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Drumheller
After living in Edmonton for over a decade, we finally decided to check out Drumheller. This town sits about three hours drive from us and it is home to loads of dinosaur related stuff, so my kids were pumped to check it out too. Overall we enjoyed the trip. The drive was uneventful. We particularly appreciated it when the flat prairies became badlands, a welcome change of scenery! We spent a couple days in and around Drumheller. What was nice about the location is that you can undertake multiple excursions in a day, pretty much everything is close by. We checked out the Royal Tyrrell Museum and several other smaller…
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San Diego Zoo
Our final big excursion while in San Diego was a day trip to the zoo. I wasn’t overly looking forward to this… I’ve seen some cool zoos before and I’m not very fond of the whole “watching animals in cages” thing. The Zoo Overall this was a fun day. Though the day was sunny there’s a lot of shade, especially in more heavily treed areas like the rain forest. There’s so much to see and some neat opportunities like the underwater viewing of the hippos and polar bear exhibits. The park got busy (we went on a Monday) but it was only super congested in a couple chokepoints. For the…
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San Diego SeaWorld
This is part 2 of 3 detailing our recent family vacation. The first entry discussed the great time we had at Legoland. Downtown San Diego The first night after leaving Legoland and arriving in downtown San Diego, we took it easy. Our hotel was located near all the public transportation, so I was a bit nervous about how well we would sleep. Periodically a very loud train (the Coaster, I think) would rumble down and shake the hotel. Luckily enough that first night we were all so exhausted from the Legoland experience, that we slept fairly soundly. The next day though we were up and at them and heading over…
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Vacation – Legoland
We recently returned from a vacation to San Diego and I figured I’d give a quick overview of our vacation — broken across a couple posts as I’m super busy, catching up on what I’ve missed while I was away. We spent about half our time at Legoland and the rest in downtown San Diego, visiting SeaWorld and the zoo, as well as walking the downtown area. This post will primarily focus on Legoland itself. First Flights This was our youngest kid’s first flight, so that was part of the incentive of going… to give him the chance to be on a plane a few times. Since we had to…
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Rewards and Incentives…
When I left BioWare, several years ago, I thought my time best spent pursuing a writing career and so most of my “deliverables” were writing related. Each year end I planned what projects I wanted to work on over the course of the next year. For the most part I exceeded my productivity goals. I wrote dozens of stories and several novels. But I did not hit my milestones however. Time and again I failed to sell the number of stories I needed to. After winning a place in the Writers of the Future Contest I became even more aggressive with the milestones I wanted to achieve but after the…
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The Basement Disaster
No, this is not the title for my next novel. A few weeks ago our sump pump failed and we had a bit of a basement flood. We caught it early and no furniture or possessions were damged, but the insurance guys still decided to tear the carpet out. This is what our basement looks like right now. It is kind of creepy. And noisy. A person forgets how much noise carpet and furniture absorb. We also have the pleasure of working with various contractors again, to rebuild. I’m being sarcastic. I have nothing against builders, of course, it just seems to me that most of the ones we end…
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Slender Man
The other day my eldest came home and went on and on about a new game of tag they were playing at school. They called it “Slender Man Tag” and as he detailed all the weird rules they had created for it, I have to admit to no small amount of confusion. I had no idea what a Slender Man was or why kids would play a tag variant based on it. So, after assuring him that the game sounded absolutely fun, I scurried to the Internet. ( Wikipedia is my friend.) I learned that Slender Man is an Internet meme about a tall, spooky looking dude who has cropped…
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Sin and Toil in On Spec Magazine
My story “Sin and Toil” is now available in the latest issue of On Spec Magazine! You can buy the print copy (or subscribe!) here or check out their ebook version here.
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Time Travel!
Well, not really time travel. Sorry. Haven’t got that figured out just yet. But I noticed that David Gaider (you know that writer guy from BioWare that I used to work with) recently posted a discussion of the early days of Dragon Age. I thought some of you might be interested. http://dgaider.tumblr.com/post/76176525033/on-the-early-days-of-dragon-age There’s also a link to his Rules of Naming Things, which I think is worth reading, but I’ll make you dig the link out of his article. In the latest Lazy book, I’ve written a bit about this, but David’s view of the early Dragon Age days is more entertaining than my take. (And for those of you…
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Toys!
I totally forgot to post some pictures of the toys that the kids got over the holidays. Here’s some highlights: (Does posting pics get me out of needing to actually write a post today? For those who want an update… book 4 of the Lazy Designer is done… I’m just doing some final tweaking and verifying it looks okay.)
