The weekend is winding down. I'm just waiting for some pants to dry so I have something to wear to work tomorrow. The kids and the 5/8 are in bed and the house seems eerily quiet except for the wood-cutting sounds of the dog snoring in the next room. Every now and again I can hear someone sneaking around upstairs, the floors in this old house creak something awful - a burglar would never make it around the house without being heard.

The weekend was mostly uneventful. Friday night was great, no casino runs, no picking kids up at the football game. Just me, my mates, and several uninterrupted hours of killing bad guys in Raven Shield. Some members from the Strike clan showed up on our server. Back before we had our own server, the Strike clan server was pretty much our home away from home. There were times though, that the server would get full and they would kick someone off to allow one of their own members to play.

It was then that we noticed they usually kicked people who weren't "wearing tags" to make room. Wearing tags is a term referring to people who are not in an organized group or clan. We decided to devise a tag of our own, so we could appear to be a clan, and save us from getting booted. Originally our clan symbol was "(.)(.)playername". But we changed that about eight or nine months ago as our kids were getting old enough to play with us. We just felt it was not appropriate for 12 and 14 year olds to have a symbol representing womens' breasts as their tag. So we changed it to "[FGN]playername".

The strike server is gone now. They have mostly moved onto newer games. We haven't. Many of our players are in the military, and simply cannot afford to upgrade or purchase new computers that would allow them to run the newer games. Raven Shield is 5 years old. And there are enough after-market maps around to keep it lively. Add to that, in multi-player mode the maps are never really the same because you are playing with other live people, and people very seldom do the same thing over and over again. The ones that do don't last long in the round because others playing will figure out their pattern and lay waste to them.

Even though we had our collective rumps handed to us by the strike clan, it was a great deal of fun playing with them again. You would think that after playing the same game for five years we would be better at it by now, but sadly that is just not the case, we still stink.

Some things never change

Can hardly wait. Monday 25 September is the season premier of Heroes! And just in time too. I wasn't quite certain what I was going to do with my Monday nights now that "Saving Grace" ended its first season. Which, I might add, was a tremendous season. The redneck angel Earl is a hoot to watch. Sure, it is quite dicey at times, and the show, in my opinion, would be just as good without seeing Holly Hunter tied naked to a bed with a happy face drawn on her back and some guy's name drawn across her buttocks in lipstick. But it is what it is.

On the home front, Topeka High is set to lose another football game tonight. Don't get wrong, I love the Trojans, but I am also painfully realistic. No. 1 Son is in the marching band and MJROTC so he has to be there for every home game. I wish I had thought of that back at enrollment when we purchased the $40 activities card. The activities card gets him into all of the home games free, and, by coincidence, being in the band and MJROTC, he gets into all of the home games...free. The MJROTC kids clean up police the stadium after the games and pick up all the trash.

It never fails that when one thing slows down, another jumps in to take its place. For instance, for the past 8 years or so Friday night has been "Dad's game night." A group of friends from across the country get together online and play video games and talk about life, the universe and everything over voice chat. We used to use Roger Wilco, which was a great, tiny free app, but have since switched to Teamspeak, which is another free app, but has a server component to it. A couple of years ago, for some reason, I seemed to become the Teamspeak host. So instead of having to manually start the server every time I rebooted my machine, I wrote a Windows Service to do that for me. Now it is always running. The problem we are running into now is my DSL. For the entire four or five years that I had cable internet I think my IP address changed maybe three times. With DSL it seems to change three times a week. So every Friday, as part of the routine, I send out an email address to the folks with the new IP address.

Crap, did I get off the subject or what? Okay, so I was saying that when one thing slows down, something else jumps in. We have established that for nearly the past decade, Friday night is dad's game night. About a year go, mami started having real problems driving at night, so I agreed to pick papi up at the casino up north on Friday nights and every other Saturday night. Well, that put quite the damper in my Friday game nights because picking papi up isn't as simple as just driving the 30 minutes up there an back. I have to drive up there, and then wait for him to finish up. If I am not in one of those moods where I become disrespectful, this could take up to an hour or more.

For about the last 6 weeks he has not gone up to the casinos. w00t! I get my game nights back! Did I mention No. 1 Son is in the band? And has to attend all of the football and basketball games. Okay for those following along at home, that means that I 1) get to take No. 1 Son to the football/basketball games and 2) pick No. 1 Son up from the football/basketball games. Granted, this is not nearly as time consuming as making the trek up to the casino to collect papi, but nonetheless, it really cramps my style. I mean seriously. Do you realize how hard it is to be really in the zone, wiping out the enemy in Raven Shield, then have to stop to go pick up some danged teenager at the ball game, and then try to re-enter the zone? It is nearly impossible, I telling you.