Reality can be a bother.

Boy oh boy the last week was a lot of fun here in reality.

We had a surprise 19th century Thanksgiving following a snowstorm that knocked out power to tens of thousands in my area. Luckily the wood stove was able to keep the place heated for the 66 hours we had no power.

Unluckily I kept on using the wood stove and there was a chimney-fire in it on Tuesday, I was right there next to the wood stove when it happened; all of a sudden there was a rushing noise, I peeked out the widow and there was a whirling vortex of dark smoke pouring out of the chimney and very shortly a ring glowing red around where the chimney touches the roof-box got the wife and the youngest out of the house and stayed inside to close doors in the house while she called 911. The fire marshal has his office just 3 doors down (in his house) so he was here quickly and I helped him get going on getting it under control as the fire department came rushing in over just a couple brief minutes.  The damage was minor, it pretty much just wrecked the chimney without doing more then lightly scorching a few roof shingles.  The local fire department was quick and thorough and did their job well while doing as little damage as possible. It wasn't up to code so it'll be a little while before that gets fixed, there is currently a bucket capping the mostly useless chimney-pipe.

Money has been tight (and there's that new chimney repair) so I applied for a part-time job at the town transfer station but no telling what will happen with that. An art contract is also moving forward finally so I can get them some good work done and get paid a bit which cheered me up.

Oh yeah, one of my crazy cats has learned how to bark, great a cat that barks, I've been telling my wife he must have been raised around dogs before he was weened, he eats like a dog and he and his sister are very kissie for cats.

So in RPG-land I'm working on getting some materials together for BigDungeon which has gotten nowhere near the attention it should have and still knocking about the zine idea; print and mail has sure gotten expensive in the past 20 years. My daughter is still interested in my DMing a campaign (not just one game) for her and a bunch of her nerdy friends and thinks going oldschool might be an interesting way to go to show them how it was done in the old days.