It's been a while since I've updated, mostly due to laziness. Here's a bit of what has been going on...

I planned to write an update early in February, after the loss of Columbia, but the feelings were just too raw. Once I got those emotions squared away, I never got around to doing it.

An ice storm rolled through here on February 15th-16th. I had just gone to the grocery to pick up a few things to eat, as well as Unreal 2 and Unreal Tourney 2003. I was awake at 6 am when the power went out due to a blown transformer. The next day, I woke up to find out that our utility pole had also been snapped when a tree fell on the high tension wires.

School was closed for two days, and on a delay for another day. Since it took 8 days to restore power and cable TV to our house (Sunday 6 am to Sunday 10 pm), I more or less wrote that week off as far as school was concerned, and hung out at mom's for a few days. It took an additional week and a half to get our internet access back. It took until last Friday to get the phone line put back up (we don't use the land line here, so Alltel didn't seem to be in any hurry to do it). The broken utility pole was still in our yard until this past Tuesday. There are still large piles of branches on the curb of a our street, at this house and others.

The war started. I support the soldiers, but not the war. I certainly have no love or respect for Bush, who seems determined to pick a fight in the wrong way for all the wrong reasons, and am anxiously awaiting my chance to vote him the hell out of office. I think a lot of American adults are behaving like children ("Freedom Fries"? Grow the hell up.) I am steadfastly avoiding war news as much as possible, because it just pisses me off.

Aside from that, I'm pretty much going to school and stuff.

Obsidian Requiem is currently on temporary hiatus. We reached the end of Act I, and Chris wanted to run his Mutants and Masterminds game for a few consecutive sessions so that people will get into it before we start alternating, which gave me a chance to delay my game until Abyssals was released. The game should get rolling again around April 18th. Act II will introduce a second layer of the story taking place in the Underworld concurrently with the first part of the story, with completely new characters (Abyssals, heroic ghosts, etc.) ... I'm shooting for "the story from another angle".