Sorry for the lack of posts; lots of stuff going on here at Skortched Urf’ Studios HQ!

I picked up the new motorcycle on Friday.  (My first ever brand new vehicle!)  For the first 500 miles you have to keep it under 6,000 RPM’s to break the engine in.  So I have been driving it like a granny; as I can only go about 70mph max speed to keep it under that RPM range.  That’s plenty for around town but on the freeway you had better be in the slow lane at that speed.  So far I am loving it, and the ability to use HOV lanes coming to work saves me scads of time from the new house.  I’ll have 500 miles on it later today, after my commute home from work.

I also sold the Yamaha motorcycle to a local guy; we got to talking last night and he asked me where my bike went.  (I moved it to the new house, so it was no longer parked at our old residence; which is why he asked.)  He agreed to buy it, so we are either going to ‘do the deal’ later tonight or this weekend.  I kind of wanted to keep it as a “project bike” but I can sure use the cash more than I can use another project to work on! My wife dug out the title early this morning so I am ready whenever he is.

My parents came down to see the new house on Monday, so my wife and I spent all weekend working on the house to get it in as good a shape as we could manage.  We really made some headway.  I added some shelves to the new office, hung some pictures, a huge mirror and a clock, cleaned and organized stuff into the various rooms etc.  Last night I used the wood shop at my old residence to cut a bunch of plywood strips that will be the basis for tons of shelving in the garage.

As a side note, my old residence was an apartment inside a local High School!  My wife and I were Security Residents with the local county school system.  We got a small apartment to stay in for free in exchange for checking the doors and windows each night and being on site to respond to alarms, while keeping our full-time “day jobs”.  It was this arrangement that allowed us to A) buy our house in the first place and B) funnel money into my publishing business to get it off the ground.  It has been a very fun experience, though I will have to admit I have lost a lot of sleep in the past three years! I called it my seven-hundred and fifty-thousand square foot one-bedroom apartment; complete with a wood shop, gym, track, library, auditorium and tennis courts. Last Thanksgiving we had over fifty people in for dinner; we put several long cafeteria tables together and fit everyone at the same table.  We also used the home economics room (with four complete mini-kitchens!) to prepare our turkey and several other dishes. It has been a very fun experience, but we needed more space and it was time to move on.  I will miss the free rent though!

Monday we also stopped by the local furniture store to take advantage of the Labor Day sale.  We bought the living room and dining room set my wife was in love with, and it should be here in about a week.  That means for the next week I need to finish up the main level in anticipation; paint the chair rail I hung last week and vacuum/steam clean the carpet on that level, move all the junk that we have been storing there etc.

I see that several new people have posted ads on BitzBox.com!  Not many, but a few.  The site is slower to take off than I had hoped, but I still firmly believe it is a solid execution of a great idea.

We played our Star Wars Saga Edition RPG on Saturday.  It was a BLAST!  I rode the new motorcycle over there early in the morning since we all needed to make some changes to our characters since the KOTR source book was released. I was driving down the George Washington Parkway by Mount Vernon on a beautiful Saturday morning, stopped off for breakfast and was at my friends by 9:30am.  He is really putting a lot of effort into the campaign, and as Sith we are having a blast.

Our Comcast cable sucks.  The internet keeps crapping out, and on the DVR downstairs all the channels over 100 have no sound.  My wife was unable to attend her online class for her Masters program Tuesday night.  We’re done with them.  I got an offer in the mail for Verizon Fios; the fiber-optic service that does TV, Internet and phone.  They are coming on the 16th to install it.  I mean my wife NEEDS to connect to take her classes, and I am running an online publishing business so I can’t afford to mess around with high speed internet that…well…isn’t.

Which brings us to the publishing front.  I am almost done with  the Psi-Watch Flash flip book.  Once that’s done I’ll post it for sale.  (With luck later today.)  We have plenty of releases on deck and lined up right behind that one too.   Of course we are all still waiting for the revised GSL to see what will happen in October to the overall electronic RPG market.  I don’t think it will be quite the “gold rush” that 3.5 was; not even close if I guess right.  (But what do I know?)