Wow, finally a moment to catch my breath and contemplate future plans. I know I haven't posted since late January, but that's because I picked up a 25% teaching appointment at a local college that really mushroomed into a full-time commitment and meanwhile I attempted to maintain my actual full-time job. Needless to say, freelance work went right out the window once the 20-hour days started.

Now that's done and the international conference I helped plan for late June is also done. In addition to everything else I started job hunting in mid-April, looking for teaching opportunities. Unfortunately, none of the long-term positions panned out, so now I have choices between keeping the not-so-fun job I currently have, taking a one-year full-time teaching position at a local college (the same one I currently work at), or jumping ship completely and taking on a catch as catch can part-time teaching appointment and research appointment at another local college (another primarily grant-funded/soft-money position).

It would be a fairly easy decision if it weren't for that fact that I'm kind of freaked out by the uncertainty of everything--and that some of the folks at the other college (where I taught this spring) have been so helpful and supportive. Guess I need to figure out how to do this without burning too many bridges AND find time to jump back into more freelance work.

I really need 36 hour days.

Well actually, I've been back for just over a week now, but things have been so hectic that I'm just finally getting a chance to catch my breath.

India was...well...India. After all of my lovely adventures getting there, I arrived more or less on time at my final destination, Tiruchirappalli (known by the locals as Trichy). That was January 6th. Unfortunately, my luggage was nowhere to be found--heck it didn't even make it to Hyderabad with me to clear customs. It took several days and many phone calls to finally track down my suitcase. It was waiting patiently for me a Mumbai (Bombay), a stop never on my initial itinerary and only on my revised itinerary for about 2 hours. Nonetheless, the airline insisted that I had arrived in Mumbai with my luggage and simply not bothered to collect it--yeah right! Well, so much for those new airline regulations stipulating that your luggage absolutely cannot travel without you, or vice versa.

After much hassle with a number of different airlines, I was finally able to collect my suitcase in Chennai on the afternoon of the 12th en route to Kolkata. I still need to have words with Northwest about this whole fiasco.

The major learning experience for this trip was that, apparently, in southern Indian cuisine black pepper (especially whole pepper corns) seem to be considered more of a vegetable than a spice. Unfortunately, my stomach and I both agree that this should never be the case.

Otherwise, it was a pleasant enough trip with some nice sightseeing opportunities scattered in amongst the work. The meeting in Trichy was definitely a success and the trip to Kolkata was pleasant, especially given that we stayed at the luxurious Sonar Bengal hotel.

I arrived back in Duluth on time and with all of my luggage intact and on time on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 16. Luckily I took two days off of work, because it seemed like I didn't have a spare moment to myself on Thursday or Friday.

Just before Christmas I agreed to teach the first semester of a two-semester General Chemistry sequence at one of the local colleges. Of course, with Christmas break and my departure for India on January 4th, there really hadn't been any time to deal with a lot of little organizational details and all of my teaching materials arrived at my home during the middle of my trip to India. So, I started scrambling on the morning of the 17th to get prepared for my first day of class and first week of lecture starting on Jan. 22nd. Unfortunately for me, my wife and I had made "holiday" plans to get together with her family over the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, meaning we had a seven hour road trip that started on Friday evening and got us back to Duluth at about 8:30pm Monday night, about three and a half hours later than expected because of unforeseen (and un-forecast) winter road conditions. Thankfully we made it home without any trouble...it just took much longer than I had planned on.

Well, that's about it for now. I finished my first week of lecture this morning, and I finally feel like I'm making headway so that I won't always be scrambling to prep lecture notes the night before and morning of lecture. Now if I can just get back on schedule for my lectures...only three lectures done and I'm already a day behind schedule. {sigh}

So here I am, sitting quietly in the Amsterdam airport. Oddly enough, Amsterdam was not on my original itinerary. Then again, neither was Dubai or Hyderabad, but that's the route I'll be taking to get to Chennai.

Yeah, I completely missed my flight to Frankfurt. In fact, despite our captain's best efforts, that flight left Detroit before we even started to deplane in Detroit. But that's ok, because some really nice NWA employees helped me with rerouting my flight...unfortunately, the first one to help actually screwed things up to the point where, had I taken the flight she booked me on, I would've been stranded in India with no way home...at least, no way that was paid for.

Thankfully, I took my travel agent's advice and called Lufthansa and they alerted me to the problem. Unfortunately, that also led to lots of scrambling at the Detroit airport to get things fixed and left me stuck with the very last flight out of Detroit to Europe, the 9:20pm flight to Amsterdam.

So, here I am. And, instead of having a full night of rest in a hotel in Chennai to look forward to before traveling on to Trichy, my final destination for this leg of the trip, or even a short night in a hotel in Mumbai, I'll be traveling non-stop until I arrive in Chennai at 9am on the 6th. That leaves me with just 3 hours before I need to be checked in for my flight to Trichy. This certainly isn't shaping up to be one of my better trips to India.

Well, here I sit in the Duluth airport, beginning my latest work trip to India. Unfortunately, I've just been informed that my flight is running late, by about 50 minutes. That wouldn't be a big deal normally, but my layover in Detroit for my flight to Frankfurt was originally only 53 minutes...leaving me, in theory, all of 5 minutes to catch my connection to Frankfurt. Needless to say, I'm relatively certain I won't make that connection.

Guess I'd better go talk to the nice lady at the gate and see what sort of options I have.

Blame this one on Steven Schend, though the results delightfully apropos.

Your Score: The Raven

You scored 48% domestic, 3% gregarious, 28% trickster, and 73% intellect!

So, after a less than lackluster start, I'm back from the wilds of the North Woods where novel writing meant that I was suffering serious frostbite just to crank out a few hundred words per day. Hopefully, the coming days will see my noveling efforts reaching somewhere close to the 1,600 words per day mark (if not more like the 3,000 words per day I need to get back on course).

Anywho, whether I make 50,000 words by the end of the month (and I will really be trying, just not sure it's a reality) or not, I am having fun writing my novel. I've been amazed at how easily the writing flows if I just allow myself to have fun and create.

Sheesh, you get a little carried away with work and home remodeling projects and suddenly two months has gone by. Well, now that I've cleared away most of the dust, I'll try to be a little more diligent about posting...again. {sigh}

What has kept me so busy? Well, first there was the book chapter due in the end of August, followed immediately by a year-end grant progress report (also due the end of August), a grant proposal due in mid-September, web development for two more conferences we're organizing, long overdue web development for an international organization (for which my supervisor is the current president, so I'm the default web go-to guy), lots of hassles with a funding agency and the University (it'd be really nice if the money came so I could get paid regularly), another book chapter that I'm scrambling to write, some resumes and job applications (just in case, since--despite the workload--things seem a little dicey at work these days), demolishing our old front porch and planning and building the new one...oh yeah, and then the little things like my wedding anniversary and wife's birthday. Heh...I forgot the new Forgotten Realms campaign I started in September, too. The one I put off prep for this summer because I was too busy....

You know, I love the fall...it's a great time of year...but it gets more and more hectic every year, so I get to enjoy it less and less. Of course, I create some of those problems myself by signing up for things like NaNoWriMo. {big sigh} Oh well, at least the novel writing should be fun--if stressful.

I wish I could say that I'm safely and happily home from yet another wonderful GenCon experience, but I'm not. Instead, I'm still on the road, in Boston this week for a work-related meeting--the 234th American Chemical Society national meeting. And, while I generally enjoy these meetings (though somewhat less than GenCon), the fact that I'm spending yet another week away from home and away from my lovely wife this summer means that I'm enjoying the meeting a little less than normal.

For those of you who don't know, I've already spent two weeks in June "on the road" for another work meeting. I know I shouldn't complain about a free trip to India, and the location this time was really spectacular (I really enjoy rainforests), but it was my fourth work trip to India and I had very little time to actually enjoy the travel. Even so, we were in the Wayanad district of Kerala, a southwestern Indian state, and the terrain and vegetation were spectacular. The real highlight of the trip for me was spotting a herd of wild elephants as we drove through one of the wildlife preserves.

That said, GenCon was great and, as always, I'm glad that I was there. It was a wonderful chance to catch up with some good friends from Canada, Michigan, and the west coast, and to make new friends and finally meet some other people I've "known" for many years face-to-face. A real highlight was finally meeting George Krashos, a long-time Realms list member and dedicated keeper of Realmslore. George came all the way from Australia for his first GenCon experience, and from the sounds of things he wasn't disappointed.

Of course, GenCon was as much a business trip as it has been for me for the past five years and I'm happy to say that I've made some new contacts in the industry and the prospects look good for more writing and editing work--including a few teases about future opportunities for writing fiction, so I guess I'd better start sharpening my skills.

Well, I'm happy to finally be able to say that one of my latest projects has been released. d20 Beasts is a small PDF monster book published as a joint project by Digital Adventures and Cerberus Illustration Studios. It was a really fun project and I'm excited to finally see it for sale on the Digital Adventures on-line store and at RPGNow.

Joe Calkins, the artist, supplied the artwork first and then I created the monster stats and descriptions from the artwork. It was something of a departure from normal monster creation, and I really enjoyed the process.

Having just returned from a trip to India, followed immediately by a Canadian camping excursion, I am terribly embarrassed to find that I haven't posted anything in, well, forever. Things are a bit frantic right now, but I need to commit to posting more frequently on LJ.

Right now, I'm catching up on nearly a month's worth of backlog at work...largely the result of the work trip to India. Somehow, no matter what my boss expects, nothing else ever goes on holiday while I prepare for and participate in work-related travel, meaning that there's always that much more to catch up on once I get back. I'm also embarrassingly late on some editing work for a friend...sigh. At least that's almost done.

Now I just have five weeks to bring everything back to a state of near normalcy before GenCon and another week-long work trip bring everything to a screeching halt once more. Geez, guess I'd better start looking into airfare for Indianapolis...and my trip from Indy to Boston for work.

Well, I think the fact that I haven't posted to LJ in two weeks says it all. I finally took today and tomorrow off of work in the hopes of getting caught up on my backlog of writing projects. If all goes well I'll finish one project today and dive into some long-overdue outlines and some short story writing tomorrow.

I've already explained to my boss that I may be doing this next week as well...taking Thursday and Friday off for writing projects.

Ah, the joys of home ownership. Because of our lack of snow so far this winter, and this past weeks stint of subzero weather, I am the proud owner of a malfunctioning septic system. And, the only way to begin to remedy the problem is to excavate down to one of the concrete manhole covers and access the malfunctioning pump.

Now, even in the summer this would be a somewhat daunting task as that lid has to weigh at least 50 pounds, if not closer to 80. But, with it currently residing beneath roughly 6 inches of hard frozen ground, I've got my work cut out for me just getting down to the dumb thing. So, I've taken the day off of work to tackle this problem. With the weather warming, I had the mistaken idea that today would be better. I was wrong.

While our high temp today is supposed to get up to a glorious 5 degrees (above zero!), the winds have picked up. So, right now its -9 with a -32 wind chill. I think I'm going to wait until noon when the temp should be around 0 with only a -19 wind chill. Yippee.

So, I guess that means I should get a pot of chili going now and then get some writing done while I wait for things to "warm" up outside.

I know this is somewhat old news, at least on the RPG news sites, but I'm excited that one of my last freelance projects is now available...if only in pdf so far. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Castlemourn is a new RPG campaign setting designed by Ed Greenwood and published by Margaret Weis Productions.

The Castlemourn campaign setting pdf has been available through DriveThruRPG for a little over a week now and the printer has the files, so a print version should be available...soon. Perhaps by the end of February.

Well, I've been signed up with LJ for about 18 days now, so I guess I should start doing something here. To get the ball rolling, here are my results for the Tarot Card meme...seems to fit fairly well with the whole dark wings, darker omens/words theme.

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of
loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.