Kiss My Knits!

We have a Windows machine partitioned into different sections for my husband, my daughter, and myself. All three have passwords. We all knows Em’s.

Today I was trying to log in to her side to help her with something and the computer wasn’t accepting the password.

Me: Did you change your password?
Em: No, the capslock is on.

Cue internal “duuuhhhh” feeling here. She was right, of course. I had turned on capslock when I had to enter a code while installing something and never turned it back off. She didn’t see me do that, but she did see that the light was lit and knew that the password was case sensitive.

These kids today…

Thus endeth my run as GM Tvini in Dragonrealms. And sixteen years was a pretty good run. There are good feelings on all sides, so who knows? I may be back again someday, when I have more time.

I thought I was calm about this decision, but the night after it was done, I had nightmares about having submitted shoddy work in the game. (Note: I have NEVER done this. My work has always been excellent.) In the morning I woke up and realized that in some form or another, I had been a professional writer since I was 22 years old. As of today, I am not a professional writer. It’s led to a bit of an identity crisis. I consider myself an educated person of words and ideas. Objectively, however, that public identity has changed to “knitting hausfrau.” Yeah, I know, I’m still intelligent, and my job right now is being a dedicated mother and entrepreneur and my product is recognized worldwide as the best of its type, but right now it all feels like trying to comfort myself while continuing down a path that I didn’t ever see myself going down in the first place.

So please bear with me as I reorient myself and reexamine my priorities and my path. The only issue in Dragonrealms really was time. I found GMing to be a rewarding experience, working in an exciting environment with intelligent people. And the game has always been fun. So if the only issue was time, then perhaps this is a good moment to examine exactly what “time” means to me in my life, and whether I’m spending it in a way that is fulfilling.

I just wish it weren’t summer, so I had more time to think about time.

Now, before we begin Week 44, I think there are a few things we need to clear up. You may have noticed that our party is sometimes a little… unorthodox… in our methods. “But Tvini,” you may have asked, “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we develop a method to quantify just how freakishly incompetent this party really is?”

Well now, through the magic of mathematics, we can!

Here’s Em’s fifth grade talent show video. Note that at the start the kids in the audience start to clap with the beat, but then a teacher shushes them. Buzzkill.

I’m reserving my seat now for the Tony awards.

This morning I was writing some thank you notes to Em’s teachers. While I did, Em stayed in her room with the door closed for a long time. I didn’t know what she was up to. Finally, someone came out, dressed as you see here. It wasn’t Emily, it was a Mrs. Andy Erickson come to visit.

After Mrs. Andy Erickson left, I added cold cream to the grocery list. Soap and water didn’t quite remove the greasepaint, although they did smear it around a lot. I’m going to have her scrub a bit more before we go out, as I can’t have my daughter running around in what now looks like blackface.

We’re lining up a few summer camps, a trip to the beach, and some math tutoring. This is also the year that I plan to teach Em to knit. She wants to know how, but not necessarily to sit down and learn how. She likes to fiddle with her hands so I think it could be a good thing to learn. Em will also be trying out piano lessons. She’s naturally musical – not surprising, since it runs in both sides of her family – so I think she has the potential to do well.

Mrs. Andy Erickson, Emily, and I are planning on having a great summer. I hope you do too.

I just got back from Em’s school talent show. Her number of background singers/dancers had swelled from the original two to six or maybe eight. I wasn’t really focused on them at the time so I’ll have to go to the video to check for sure.

So how’d she do? She knocked it out of the park. We’ll work on getting the video internetified later so you can see for yourself.

This kid couldn’t say the word “no” at age three. Today she’s eleven, and on the last day of primary school, she coordinated an act, recruited accomplices, got on stage with a microphone and danced and sang with total confidence.

Parents of the newly diagnosed: I mean it when I say that you never know where life will take you. I have no idea what the future holds, but today is proof that anything is possible. And that my daughter is awesome – but we always knew that.

Bookmark 2 done. No way can I knock out three more by Thursday. Since the bookmarks were plan B, it’s time to move to plan C.

Em continues her quest to figure out what my password for the Windows machine is. Today she told me she knew it. It was Tvini. How the heck did she know about “Tvini?” It’s not the password, but I’m still impressed. Clever girl. Project for this summer: lock down the blog.