not only specific Chaosium games like Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, but also other role-playing games like D&D and Champions,

Sargon the GM had played one-on-one with Naamah for years before inviting other people (including me) to join the game. During that time, they had evolved a complicated and very high-powered magic system for the game. My first exposure to the magic system was in the second campaign I was in, our Atlantis game (which I've written about several times on this blog, more than I care to list ATM).

 At that time, an issue revealed itself in regard to the magic system: it was way overpowered compared to the rest of the game. This had never been a problem for Sargon and Naamah. As long as the game only had one player; there was no party balance to disrupt. But as events progressed in Atlantis, combats often became a matter of trying not to die while waiting for the mage to have her turn and wipe out the opposition. The enemies kept getting more and more ridiculously overpowered to challenge the mages while us humans progressed more slowly, occasionally running across magic items to give us a little more oomph.

The next two campaigns avoided magic altogether in favor of a new psionic power system and superpowers. But then along came the Wraithport game, which would obviously involve magic. How to solve the game imbalance issues, then?

Well, as it turned out, in a couple of ways. Number one, by having everybody in the party (with one exception named Mendoza) be magic-users (one character was part-demon who, while not knowing spells per se, had many spell-like powers that behaved pretty much like de facto magic spells). If all of the players are using magic, it doesn't matter how powerful magic is compared to other weapons and skills.

Sargon also adopted a new, slower advancement system for learning new (and higher-powered) spells to keep players from getting the really ridiculous high-level spells too soon.

And third, by adopting a set of optional combat talents to allow weapons combat to be more potent and flexible. It was by clever use of this third option that I was able to make Eddie Mendoza, who at first glance seemed destined to be totally outclassed and useless in combat, to be a useful contributing member of the party (thanks in large part to a magic pistol with some truly potent bonuses that the combat talents were able to amplify to ludicrous levels).

And somewhere along the way, something strange happened. Eddie Mendoza, the mundane character who was supposed to have been the weakest of the group, came to be seen as the "big gun" (pun intended). The same magic system that had seemed so overpowered in Atlantis now seemed strangely underpowered. That slowed-down magic advancement system now seemed too slow.

So new systems were introduced to make magic more potent. Magic talents were introduced to give magic some of the extra flexibility and impact that Eddie had enjoyed with the combat talents. And a new magic casting system was introduced to let magic do the same kind of absurd damage that Eddie could do when the dice smiled on him.

That shifted the balance back to magic again. Eddie in the last few game sessions has been relatively useless compared to the mages, and in the next session will be starting without the array of magic items that make him even marginally useful compared to them. But his skills and talents continue to develop, so at some point, he may pass a crucial break point that will make him bad-ass again. We'll see.

Those AIG Tweets, an Identity So Far Hopefully Unstolen, and Unknowns Known and Unknown

So Sunday night, in the middle of a completely unrelated personal drama, I opened an envelope that I expected would be junk mail. The return address said "American General Life Insurance," and since I don't have a policy with American General, I figured it was an offer to sell me insurance. But it also had the no-frills look of some of those financial come-ons from no-name companies, the ones that have a check inside for thousands of dollars that constitutes an instant loan for godawful interest.

So I decided  to open it to see if it was something I needed to destroy. But instead of an ad or a check, it was a bill, asking me for a payment of $25 against a loan of $3160, made against my life insurance policy.

Two problems:

1. I never took out a loan against my life insurance because...

2. I had never bought a life insurance policy from American General.

My first thought was that someone actually had stolen one of those "checks" from my mailbox and cashed it, leaving me on the hook to repay their loan. But thinking more about the way it was worded, that I owed for a loan against my policy, I thought maybe my identity had been stolen.

The notice included an 800 number to call as well as a website. So I decided to check out the website and see if it was at all legitimate. And it was weird. The website was for AIG, which is a huge insurance company. But when I checked the phone numbers and addresses on the website, nothing quite matched the notice I'd gotten in the mail.  The 800 number didn't match any of the numbers I found on different pages of the website, and although both the website and the mailed notice had P.O. Boxes in Nashville TN, they were different numbers.

This was not definitive proof of anything either way, though. Big companies have lots of phone numbers and boxes. But there was nothing that confirmed this was a legitimate notice, either. Even the second page, giving some further information about the company, listed the abbreviation for the company as AGL rather than AIG. So was this a legitimate notice or a clever hoax designed to look like it was from the big company?

I ended up getting very frustrated and sending out an angry tweet worded thus:

Received a notice from a fraud factory called American General Life Insurance, which may be @AIGInsurance. Interesting business plan.

A follow-up tweet went on to mention that they had gone straight to the billing phase, without ever doing the provide-goods-and-services part, but it doesn't look like that tweet actually went out.

I sat around stewing all the next day, because it was Presidents' Day, and AIG wasn't open. But I did receive a reply to my tweet early Tuesday morning, asking me to call a particular number. I called the number and went to the voicemail of someone named Stacy Golden, who was out of the office, but if this was urgent, I could call another number and talk to a different representative. So I called the different number, which took me back to the same voicemail. Which started me wondering again if this was all part of some really elaborate hoax.

I finally called the number from the AIG website, stayed on hold forever, and talked to a rep who finally confirmed that yes, a policy did exist under the policy number listed on my notice. And when I protested that I had never taken out a policy, she told me a detail that made some pieces fall into place.

The policy had been taken out in 1965. I was two years old at the time.

So this was a policy that my parents had taken out on me that I had no knowledge of. But it still didn't explain the loan. She had to transfer me to a specialist to deal with the loan part, though. After another ten minutes on hold, I got more of the story.

There had been no premiums paid on the policy since 2002. And since it was a whole life policy, it didn't lapse if the premium wasn't paid. Instead, the premium would be paid out of a "loan" taken out against the cash value of the policy. And so the amount had grown for 14 years, from unpaid premiums and accumulated interest on that unrepaid amount every year, until I owed over $3000 against a $5000 policy.

I called my dad and he said, yeah, there was a policy, but he thought they had been taking the premium payments out of his bank account automatically.

So now I'm faced with a few possible courses of action, none of them very satisfactory. I can do nothing, have the debt continue to pile up until it exceeds the value of the policy, at which point they sic collectors on me maybe? I can pay the debt and continue to pay premiums and receive a $5000 payment once it matures when I'm 65. I can just pay the premium and annual interest (about $200 a year) until it matures and receive an $1800 payout. Or I can cash out the policy now, before it has matured. I don't get as much money, only about $175, but I don't have to worry about any of this crap again.

That last one is the option I'm leaning toward.

But what disturbs me is how I just accidentally discovered the situation, and how close I came to having this problem continue to grow. It reminds me of that famous Donald Rumsfeld press conference about Iraq, mocked by liberals, when he talked about "known  unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." This is a perfect illustration of that principle.

There are several things I don't know. How the premiums stopped being paid. How my parents never noticed. How AIG somehow tracked me down, and how long they might have been sending me notices that I threw away unopened because I thought they were junk mail.

The difference between now and say, Saturday, though, is that Saturday I didn't know any of these things were issues. Now those are things I am aware that I don't know, while before, I didn't know an entire category of things I didn't know.

Now I wonder how many more of these kinds of things are out there, secret bombs from my past that I have no idea exist until they suddenly explode into my life.

The Long, Dark Night of Eddie Mendoza

So I mentioned over a year ago that I was playing a "new" character in our current tabletop game, a journalist named Eddie Mendoza. And I'm having a tremendous blast playing him, although it apparently doesn't look that way from the perspective of some of the other players in the game. Which sounds like something interesting to explore in a post.

As I mentioned in that previous post, Eddie started out as a provisional character. I wasn't sure if I was really ready to commit to another long-term game, but the premise sounded intriguing, so I came up with the concept for Eddie. The game master Sargon was dubious about Eddie, because everyone else was playing high-powered magic-using characters of one stripe or another, while Eddie was a mundane human journalist.

But with a strategically discovered magic pistol and a set of experimental new rules I was encouraged to break abuse use to my advantage, Eddie is able to hold his own in combat, and his nose for news has proven the launching point for many adventures. So I'm really happy with how Eddie has developed.

But here's the thing: Eddie's not happy. In fact, I don't think Eddie's capable of being happy, at least not yet. Eddie doesn't trust happiness, because happiness is what you feel before the rug is yanked out from under you. Eddie has spent years feeling guilty for something that happened over a decade earlier, although not in a mopey emo way. In a very-careful-to-guard-his-feelings-and-not-get-close-to-other-people way. And even though recent events in the game have shown him that the events he feels guilty about were more complicated than he thought, so that some of his guilt is misplaced, it's not something he can just give up.

The worst kind of character you can play in a tabletop RPG (and yet one that you encounter so often) is the Loner, because by nature, the game is about teamwork, and a Loner doesn't work well on a team. Eddie is a loner who doesn't necessarily want to be a loner, but learning how to change is not always easy.

I've been keeping a journal in Eddie's voice that the other players have access to on a cloud drive. Part of it is to say, "This is what happened." But Naamah, another player in the game, also keeps a similar in-character journal that is better at detailing events (I totally copied/stole her idea-not even going to lie).

But there was another reason. Because Naamah's journal tells events from her character's point-of-view, events are often characterized in a certain way that lines up with her character's attitudes. Eddie perceives things in a different way, and I wanted to represent that point-of-view. Also because Eddie's actions were often baffling to the game master and other players and I wanted to give a little insight into his thought process.

Sometimes even that isn't enough, because I think we sometimes approach gaming from completely different perspectives. It's like the difference between literary genres. Superhero and romance stories are largely about wish fulfillment. Horror stories are about confronting and working through fears and anxieties. I think the other players approached this game more as a superhero/romance, while I've approached it more like horror.

One of the players is an anime fan/devoted reader whose character is a magical girl fairy princess who is also a librarian. One of the players facing job anxiety has a character who is super-rich with a magical house that can travel anywhere at a moment's notice and also provides unlimited food and clothing. Literally any material possession she wants is available with a snap of the fingers. One of the players with RL family issues has a character with a close, loving, happy family.

And although some of the characters have tragedy in their pasts, none of them were at fault (or feel as if they were at fault) in any of them. Their characters are generally happy with themselves, happy with the way their lives were going before the game started, and not looking to change in any fundamental way. And they have had no problems falling into friendships (and beds) with each other.

Eddie was and is different. Eddie is not some wish-fulfillment fantasy. Eddie is much more a horror story character, a guy who may appear smart and cool and brave on the outside, but who is broken inside, and whose struggles mirror some of my own issues.

Eddie is more me than probably any other character I've played in my life. He's got my old job (journalist). He's got a lot of my attitudes. He's got a secret that he has never confessed to anyone in his life, and I have the exact same secret, something that absolutely no one knows about me, not family, not friends (and it's not evil or shameful, just sort of lame and embarrassing).

He has few friends, and what friends he has, he feels like an outsider among. He keeps his distance and has unrequited crushes (there was this one preacher's daughter; everybody knew how I felt, but I never copped to it, so we never actually dated). He tries to keep his head up, but he feels the guilt of a lifetime of bad choices that seemed right at the time. He even has my name, the name my parents originally meant for me to have before life laughed at their plans.

So Eddie is maybe a way for me to work though some of my own anxieties. He's also sort of opposite to everyone else in the game. But I think it works well for the game dynamic. A little sour to go with the sweet. That little hint of salt in the chocolate-covered pretzels.

It doesn't hurt that he is also an absolute terror with a pistol. And he is slowly trying to change his ways. Sometimes he has to do some logical contortions to find an excuse to change, but he is changing.

He's not happy, and he may never be truly happy, but I'm having a great time.

Vacationing in Place

So I had some vacation time planned last week, and I was really looking forward to the time off, although I didn't have any particular plans. I had thought about going out of town, but those plans fell through. And then I decided to just vacation in place.

I use the term "vacationing in place" rather than the trendier "staycation" because to me, staycation implies what I have usually done on my weeks off in recent years, due to a lack of money and motivation: stay at home and do all the things I normally do in my daily life--surf the internet, play games, cook at home--only without the going-to-work part. If I do happen to go out of town, it's to see my parents whose homes are as familiar to me as my own.

In other words, I don't have any new experiences or do any of those touristy things you do on a vacation. But I realized that there's a lot in Tulsa I haven't done. I never really experienced Tulsa as a tourist, because when I moved here, a combination of poverty, extremely demanding work schedule and a new fiancee kept me pretty much just working and sleeping and having sex much of the time. And by the time I got out of that pattern, I was married and affecting the bored, cynical pose of the native towards all those "tourists." Plus I'm from Oklahoma City, so it wasn't as if I thought Tulsa really had anything to show me.

But for this vacation, with some money in my pocket, I decided to treat it like an actual vacation. Don't spend all my time in the house. Go to places I've never been. Eat out as much as possible, and preferably at local places. See some touristy things. Go to some special events.

The first couple of days off, since they were my normal days off, I spent like any normal Monday and Tuesday. But on Wednesday, I started to ramp up. I ate out at the Rusty Crane downtown, where I'd never been before. I had the Sloppy John, which you would expect to be like a Sloppy Joe, except it wasn't. It was more like dry taco meat with some barbecue sauce on top. It was tasty, but not the flavor explosion I was expecting. Very friendly service, though.

Wednesday evening, I went to eat with someone (a rare experience in itself) at Gogi Gui, a Korean fusion place here in town. I had the donkatsu, which I haven't tried since one drunken expedition to a pub in Seoul in 1995(?) which culminated in me eating bugs, so my memories of the donkatsu were vague at best. Afterward, I went to the Saturn Room, a tiki lounge downtown (another place I'd never been) and tried one of their house specialty drinks, followed by karaoke at Woody's.

Thursday, I continued to press forward with the concept. Lunch was at the Genghis Grill on Cherry Street, which is a chain, but I'd never been there, so I tried it. Tasty food, but the organization, traffic flow, and service were all pretty bad, especially during the lunch rush. That afternoon, I decided to do something I've never really enjoyed, but suddenly found myself in the mood to try. I went to a bar and drank on the patio. I went to Classic Cigars downtown, sat out on the patio with a cigar and a beer and read Dracula, a book I had attempted to read as a child, but never finished (I did end up finishing it over the vacation). Both the cigar and beer were brands I'd never tried, recommended by the staff. I don't remember the cigar, but the beer was 5 a.m. Saint, a red ale. I really enjoyed myself, although it looks like I was still carrying some tension from work.

Still, to quote Castle, "I really am ruggedly handsome, aren't I?"

Afterward, I ate at the Rock 'N Rib Festival in downtown Tulsa. Rib Crib sponsored the event and were offering some special custom menu items just for the festival. I had a sampler of their htree types of smoked meat street tacos, which were all good, and also tried a sandwich from one of the barbecue contenders. Unfortunately, I tried economizing, so instead of having some authentic ribs, I had a sandwich which turned out to be a really expensive McRib. Still, a pretty good day, all in all.

Friday, I was not sure what to do to fill the day. I had events planned for the weekend that I didn't want to step on, so I started out by going to breakfast at McDonalds. Nothing says vacation like eating an oversalted biscuit with an undersalted egg on top, and I mean that sincerely. I pretty much only eat McDonalds breakfast (or any breakfast) on vacation, so that is exactly what it felt like.

Not sure what to do for lunch, I hunted around online and discovered that the Greek Festival was also happening that weekend (turns out there were at least four festivals happening that weekend - everybody trying to capitalize on the end of summer).So I headed just south of downtown to have some gyros and spanakopita and various other Greek things, including a glass of wine and a sour-cherry Greek soft drink. I hadn't been to the Greek festival in probably ten years, so this was a welcome return. I even enjoyed the bouzouki players.

Afterward, I drove around, thinking I might visit a park, but instead went back to Cherry Street, where I did some window shopping and had a chai in the Coffee House on Cherry Street (also new to me). I finished off Dracula and thought about doing some writing on my laptop, but there were at least ten other people on their laptops there, and they were ALL Macbooks, so I kept my Windows laptop safely in its bag to avoid Apple bullies.

Supper that night, after researching several possibilities that fell through, was at Fat Guy's Burgers downtown, where I go fairly often, but I had never tried their fries. Fat Guy's has a large number of custom dipping sauces that I have been wanting to try, so I got an order of fries with malt vinegar aioli. Not as tasty as I'd hoped, but a new experience nonetheless. I kind of wanted to go try another bar at that point, but since I had to get up early the next morning, I decided to go home and make it an early night.

Why did I have to get up early? Because a couple of weeks before my vacation, I found out that there would be a race that Saturday morning, the Quarter-Marathon sponsored by Fleet Feet Sports (quarter-marathon is a little over 10.5k). So at 7:30 in the morning, I headed downtown to run in the race. I didn't have my best time ever, maybe because I had spent the last few days drinking and eating fries with malt vinegar aioli, but the weather was perfect for running, overcast and cool,and I did okay.

Of course, although I tried to smile in this immediate post-race shot, I was feeling more like this.

Afterward, I stuck around and ate the free food provided (and by "free," I mean "covered by the race admission fee"). Went home and cleaned up and then took my daughter to Eufaula to see my dad, where we ate at a Mexican restaurant I had never tried (Los Arcos, apparently a regional chain, but the food was mediocre at best).

Sunday, we slept late, lunched at Braums, then came back home, where I tried another new thing. I have lived in my current house for over seven years, a couple of miles from downtown which I have just started trying to explore, and only a mile or so from the Gilcrease Museum,where I had never been. And it just so happens that they have free admission on one Sunday a month, which just happened to fall on my vacation week. Serendipity!

So I toured the museum and felt so relaxed and at peace that I even decided to explore the park out back.

I think I look a lot more relaxed in that last pic than in the previous ones. I also decided that my vacation needed a souvenir, so I bought some overpriced Mexican chocolate from the museum gift shop.

And then I faced an agonizing couple of hours trying to decide where to have dinner for the last hoorah of the vacation in place. I juggled several ideas, but eventually settled on another Cherry Street restaurant called Smoke, which sounds like a barbecue place, but is actually a steak house with a cigar lounge. On Sunday nights, they have a special price on a 12 oz. New York Strip which was quite nice. I paired it with an ale from an Oklahoma brewery that I had never tried before. A very enjoyable evening, even though I ended up passing on the cigar lounge. Afterward, I spent way too much of my remaining cash at a bar.

And now, even though I technically haven't gone back to work yet, the vacation part of the vacation-in-place is over. I think it was a great success. I didn't get away from Tulsa, except for a brief jaunt to Dad's, but that meant I was able to spend money I would have used on gas and lodging to eat at great places and have fun experiences. But I am left with two conflicting thoughts.

One is that there is still a lot of Tulsa that I haven't experienced, so I can use this concept again and again on several future vacations. The other is that, since I'm here, I don't need to wait until my vacation to do these things. But the thing about doing it as a vacation is that I could use the money budgeted for travel to go places I normally can't afford, and because my mind was in vacation mode, I allowed myself to spend the money that I otherwise wouldn't have.

It was a good week. I can't wait for December.

The Beast With Eight Shoes (And Counting)

Holy crap, what a mess.

You know the old saying about waiting for the other shoe to drop? Right now, I'm wondering just how many shoes this beast has. But let me start at basically the beginning.

Several years ago, when my ex and I separated, I bought this little old house. I thought at the time it had this retro charm to it. Seven years later, its quirks are no longer lovable, and I seriously want to raze it to the ground and build a brand-new house in its place.

One of those quirks was the bathroom plumbing. In the bathroom was an antique cast-iron clawfoot tub, which was cool. But when it was installed, it had only a tub filler faucet, no shower. Some time later, the previous owners decided to rig a shower using flexible tubing and a separate faucet fixture that looks like something you'd hook a garden hose to..

Another flexible tube hung from a chain attached to the ceiling, with a piece of pink string tied around the base of the shower head to keep it from weaving around like a Water Wiggle (from Wham-O).

I didn't especially love the setup, but new tub/shower fixtures were expensive, so I made do. But over the years, the faucet developed first a little drip, and lately, a full trickle that could not be shut off no matter how tightly you turned off the faucets. And because that trickle included hot water, the bathroom was permanently steamy.

Now, this is normally a pretty easy home repair, a simple matter of replacing the washers in the faucet handles. But I decided, since I'm now working full-time and had some available cash, to go ahead and change out that old jerry-rigged system for some new fixtures.

Shoe the First: local stores do not carry clawfoot tub fixtures in inventory. So I had to special order on-line and have it delivered, which caused a brief delay. By this time, I could feel the heightened humidity every time I headed back toward the bathroom, and any paper goods in adjoining rooms felt decidedly damp.

But although Home Depot's website said something on the order of 10 days for delivery, I think I got in closer to seven. Still not ideal, but at least now I could get on to the repair.

Drop Shoe the Second: torrential rains. When I went out to the water meter can to shut off the water, the hole was flooded. Feeling around in muddy, murky water, I could not feel anything like a shut-off valve.

So I went to the internet to research. I found that most houses should have a separate shut-off valve in the house somewhere, either in the house proper, or in the crawlspace, or on the pipes outside where the water comes into the house. Well, there was not a master shut-off in the house, and the crawl-space, besides being muddy and frightening (imagine the support pillars for the house having the same jerry-rigged look as the plumbing above), was very confusing. Nothing clearly stood out as a master shut-off, and the main cluster of pipes looked mostly inaccessible. I did find a pipe going into the house with a proper shut-off valve. Turning that off shut off my gas.

One relit water heater pilot later, I still had no idea where my shut-off valve was. I decided to wait until the water had receded in the water meter can so I could find that shut-off valve.

Which is probably the reason why it rained every day for something like two solid weeks.

Eventually, after a few dry days, the water surrounding the meter finally soaked back into the ground and I could clearly see...

Shoe the Third: no shut-off valve. Seriously, nothing there. Look.

At this point, I seriously considered calling a plumber to do the installation, but I had spent most of my available cash on the fixtures themselves, which were just sitting in pieces around the house. So I decided to call the utility company and ask them. The customer service rep insisted the shut-off valve was with the meter, but suggested that she could turn in an emergency shut-off request to the city. I hesitated, but declined, since I would then have to have someone come back out to turn it back on, and if there was a leak somewhere, I would have to call them back out to shut it off again.

So I decided to take some time to look for other options. But apparently, the customer service rep I talked to misunderstood what I said, because a couple of hours later, my water was off. I ran out to look at the water meter to see if I could tell what had been done to shut it off, but there was no sign.

But not wanting to waste the opportunity, I went ahead and did the installation of the new fixture. It took a few hours longer than it should have, because...

Shoe the Fourth: the old faucet had been in place for decades. The nuts securing it to the tub had been painted over at least once, space was tight, and one of the corners on one of the old nuts had been worn away pretty thoroughly, so getting the nuts free was a bitch. Once I finally had the nuts free, I found out the faucet itself was secured with putty, so I had to spend another twenty minutes to a half-hour trying to work it free. The heat and humidity built up over previous weeks meant I could only work in there for about twenty minutes at a time before I had to step out and cool off. I also replaced the float-and-flapper system in the toilet, which otherwise runs constantly in the winter unless you reach your hand in the tank and hold down the flapper, which as you might imagine is a pretty cold proposition.

Finally, though, I got the job done.

Or so I thought. By the time I finished, it was almost 9 p.m. and I had to leave for work. Because of my odd sleep-and-work schedule, I was not able to call the city for a couple of days to get the water turned on. Which is when I heard the crashing sounds of...

Shoe the Fifth: getting the water back on. Remember, I still had not found the shut-off switch outside, so I still had no way to turn the water back on. I called the city to come out, but by the next day, he had not shown up. Still no water.

So I called, only to be told he had turned the water on, found it to be running, shut it off immediately, and left. Because of bad phone reception in my house and poor communication skills on the part of the rep, I could not process what she was telling me, so I asked for the guy to come back.

Another day later, and when I called back, they informed me that once again, he had come, turned it on, shut it off, and left. This person was able to explain the issue more clearly: if the water meter shows water flowing when they turn it back on, they have no way of knowing whether that is something normal (like the toilets refilling after being flushed during three days without water) or a leak. So they immediately turn the water off and leave.

I think it stretched to five calls with the city and me planting a folding chair out by the street to wait for the guy to show up. Finally the truck pulls up so I can watch the guy shut off the water. And there's the shut-off.

Remember the picture I showed you above? The shut-off valve is visible in that picture. Here:

Hidden there in the grass and dirt is a barely-visible oblong almost the same color as the surrounding dirt that looks like just another piece of debris. Once I cleared away the dirt and grass roots, it looked more like the kind of shut-off valve I was looking for.

And it was a good thing he showed me where it was, because there actually was a pretty bad leak. I had tried to reuse some old washers from the old fixtures, which didn't work well. I had to leave the water shut off and run to a couple of hardware stores to find new washers that would work, and then turn the water back on myself.

And finally, it was done. And none too soon, because all the extra humidity from the hot water had huge patches of black mold growing on my walls which I spent a few hours scrubbing away, not just in the bathroom, but in the adjoining room. All was good with the world again.

Until there came the thundering sound of Shoe the Sixth, a week or so later: apparently, all the hot water that had been running had kept the hot water heater running more than usual, driving my gas bill up to twice what it normally is in the summer. This made the meter reader suspect a gas leak, and he shut off my gas.

Not a problem. Unlike my long sojourn in the wilds of underemployment, my bills were now current and in good standing, so I just called to have it turned back on.

Oh, wait, is that the gentle trip-trapping of a SEVENTH SHOE? Why yes, I think it is. Remember all the way up at the top of this post, when I talked about my old house's no-longer-lovable quirks. Another one of those quirks was a slap-dash venting pipe coming out the top of my old water heater. It was apparently venting carbon monoxide into the house. Now, the house is not actually sealed up well enough for deadly gases to build up, but rules is rules, so the water heater is shut down with an official tag on it until I get the vent replaced. But it shouldn't be a problem, the guy said. It should be, like, maybe an hour's work for a plumber.

Shoe the Eighth: I called out a plumbing service to take a look and quote me a price. And as it happens, they need to not only replace the vent pipe leading to the hole in the wall inside, they need to add some kind of gimcrack outside. But I have allowed the foliage to grow out of control on that side of the house. There's only a couple of feet of clearance between the house and the fence on that side, which means it is completely impassable.

So the quote for the "easy one-hour job," including a little extra for working in an inaccessible location: north of $700 bucks, otherwise known as the "there's no way in hell I want to actually do this job, so I'm quoting you a price so high that there's no way you'll agree to pay it."

So that's where I am right now: living in what is turning into the third week without hot water while I try to track down the parts to do the job myself (honestly, other than the outside bit, it doesn't look that hard). But, like clawfoot tub fixtures, there is a part that I'm having trouble finding. Home Depot carries everything I need except for the part that actually attaches to the water heater, which looks like it is sold with the water heater itself.

I was going to go today to regular hardware stores to look for it, but I overslept. Yes, I know. My own procrastination and odd sleep schedules are turning every problem much bigger than it needs to be. But it's a little late to get me to change now.

Fate Core AAR: "The Saxony Jewels" One-Shot

So, wow, it's been over a year since I ran my last Fate one-shot, a scenario I found online titled "Spirit of the Tentacle." That experience had been less than satisfying for pretty much everyone involved, I think.

What has happened in the intervening year was that I wanted to put together a campaign to run, but have not had the spare time to coordinate with a group. We had also tried building characters at one time, but some of the phases I had defined were too nebulous. I finally decided to break the stalemate by writing up a one-shot adventure that takes place in the same alternate-history campaign world I had been developing, but which didn't involve any of the major players or major conflicts of the campaign.

I settled on a treasure hunt/race. The Crown Jewels of Saxony had been stolen from a museum during the California-Pacific Exposition in San Diego in 1935. The players would compete in teams to try to track down the jewels first. I built each of the characters to be a unique archetype, tightened up my approach to aspects, and wrote for each character not only a background and a unique reason to search for the jewels, but also explained the aspects and possible ways to invoke/compel them so the players could understand them better.

I had four people scheduled to show up, in two teams of two. When the scheduled night arrived, one player canceled, so we ended up playing with three, and I played the fourth PC as an NPC (well, I intended to, but tended to forget, so Kendall ended up tagging along silently, mostly doing nothing until the big final confrontation).

I did my best to switch back and forth between the teams frequently to keep everyone engaged, although sometimes I think I concentrated more on the two-player team. I tried to give everyone some interesting interactions and choices. I think it was somewhat frustrating for the players, because the sandboxy nature of the scenario made it hard to figure out where to start, and the clues to the mystery developed slowly. But the clues did develop, and I think that helped keep the players engaged.

One weird thing that happened was that the players often got really awful die rolls, while I (whose bad die rolling as a player is somewhat legendary) made consistently better ones. But smart use of skills and Aspects gave the characters some moments to shine. And as it happens, I was able to draw all the PC's to the treasure at about the same time for a final confrontation.

I'm not sure if the ending was entirely satisfactory to everyone. I had designed the characters' motivations such that, if they decided to cooperate and split the treasure, they could do that, and I think I might have railroaded them into that outcome a little bit. But they seemed to have a good time, and I had a much better time than my previous Fate running experience, so I'm happy with the outcome.

Now I'm wondering about Google+ Hangouts or maybe running a campaign on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, since my nights are taken. We'll see what happens.

Update on the Big Idea

So last post, I mentioned that the Big Idea I had a couple of months ago was progressing more slowly than I'd expected. So, a little clarification:

When I wrote that first post about the idea back in mid-September, I leaped headfirst into working on it with the idea that by this time--the week I was scheduled to take a vacation in December--I would have passed a couple of milestones and would be ready to take it to the next level by having something ready to present to potential collaborators/partners.

That didn't happen.

I realized after that first rush of creativity that what I was putting together was okay, but not particularly exciting or original. I needed to let the idea cool down a little and come back at it from a different angle, try to find a more interesting approach. After a couple of recalibrations, I think I've got something stronger and more interesting. Now I'm starting over on the writing, slowly, but I think it's more solid than those shallow initial ideas.

I won't have anything in any shape to share during my vacation this week, but I'll be burning off some excess vacation days early next year, and I may actually have something to show then.

Gaming Update: From Orion Dusk to Eddie Mendoza

I haven't posted any game-related content here for over a year, so here's the rundown.

I mentioned in a post way back in January 2013 that we were starting up a new role-playing campaign involving superheroes. I had just finished playing for over a year as Sunder, a paranoid, sometimes-insane scavenger on a post-apocalyptic alien world, and I wanted to play someone radically different. Someone happy and fun.

And so I came up with Orion Dusk, who turned out not to be happy and fun. In creating his backstory, I gave him some tragedy and trauma, which was (of course) certain to come up in the game. But what happened was that, not only did the entire game revolve around the conspiracy behind his tragedy and trauma (as well as the other members of the group), but one of the other characters in the group was the daughter of the man Orion blamed for the tragedy in his life. In addition, I somehow decided that making Orion a fugitive living under an assumed name would be a good idea. That decision added tension to several of his moments in the game, but it didn't contribute to making his character "happy and fun."

So Orion ended up being dark (and I don't just mean his skin) as well as being a bit of an asshole. And then there was the other problem.

He was kind of superfluous in the game. I had originally decided to make him a classic tank--super-strong and physically very tough--with the twist that he absorbed heat to power up. So when he powers up, there's this wave of cold that explodes out from him, and then he's super-strong and glowing and also able to release heat as a blast of energy. Sounds really cool.

Only there was another hero in the group who could change her density. When she got really dense, she was stronger and WAY tougher than Orion, so his tankness wasn't so very tanky. On the other hand, his energy blast abilities, being kind of secondary powers, weren't nearly the match of the other blasters in the group. So I decided to concentrate on some other aspects of his backstory--he had been an accountant who followed a money trail to the big conspiracy--and let him be more of an investigator.

Only there was another character in the group who was a super-miraculous hacker who did most of the actual investigating. And hell, even the other tank had for some reason bought a higher accounting skill than my character WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PROFESSIONAL ACCOUNTANT!

Every character needs a niche, and Orion's niche was being worse than somebody else in the group at absolutely everything. He got some moments to shine, based on some spectacular die rolls, but he was never a go-to guy for anything. He was just there, being an asshole.

The game lasted for over a year, and as it seemed as if it was approaching the climax, some personal shit happened and the game broke up. And I wasn't particularly heartbroken about it, as I had been getting kind of burned out on Orion. So much so that I wasn't sure I really wanted to get in on the new game that Sargon was starting, a closer-to-our-time-period game of monster hunters set in the West Coast city of Wraithport. I had kind of been enjoying the break and having my Tuesday evenings free.

But it sounded intriguing, so I made up a provisional character, a Kolchak-type reporter specializing in news of the weird--Eddie Mendoza, Freelance Seeker of the Strange. I sat in on the first session, kind of halfway thinking that Eddie could be a guest star in the pilot episode, get his one story and be on his way.

That was six months ago, and now I'm having a blast. The game is fun, the group character dynamic is way different, and Eddie has his niche. He is the only character in the group without magical powers, but he is a crack shot with a magic pistol he picked up off the dead body of a demon hunter and he uses his journalistic know-how to investigate leads on new monsters to battle while trying to track down an even larger menace lurking in the background.

Inspired by Naamah (who did it first), I've even been writing a journal in Eddie's voice, keeping track of our adventures. It's almost up to 50 pages now. I'm kind of embarrassed to say it's the only real creative writing I've been doing for over a year now (the big project I hinted at last time is building more slowly than I'd like, though I still work on it; the long percolation time will be good for it, though, I think).

And I'm gearing up to run another one-shot Fate adventure next week, over a year after my last attempt. We'll see how that goes.

Dreaming Big - A Story of Failure

You'll excuse me while I indulge in some middle-of-the-night fear-and-regret wallowing and motivation-pumping.

I was not one of those kids who figured out what he wanted to do early in life. I attended an event in ninth grade in which I and a couple of classmates had to introduce ourselves and tell our future goals. The other kids had answers like "I'm going to study medicine and be a doctor" or "I'm going to study engineering to work in the petroleum industry."

My answer? "When I grow up, I want to be... tall." (SPOILER ALERT--didn't happen).

The problem, mainly, was that I was one of those kids--obsessed with television and science fiction and fantasy and, most especially, superhero comics--who was not in any way interested in reality. Reality was mundane. Reality was beneath me.

Plus, I was really smart, which made it easy for me to coast through most of high school without having to work too hard. I could sing and act well enough to have a reputation as a big talent among our small high school, but I was so shy and insecure that I never really considered trying to make a living at something like that.

I developed the habit of faking it through high school, doing just as much as I needed to get by while retreating into fantasy in my spare time. I didn't get a part-time job and develop any real-world skills. I didn't have a girlfriend. I didn't have any really close friends.

And then Star Wars happened. And as I was in my junior year of high school, having to think seriously about what I wanted to do in life so I could pick a major in college, I realized that George Lucas had gone to film school. Seriously, there was a school where you could go to learn how to make movies. I applied to the same school he had attended--the University of Southern California--and somehow got in.

But having been literally handed the keys to my dream--enrollment in a prestigious university right in the middle of the movie capital of the world--I did nothing with it. I didn't take it seriously. I didn't actually know how to take it seriously. I didn't hang out at the film school building with the other film students. I didn't network with the several connections I had within the industry (and I made a few). I didn't work hard to learn the skills I needed. I mostly stayed in my apartment, watching shitty movies and writing sporadically on some really shitty scripts that I was afraid to show to anyone because I knew they weren't up to snuff. On weekends, I played D&D.

And I still didn't get a part-time job or a girlfriend, because mundane work was beneath me and girls terrified me. And when I finally started the film production track in earnest, I had no money to make my student films with and no social skills or self-confidence to get people to act in my films for me. I ended up dropping out and moving back to Oklahoma, ashamed at my failure.

I decided to recalibrate my dreams and try again. I worked at the Daily Oklahoman, where I lucked into a position as a freelance movie critic, then as a general entertainment reporter, despite not having a journalism degree. I bought an early-model Macintosh computer and wrote several screenplays, even travelled back to Los Angeles to try to get representation for one of them (SPOILER ALERT: I didn't succeed).

After a couple of years and a reorganization at the paper, I lost the film reviewing gig and ended up having to get my first real job, waiting tables at Bennigans. By this time, I had made friends with Mike McQuay, an award-winning science fiction novelist who read a couple of my screenplays and had some encouraging words for me. He suggested that I should blow off writing unproduceable giant monster movie scripts and really get into writing novels and stories. I also tried to put together a proposal to finance my own low-budget independent film, but I felt as if I didn't dare start until I had raised a production budget of at least a million dollars, and there was no way I was confident enough to ask anyone to give me a million dollars, so that went nowhere.

I had also gotten into a serious relationship with the woman who soon became Mrs. Frazier, which caused me to put off any more thoughts about a film career. I did think about going off to Vancouver Film School for a year (SPOILER ALERT-didn't) and try writing and selling one more script (SPOILER ALERT--nope) before recalibrating my dreams yet again and buying an Amiga with the idea of making an ultra-cheap direct-to-video science fiction thriller. But by that time, my heart wasn't really in it any more. After more than ten years of failure, filmmaking was pretty much over for me, even as a dream.

It took me several years, some false starts, and an enlistment in the Army before I ended up finally recalibrating my dreams again and making a serious run at being a novelist. I wrote Blue Falcon, a novel about a modern-day Korean war, which failed to find representation. I finally ended up self-publishing it through iUniverse just to get it out of my system. I joined a writers group here in Tulsa and wrote a handful of short stories (some of which I even sold).

But by this time, my marriage was falling apart, along with my day-to-day career, and I made the Biggest Mistake of my Life(TM), a bad business decision that left me not only broke but unemployed and deeply in debt. I wrote a couple more novels, but didn't even try to sell them through regular publishing channels. I recalibrated my dreams downwards again, self-pubbed through Smashwords and CreateSpace, sold virtually nothing. I tried different schemes at building an audience on-line through daily serialization and movie reviews and what have you, but nothing really gained any traction.

And this was where I found myself last year: broke, exhausted, alone, with a long record of failure and my dreams recalibrated downwards so many times that I no longer really had any dreams left.

And then, this year, things slowly started getting better. I got a full-time job once again, and with my father's help, I got my debts paid off. I started working out and adjusted my diet and started feeling better. And in the course of working out, I encountered this guy at nerdfitness.com who talked about the importance of not putting off your dreams, but going out to achieve them. More importantly, he suggested to dream really big, not to recalibrate your expectations so low that you could never be disappointed.

Which I would normally have dismissed as pie-in-the-sky motivational poster sloganeering, except that he suggested thinking of it as a role-playing game. Think of the big ultimate goal as Level 50 and break it down into smaller steps that become your intermediate levels. And then, don't worry about 50. Work on making Level Two. Once you've got Two, go for Three, and so forth. Eventually, 50 will come.

It was nothing I hadn't heard before, but that perspective really got me rethinking my life and my expectations. It had literally been so long since I had let myself dream that I honestly couldn't remember how. But for the last few months, I've been rolling that idea around in my head, and I think I've got something.

A big dream.

Something that I've wanted to do for literally my entire life, but always put off because I didn't have the knowledge or skills or resources or confidence or even, honestly, the ambition.

I'm not quite ready to share it publicly yet. But I've been playing with the idea for a couple of weeks, breaking down the steps, level by level, and the more I do, the more feasible it seems. I may not ever get to level 50 (that will depend on things that are really out of my control), but I'm well on the way to Level Two. For the first time in over a year, I'm working on something I'm really excited about,  and if I keep concentrating on the levels at hand, the higher levels will come.

Wish me luck.

Week 20 - Dangerous Waters Ahead

So here I am after 20 weeks, and things are looking pretty good, overall.

I'm down 25 lbs and 6 % bodyfat, I'm still doing strength work and running. I went from barely being able to sustain 2 continuous minutes of running to running a 10k. My pace has improved from 14-16 minutes per mile to 11-13 minutes per mile on good days. I look much better in the mirror. I'm fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for years, and I'm still maintaining a healthier diet. I've even started to take control of other parts of my life that I had similarly let slide.

But now I'm thinking about making a change. Strength training has been the weakest link in my newest evolution, and I'm thinking about starting a new program to hit it really hard. While I am actually seeing some results on my current, bodyweight-only regimen, part of me is dying to hit the heavy weights again. The program I'm contemplating would be a big shock to my body and schedule--jumping up from 20-30 minute workouts to probably over an hour--and would simultaneously make a big change to my diet as well. If it works as promised, I could break through to the best shape of my life.

But I'm nervous. The last time I tried a program as intense as this was P90X, a 90-day hardcore workout program which I really enjoyed, but was so stressful to my body, and so demanding of my time, that when I missed a couple of days for a business trip (at something like 86 days into the program), I literally quit right then and never finished the last 3-4 days.

And see, one of the reasons that I'm still going right now, I think, is that I've kept things pretty simple and flexible. The diet has been much more basic than previous attempts; I have eaten the exact same breakfast every day for probably over 15 weeks now. I haven't given up and quit when injury or schedule difficulties caused me to miss workouts because my workouts have been much more simple and easy-going, so it's no problem to make them up or let them slide. My progress has been slow, but I haven't quit.

This new program could be wonderful. My conditioning has improved to the point that I could probably use a really hard kick in the intensity right now. But I worry that it could cause me to repeat my previous pattern of three-month burnout and quitting for who-knows-how-many years. And there is some expense to the program, extra equipment to buy and such, in order to get full use out of it. I'm wondering if the expense and risk is worth it.

Which is kind of a moot question, because I've already spent a substantial amount of money gearing up for it, so in that sense, I think I've mentally committed to doing it. I just hope I can make it work.

Week 19: Bridging a Break

I've mentioned before that one way to stick to a new fitness regime is to establish a routine. The flip side to that is that if the new routine breaks, it can be hard to reestablish. In the past, when my fitness cycles ended, it was often because I had a forced break in the routine--a vacation or extended holiday weekend which necessitated a break in the workout sequence or a break in the diet, after which it just became easier to quit rather than go back.

So this week was a particularly dangerous time for me. This year, I finally went back to full-time employment, which means I am eligible for paid vacation. I took my first such vacation this past week, and it seems as if I didn't do too badly in terms of breaking my routines.

Which isn't to say I didn't break the routines. I completely skipped all my strength workouts for the week, and my diet has also fallen off. But it hasn't fallen off completely, and I did compensate for the lack of strength workouts somewhat by running extra mileage and getting in a heavy bag workout, which I had abandoned almost completely for the past few weeks.

I may still lack motivation for strength workouts, but approaching the mid-point of Zombies Run! Season 2, I am ridiculously motivated to get out and run. Both speed and distance are developing nicely, I'm really enjoying the story, and I'm making nice progress with the game elements such as achievement badges and my base, which is filling out. I ran a 10K about two weeks ago, and I'm contemplating entering some actual races in a couple of months.

Speaking of Zombies Run!, when I first started using the app (not being an especial fan of zombie stories), I contemplated ideas for a more well-rounded app that would be more of a superhero adventure, combining the running elements of Zombies Run! with strength/conditioning elements. In a way, the overall program I started out to pursue--running, strength, boxing, diet--was a sort of all-purpose hero training regime.

Well, as it turns out, Six to Start (the company that makes Zombies Run!) was way ahead of me. They've been developing a new fitness app, due to release later this month, called Superhero Workout. The goal seems to be to do for calisthenics what Zombies Run! does for running. I cannot wait for them to release this for Android, but given the problems I'm having with storage space on my phone, I may end up having to buy a new smartphone just to run this app.

So, Robin Williams...

I try not to jump on these bandwagons when a celebrity dies unless it's someone who really affected me personally like Ray Harryhausen. Or, in this case, Robin Williams.

Cause here's the thing that people who know me understand about me. I'm an introvert, really shy and quiet around people I don't know. But I wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, I was supposedly really extroverted. According to my dad, I started to withdraw after my parents' divorce, and I stayed that way, except for a couple of years in high school when I seemed to come out of my shell in a big way.

What happened? Mork happened.

I was a huge TV fan as a teen, and when Mork and Mindy debuted at the start of my junior year in high school, it was like a revelation. I thought Robin Williams was the most amazing entertainer I had ever seen. It wasn't that any single bit was that funny, but there just seemed to be an endless well of them, shooting out at machine-gun speed. Spew out a dozen punch lines in a minute, and one of them has to hit, right?

So for the last couple of years in high school, I channeled Robin Williams (as much as I could without cocaine, anyway), talking fast, spewing out silly observations and funny voices as fast as I could make them. And strangely enough, I went from being a marginal outcast to becoming marginally popular.

Then I ended up going to college and got lost in the crowd at USC. It didn't matter so much, because Williams's schtick was starting to get a little old, anyway. Mork and Mindy was cancelled, and I went back to being an introvert.

But something else happened at the same time. Williams became a bona-fide movie star, which is when the next bit of the story happened. Williams starred in a movie called "Good Morning, Vietnam," directed by Barry Levinson. I just happened to be reviewing movies for the Daily Oklahoman at the time, so I ended up going to San Francisco for the press junket, which is how I met Robin Williams for the first and last time.

As a print journalist, I didn't get to meet him one-on-one. We had what were called round-table interviews, where one of the people from the movie (Williams or Levinson or Bruno Kirby or Forest Whitaker or Adrian Cronauer, the real-life inspiration for the story) would sit at a table with 5 or 6 of us newspaper writers for 25 minutes or so, and then shift over to the next table.

So there I was, sitting next to Robin Williams as different writers asked him their questions. And every time I would try to get my question in, someone else would talk over me. Before I knew it, the studio rep was there, telling Robin it was time to move to the next table.

And he turned to me and said something to the effect of, "No, let this guy ask his question first. He's been waiting all this time."

So I got to ask my question, which was something about an interview with Pam Dawber where she said toward the end of Mork and Mindy's run, the writers gave up trying to write gags and would just insert a line to the effect of "Robin does his thing for a minute." And I asked if they had done anything similar on the movie.

His answer was something to the effect of "don't believe everything you read in interviews" crossed with "I didn't have as much freedom to improvise because this was a big-budget feature." But yeah, there were times, especially in the DJ booth scenes, where he would start riffing and Levinson would have to just let him go for a while.

So here's the thing: although I was not a big fan of Williams as his star continued to rise--"Dead Poets Society" and "Patch Adams" and the like left me cold--the one time I met him, he was nicer to me than he needed to be, which I will always appreciate. And for a couple of years there in high school, he literally changed my life. So I am really sorry to hear that he ended the way he did. He deserved better, for whatever that's worth.

Week 16 - Routine and Renewal

One big problem with maintaining the gains and motivation I had earlier is that, after I had settled into an acceptable routine, my schedule at work changed, which threw my routine into chaos. It was sometimes hard to find an acceptable window of daylight to fit a workout into between sleep and work. Also, as I mentioned before, the slow cadence workouts I was trying were killing my focus and motivation.

So I took a full week off of strength workouts while I tried to decide what to do. I've had a general bias against doing workouts overnight, but it looks like I'll have to rethink that. I'm also going to increase the speed on my reps, or maybe alternate fast and slow sets to help my motivation.

Another problem is that myfitnesspal (the app I use to track my food) recalibrates your calorie targets every ten pounds lost. I had established an eating routine that put me just under that target number, but having hit the 20 lbs off mark, my new target is getting harder to hit. I could pad that number by running more frequently, but I run into that time crunch problem again, unless I'm willing to run after dark, which is not the best idea in my neighborhood, I'm thinking.

Part of me wants to make more radical changes in my workout schedule, or even throw it away and start fresh. Based on past experience, I'm worried about trying it. The reason I've been able to sustain for almost four months is that I've developed a routine, which is how you get past that early rush of enthusiasm and borderline obsession.

Starting fresh means having to renew that enthusiasm and obsession again, until I've settled into the new routine. I've never been able to accomplish that successfully before. With luck, coming back to a tweaked strength workout after a week off will help the stale routine feel a little fresh again without completely throwing me off track.

15 Weeks - Hitting Milestones and Losing Steam

I love round numbers, so having finally hit the 20 lb. lost mark was a big thing, in a way, although after so many weeks of hovering just above that mark then bouncing back up, it was also sort of anti-climactic. I did go out Friday night after work and have a cigar to celebrate, though, so hte effort wasn't wasted.

However, now I have to face the fact that I'm only halfway to my goals, and everything is starting to wear on me.  I've said before that three months tends to be the limit of my patience with workout/diet obsession cycles. I'm just past that and starting to debate whether all this frustration is worth it.

For instance, the way my "morning" routine takes up so much of my day. See, that fancy digital scale that measures body fat? You need to maintain a pretty consistent level of hyrdration to get consistent results. So the first thing I do upon waking is drink 750ml of water before I weigh myself, because I also need to weigh myself before eating. But because I supposedly need to eat within an hour of getting up for best results, I have to slam that water down, wait a few minutes, weigh and then eat. This takes the entire first hour of my day, and sometimes due to my odd sleep schedule, time gets a little tight, especially with a new schedule at work.

Also, the timing of my breakfast then makes it so that I can't work out very early, because I don't want to work out too hard immediately after eating. And my current approach to strength workouts is not giving me very good results. Even Zombies, Run! (whici I finally broke down and purchased all the available content for) is starting to wear a little thin.

And this doesn't even take into account the inconvenience of cooking so much of my food, not to mention the fact that I haven't had some of my favorite foods, like gyros and pizza, in months.

Part of me wants to take a break, treat myself to some forbidden foods for a couple of weeks while I figure out how to retool my workouts to be more interesting and also relax my morning rituals a bit. Another part of me is worried (from past experience) that breaking the routine now will let me spring back into my old habits and lose all the progress I've made way too soon.

Conundrum.

12 Weeks - Backsliding

So after last time, I finally had everything working right in week 11. I was running faster, getting stronger and dropping weight again. And I bought a much nicer car. Everything was good.

And then, week 12 hit. It started badly, with me not being able to do nearly as many push-ups as the week before. It was probably just fatigue, because I had been sleeping badly all week. But I panicked and figured the short workouts and long rests between were causing my muscles to atrophy. So I ended up having a huge binge day, eating around 900 calories over my maintenance level, to see if that might spur muscle growth.

Well, it spurred something, because I jumped up 3 pounds in 3 days and have been stuck there ever since. And the rest of my workouts for the week weren't much better. It was really hard to try to maintain my numbers on anything. So it seems as if my strength and endurance are slipping away. But on the other hand, the muscles look like they're getting bigger, so maybe next week I'll get back on track.

On the running side, Monday was my best pace so far, by a lot. But my other runs, coming after my leg workout days, I felt weak and slow. My calves, which had been feeling much stronger, seem to have lost their spring, especially my left. I'm wondering if it's partly because I bought a car wtih a stick shift and a tight clutch. I'm having to work that calf a lot more when I drive.

And of course, the big thing that's sticking in the back of my mind is that this is where I have traditionally run out of steam in the past. Three months usually ends up being my limit on workout/diet cycles like this. But less than halfway to my goals, I can't afford that this time. So I'm really hoping to maintain my motivation and discipline for at least another three months. We'll see.

10 Weeks In

10 weeks in, and though my weight and body comp numbers remain pretty well stalled, my performance--run pace and numbers of reps in strength training--continues to improve.

I'm one mission away from the end of Season One of Zombies Run! and trying to decide if I want to buy Season Two right away or dawdle awhile with the side content I haven't tried yet, like Supply and Airdrop Missions. I did run a 5K Race Mission this week, which was both my longest and fastest run yet since starting this fitness cycle. I'm contemplating whether to attempt a 10K. I don't know if my legs will take it, but I kind of want to push myself and see.

Plus, the game itself really motivates me. I have pushed myself longer and harder since starting the game than I would have without it. And the proof of that is that three times since starting, I have done missions while away from home. When I was at my mother's house at the tail end of the injury, stranded at my ex-wife's house with car problems, and this past week, visiting my father in Eufaula. Normally, I would take such an event as an easy excuse to miss a run, but wanting to push on and hear more of the story, I made myself run there. So Zombies Run! has been a big win so far, well worth the money.

The other half of my plan is not working out so well. The new routine is difficult, because it consists of progressively harder exercises done at slow cadence with strict form, much different than my Army experience of "bust out as many reps as you can in two minutes" and "the only bad rep is the one they don't count." For some exercises, I feel frustratingly weak.

However, the routine itself is very short; it calls for only a couple of sets of mostly low reps. By the time I'm done, it almost feels as if I haven't worked out at all, although during the sets, I definitely feel the strain. But there's this weird tension between the program's two principles of "do low volume work at high intensity" and "don't work to failure and leave strength in the bank." I'm never sure if I'm working hard enough, or if pushing harder will be counter-productive.

Plus, the program advocates working each bodypart only one day a week, with a week's rest between, which goes against the conventional wisdom I've been taught for 25 years. So the workouts feel scanty and unfinished, and it seems as if I'm resting between training bouts way too much, which is not helping my motivation. And yet, I've been making progress on my reps. However, since I've just switched to a new style of training, that improvement may be due more to neuromuscular adaptation than actual strength increase. We'll have to see what happens in the next couple of weeks, once I've got this new slow style down.

After 9 Weeks - Plateaus and Plummets

Something seriously weird is going on with this digital scale I splurged on. But first, an historical note: back in the day, when I would be on a diet & exercise cycle, I would sometimes hit plateaus where my weight wouldn't change for several days in a row. But I didn't sweat this, because A) weight by itself is not very meaningful, so even if my weight wasn't changing, that didn't mean my body wasn't and B) I was using an analog scale that wasn't very exact at the best of times.

But now I'm using this digital scale which measures down to the tenth of a pound and which also gives a fat/muscle measurement. I've mentioned before that the fat/muscle measurements aren't very precise. But here's the thing that's really giving me fits.

The scale keeps measuring me at exactly the same weight for several days in a row. In week 5/6, three days in a row. In week 7, 5 days in a row, followed by 2 days in a row at a different weight. In week 8, 2 days in a row, one small dip down, then back up to almost the previous weight for 5 days. A two-day dip, and now three days in a row. No matter how much or how little I eat or drink, what exercise I do or don't do, what time of day I weigh, I spend up to 5 days weighing exactly the same to within a tenth of a pound. It's almost as if the scale gets stuck on that number for a while.

And then there's the real anomaly. On Wednesday, after 5 days locked in at the same weight, I dropped three pounds overnight. I bounced back up almost immediately, but I can't think of any mechanism to explain it other than a bad reading. I ate normally the day before and didn't spend any extra time in the bathroom. I wasn't dehydrated. It's a mystery.

I'm thinking that I may need to do something radical if this plateau doesn't bust soon. I'm thinking at the end of Week 12, if I'm still not showing much progress, I'm going to up my calories and shift more emphasis to strength workouts. Try to pack on some muscle mass to up my metabolism. I have never in my life been especially muscular, partly because at the times I was working out the hardest, like now, I was also restricting calories to try to drop fat. It might be time to try another approach.

7 Weeks Down

So a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I didn't trust the results from my digital scale's bio-electric impedance body fat percentage. This week I decided to do something about it, so I got myself a tape measure and tried the U.S. Navy method of determining the body fat percentage.

And damned if it wasn't right there with the bio-electric impedance. The scale had been very slowly descending from 29-30 to 27-28, but it could fluctuate quite a bit depending on my hydration, and I hadn't been following a strict hydration routine for the first three weeks, so those early higher results were in doubt. Now they're less so.

The second big change is to alter my strength workouts. One thing that has been giving me a problem with motivation was that I put together my strength workouts based on what I had done in the past, but since I've done four or five dramatically different workouts during various phases over the past 17 years, my current workout was a set of random bits from here and there with no real focus. It has made me firmer and stronger, but any kind of workout would have done that, given how far out of shape I was. But I had no tangible goals and no firm results, and so my motivation to do each day's workout was approaching nil.

So I did what I usually do. I bought a workout book. I have a dozen of them, but unlike those, this one builds on what I've been doing and gives it a systematic approach with goals to work toward. So I'm looking forward to seeing if a more systematic approach will give me better focus and accelerate my progress.

Because I'm approaching a really tricky time. Usually these fitness phases last about three months, at which point, I've gotten into pretty good shape. My motivation and focus drops, and I quit for several months (or years, this last time). I have tried a couple of times to fool myself into continuing to focus (and reach a new level of fitness and strength) by changing up my workout, but that hasn't worked well. Usually, by that time, I was hitting a plateau, and without continued results, my interest waned.

And right now, including the baby steps I took before starting up the spreadsheet, I'm either just at or just over the two-month mark, and nowhere near my weight, muscle, or speed goals. Admittedly, I've never let myself go quite this far out of shape before since leaving the Army, but I'm not going to get where I want in another month.

So I've got to hope that starting this new workout approach (coming a month before my usual quitting time), plus the continued motivation of Zombies, Run!, will keep my interest locked in.  I've also kept my diet nicely dialed in this time, and I think I'll be able to continue it as well.

I started out planning to do a sort of low-carb approach (which has worked well for me before), but I was kind of half-assing it, so after a week or so, I switched to the Slow Carb approach from Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Body. But it just doesn't work for me. This is the third time I've tried it (though the first time I think I've given a real careful go), and I've never gotten the kind of incredible results he promises. So a couple of weeks ago, I went back to a more serious low-carb approach, only this time I'm having way more fun with it.

The times I've tried it before were when I was still married and living with my wife and her mother and grandmother. So I kind of had to separate myself from them at mealtimes, had to buy my own separate groceries, and often felt like I had to sneak my low-carb eating under the radar.

This time, I'm living alone, so I do all my own grocery shopping. I can buy exactly what I want, I do all my own cooking, and I don't have to worry about any comments from anyone about what I'm eating. I'm not losing weight super quickly--only about a pound and a half per week--but it's coming off steadily, and I'm not getting the kind of energy crashes and food cravings on overnight shifts that I used to. I used to hit the vending machines at work three or four times a night, eating chips and M&M's and cupcakes. I'm not doing any of that now.

The only problem I have now is deciding whether to start pushing my calories up to try to build muscle faster on this new strength regime. It may take me a couple of weeks to decide that for sure.

6 Weeks Down - Positive Reinforcement and Losing Motivation

I mentioned last week that it was hard to stay motivated when I didn't seem to be seeing results. This week was full of positive reinforcement, and yet I've ended up losing a bit of motivation.

First, I seem to have my diet mostly locked down with a good variety of stand-by foods that are easy to fix and that I like, mixed in with new recipes that I'm trying. The money I save off the food I'm cooking (instead of going out) seems to go right back out for kitchen gadgets (I finally bought a blender) or fitness crap or what have you, but I'm eating and feeling much better in general than I was last year.

Second, although the numbers barely seem to be moving, I did hit the 10 lbs lost mark this week (I've bumped back to 9, but fluctuations happen). Funny thing is, because most of the fat I've gained is visceral fat, packed in around the internal organs, I'm starting to see the first hints of definition in my abs, even though I'm still paunchy.

Third, I went out this week and ran into a woman I haven't seen in a long time. And while we talked, her hand touched my arm, and then she did that little fingertip dance along my arm, over my shoulder and across my chest and asked, "Have you been working out?" And then she let her fingers linger a couple of extra moments before taking them away.

That's what it's really all for, isn't it?

Unfortunately, as good as that all was, it seems to have done precisely the wrong things to my motivation. Instead of spurring me on to build on success, it seems to have given me a feeling of "Mission Accomplished." I've been working less hard this week and making excuses for skipping workouts. I mean, I did have some legitimate scheduling problems that forced me to skip a couple of workouts, and there were some emotional distractions this week, but I still blew too much off. I have to remind myself that I'm nowhere near my strength or speed or weight goals, so I need to keep pushing.

Five Weeks In - Lies

My body, it lies. I've known this for years, yet sometimes I still fall for it.

I went for a run on Wednesday, and even though I had previously run continuously for over a mile and a half without stopping, this time my legs were burning like crazy and I slowed to a walk after a quarter-mile. After maybe 30 seconds of walking, I started running again and continued on for well over a mile before walking again.

Wonky physiological explanation follows: your muscle cells use several different stages of chemical reaction to store energy for muscular effort. I could throw around chemical names or acronyms like ATP and ADP and phosphocreatine, but the simple version is this:

You have a tiny amount of primary fuel available in your muscle cells for immediate action at maximum output, like a hard punch or jerk.

You have a slightly larger amount of stored fuel in your cells that requires a little breaking down first. This is available for hard sustained action, like a set of heavy bench presses. Without oxygen, though, you run out quickly, like within 30 seconds or so.

You have an even larger (but still small) amount of stored fuel in your cells that can be broken down with the help of oxygen. This fuel is called glycogen and is broken down when needed via a process called fast glycolosis. But there's only enough glycogen stored in your muscles for about 2 minutes of sustained activity, at which point the muscles start having to draw on blood glucose for energy and send chemical signals to your liver to convert stored glycogen to glucose for more energy.

And during this crucial switch-over, which for me usually happens right around the quarter-mile mark, your muscles scream that they are dying. They tell you that there's nothing left, and that you need to stop so they can rest a second and get their breath back, so to speak. One of the first things you learn when running for more than a couple of minutes is to recognize that signal for what it is--a desperate lie--and push through it until your muscles get the blood glucose working.

I've known about this effect for over twenty years, and yet I still fell for it on Wednesday. Why?

Because I wasn't thinking straight is the best answer I can give. I was distracted by the fact I had overslept, so I had only eaten about an hour before running, which made me wary of pushing myself too hard. My legs felt tight and tired from the workout I'd done the night before, and I had only a limited window of time before I needed to get to work. So my mind was everywhere except on my actual running, which means that when my muscles gave their fake danger signal, I listened and walked. And immediately regretted it.

I think my fancy new digital scale lies, too. Not about my weight, even though I'm not losing much. I expect that, because when you start working out the way I have been, you build more muscle as you burn off fat. Because muscle is denser than fat, you may get heavier briefly while actually getting trimmer. I've known this for years as well.

Which is why, to keep up my motivation, I splurged a little on a more expensive digital scale that uses bio-electric impedance to determine the relative percentages of fat and muscle tissue in your body. It is not an especially accurate method, but I figured that as long as the numbers were moving in the right direction, complete accuracy wasn't as important. It would just be an extra motivational factor to know that, even if my weight wasn't going down, positive changes were still happening.

The problem is, those percentages have barely budged in four weeks. I'm getting results in my workouts (reps going up, run times getting marginally faster), and I feel as if I'm getting smaller and firmer, but the percentages on the scale are just fluctuating up and down within a very narrow range. So what was supposed to encourage me is actually discouraging me a bit.

One problem I'm having, though, is that the scale has trouble giving a reading unless I wipe the sensors first with a wet cloth to improve the connection. So I'm wondering if the (very thin) layer of water between the soles of my feet and the scale is throwing off the results at all. It shouldn't--I just barely dampen the cloth--but I'm grasping at straws wondering why the numbers aren't moving.