Last week my husband came home with Blizzard’s long-awaited Starcraft II nestled under his arm. It’s a video game. He hadn’t mentioned any plan to buy it and as he walked by, as he loaded it up, as I heard the roar of Blizzard’s famous opening cinematic movies coming from his office, a queer almost forgotten feeling in the pit of my stomach slowly materialized into nostalgia. I remembered this. I’ve been here before. But there was quite a different flavour mixed in. What was that?

As I fumbled trying to identify it as bitter or sweet, it was easy to remember it’s origins. It had been years – nearly ten actually – since I’d seen my husband sit down and do the thing he has loved best all his life: sitting at a computer to play a video game.

Don’t get me wrong. He adores his Xbox 360, dabbles with the Wii, obsesses over which games are on sale and what his gamer score is on the iPod, but that particular image of him and his PC game, a game in which no wife or children are involved, had been absent from our lives for a very long time.

Gaming had almost nothing to do with my life prior to getting married. I mean, my kid brother would get me to help him solve puzzles in the 11th Hour when he was stuck and I was known to play a mean game of Tetris when bored. But I happened to fall head over heels for a gamer who was more man than any tight pair of wranglers I’d ever seen.

And I love my geek. But for a long time, I felt like a widow as he played his games. He’d be at it for hours. We did lots of other stuff together, but there was something about the nature of this  hobby that because I didn’t understand it lead me to being jealous of the time he spent with them.

He did his best to find games we could play together. There was Worms and You Don’t Know Jack, a trivia game with a smart alleck host, that we sat at the computer together to play. But the immersive games were lost on me. He was in the middle of Ultima Online when we got married, tried Everquest briefly – thankfully it was never his crack – played through the original Warcraft games and expansions. And who could forget the first Diablo or Wolfenstein? Honestly, I thought it was a waste of time.

I read while he played and kept my opinions to myself. I wonder if he thought my hobby was a waste of time. ha!

Can’t be though because what I read was his library: Star Wars novels, Tolkien, Lawhead, the Chronicles of Narnia and Robert Jordan. I read almost everything he had and begged for more. What a sneaky man. By introducing me to fantasy books – something else that had been absent from my life prior to him – he was simultaneously sowing the seeds of my conversion. I loved fantasy in book despite myself and my perhaps less than hidden disdain for fantasy in video games. Fantasy opened up my imagination, showed me I had choices in life and gave my romantic sentimentality a sense of playfulness that was desperately needed to balance my serious side.

And he never stopped trying to find more games I would like and that we could play together. (Still hasn’t actually.) Once he had moded our very first xbox and loaded it with emulators, we were… wait, wait, sorry I’ll say that all again in English for ya. He took his original xbox, sautered some memory chip onto it that voided its warranty and scared the hell out of me but allowed him to load software on the xbox. That software would “emulate,” meaning run old computer systems and their games that had been hacked by other people. In other words, we had a Commodore 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and others INSIDE the xbox, and we could play the old games on the xbox.

So on this rogue system, we played even more Worms and found Tetris Attack. A  forerunner of Bejeweled – you know that game, right? – that was familiar to me because of the name Tetris, it really wasn’t a tetris game. You are getting rid of blocks, not dropping them. Nevertheless, it was a hit at our house, and we became hardcore. Competitions began as soon as the two babies were tucked in for the night and continued furiously into the wee hours of the morning. I dreamt of those brightly colored blocks with crazy faces. My strategy I plotted in REM.

Matches were won and lost. There was definite competition. I couldn’t beat him until I’d played enough on any given night to get into a groove. That’s when my fingers became magic and the hours melted away… together.

Little did I know, but we had established our beat. And it was fertile ground to sow in some Diablo II. He suggested, and I, on a Yoshi high, agreed. Nothing in our life has been the same since.

There was an enormous learning curve moving from a game controller to playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse, but once I stopped the swearing and sighing and being too stubborn to ask for help, I loved the game. I loved it so much that I never wanted to stop. And he loved that I loved it. My butt didn’t leave the computer chair for hours.

Without high speed Internet without malls in the middle of nowhere and our biggest luxury being that we owned two computers in the first place, we clobbered demons, crawled dungeons and had way too much fun slaughtering cows. We ended up playing through Diablo II countless times with several characters on several different difficulty levels. It was my first experience pretending I was someone else, someone made of pixels, and that’s when Kalanna was born. I used Tolkien’s elvish dictionary at the back of The Silmarillion to make up the name and alias that would give me the freedom to try many new things in the years to come.

It was then too that I discovered my everlasting love of breaking barrels. There could be treasure inside! And a girl can never have too many mana potions. Smash, boom, bang! Who cares if we’re about to get eaten by a horde of angry Bonebreakers, I see a barrel and it’s MINE!

Diablo II was so much fun, a story to dive into, frustrations to take out by dealing out fireballs and extremely empowering too. It may seem a giant leap to switch from a discussion of video games to women issues, but for me the two are linked.

Letting myself simply enjoy my time, moving outside of the stereotyped women who lived and breathed (down my neck) all around me was huge. Huge! And my acceptance from that moment forward of the gaming culture in my home instantly made me a different kind of woman. Someone, when I look back, that I’m so proud to have become.

From there it was an easy move into Halo and Baldur’s Gate and, when we got high speed internet, World of Warcraft. I’ll never forget my first sleepless night. Stayed awake till four in the morning or something crazy to finish Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first game I played beginning to end by myself. I had arrived.

As time has gone on, I find my favorite games are still ones that I play with my husband. The recent exception was Dragon Age: Origins in which I didn’t know how to react or feel when I started… sorry when my character started flirting with another character of the male persuasion. His name was Alistair. It was kind of too real for me. Awkward romance aside, Dragon Age let me be the hero in 3D, in a story I controlled where I could glory in the well-chosen path and put up with the consequences when my steps weren’t so well-placed. But the lines of right and wrong were really blurry. You could be whoever you wanted to be – a personality of myriad nuances – and still end up in the same spot at the end no matter what. The game accepted you for who you were. Frankly this made me nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to be the hero who did it right. Same way I play life. But the game just wanted you to do it your way. Same as life really is.

Puzzle Quest was also awesome, being a similar game as Tetris Attack and taking me back to those days, only it involves some more serious strategy. Mages always need a plan to keep their cloth covered bottoms from being scorched.

Anywho, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of gaming now. My kids play. We play. We all play Rock Band together  We’ve moved onto to board games and our rec room basement is now such a crazy perfect layout for the tv/xbox, board game area and then the computer station from which I hope to one day be tearing through and taking names in the upcoming Diablo III and The Old Republic.

I play as much as I can. I just began Puzzle Quest II which is massively even better than the first and hope to start the duo of Mass Effect games as they are sci-fi versions of Dragon Age by the same company and huge hits and why aren’t I playing them right now?! Because I have too many pots on the fire. Creativity explodes in my head on a daily basis, and I follow where it wills. One day it sends me to my sewing machine, another to the keyboard to talk to you fine folk, sometimes to the kitchen or the garden. Gaming comes in last place in the summer, but first in winter.

So when the husband brought home Starcraft II, what was that unavowed feeling? It was four of them, actually. It was me remembering the days of widowhood, then crazy jealousy that it wasn’t the kind of game I enjoy therefore not a game we could play together, mixed with supreme vicarious giddiness for how much fun he was going to have, and lastly remorse that I had ever made him feel bad for being who he is. Somehow, him walking in the door with that game brought us full circle. We’ve arrived. I’m a gaming gamer’s wife. Because it’s been the most fun ever. +5 to family game time.

We lost our backpack. And it had the bathing suits and beach towels.

It was our usual summer routine. No car for the day meant a trip on the city bus, just the three of us, to feel the heartbeat, hear the sounds, know what it is to be part of something larger. First stop: library, second stop: the beach.

But somewhere between home and the library, we lost track of one of our backpacks. We were sad and panicked and outright bummed, but searched with vigor and… yes, desperation.

The search was extensive. We left no aisle unturned, though not literally. Imagine the poor librarian and her face if we had done that?! We combed the fiction and nonfiction, audio books, movies, graphic novels, everywhere. But in vain. We stopped on the second floor only hoping to vent the sadness that weighed our exhausted feet and hearts.

From that vantage you can see out the front windows, That day, they were our salvation. For we spied our beloved from afar. It sat, alone and untouched just outside on the blue bus bench. All was restored, all was well, time for the beach… except for the “but” lingering on the other side of the bench: a neighbour, nefarious and unknown.

He was reading a book. Seemingly harmless and yet we raced as if at any moment tranquility would turn into tempest and our arrival would be too late. Our lives depended on it!

There was little need. Backpack in hand and safe once again, the stranger was kind and endearing. The adrenaline racing in our bloodstream suddenly useless, and the day went on, emergency forgotten with the kindness of strangers.

Later we sat on a hillside curb. Apparently being a part of something larger means waiting. To pass the time, I imparted the wisdom of automobiles. It is always a strange hour when you find it quite unusually necessary to teach your children something so mundane that you never even realized it required teaching. How do you tell a Ford from a Toyota? My son was trying to turn the punch buggy game of spying Volkswagon Beetles into a punch Kia game because that is the car that we drive. Only he thought EVERY car was like ours. Ahhhh, no, not exactly, dear one. And so began their lesson of which car is which… Honda, Ford, Dodge, Toyota, Ford, Kia…

Between bus stops we air-conditioned ourselves out at Fabricland and bought new patches for the kids’ school backpacks. They, patches not backpacks, are the only thing I enjoy collecting simply for the joy of doing so. And I’m passing on the silliness. They get a new patch each year. I sew them on. And when a new backpack is required, we remove, place and sew again. How I love my backpack patches and theirs. My green university backpack is like my life story in patches.

Last year our acquisitions were found at the comic book convention – Buffy for me, Super Mario raccoon style for the boy and Care Bears four in a row for my girl. The selection wasn’t nearly as good at the fabric shop this day, but she found a teddy bear patch that reminded her of the bear she sleeps with every night – so that she always has her bear near – and he found a frog with bugged-out eyes holding a book – because he looks a little silly like my son acts.

Tim Horton’s ended up another minature detour. Not that surprising, I know. We had to wait for the appointment that was scheduled between the fun and a double double with donuts can’t be beat for re-fueling. We sat down. And the kids had their cinnamon rolls warmed up.

Or, if it was a book…

Where is your Internet heart?
Revisiting online privacy and presence

amidst everyone freaking out about facebook latest changes to privacy, friends leaving facebook and other friends discussing blogging, I’ve come to the conclustion that my loyalties are in the wrong places.

Facebook has been bothering me for other reasons on top of the current uproar. And the pile of stress was so high that I finally recognized it for what it is. A constant flowing stream of updates and applications that have little importance to my daily life. My exuberant reach at the start went way too far. My daughter said it best when she confided: “Mom, I like being involved and busy, but I don’t like doing everything and having no time to relax.” Exactly! Thank God for my ten-year old fount of wisdom.

The deluge coming from Facebook feels just like that to me. Too many people to keep up with. One liners are funny when you post them on a wall, but do they penetrate? are they a building block? do they make a friendship when after years the only thing left is a hyper-link from one insecure social media webpage to another. There was way too much time reading somethings and not enough Skype calls to my girls, my real friends who have been there through thick and thin and who read my blog. Not enough blog writing – you should see the backlog in my drafts! – and expressing and reading and spending time with the people that matter.

So after much hand-wringing – just ask my husband how many times I asked him a question like “what will people think?” or “will they hate me?’ or “should i tell them what i’m doing?” still trying to please – I seriously downscaled my Facebook: chopped my friend list in HALF, tightened privacy settings and removed any information that I do not want totally public.

When I left high school, I made and kept a promise to myself: that I wouldn’t feel obliged any longer to keep in contact with people just because there were the only game on the block. Facebook changed all that and put me right back in 1995, a pleated plaid school skirt standing in front of a baby blue locker absolutely covered in pictures of people who don’t call me on the weekends. Sheesh, why did I do that to myself?!

Where is my Internet heart?

Where my real one is. Right here. And from now on, my online presence will not be what Zuckerberg wants. It will be what I want. And I like Twitter better anyways.

ps. In case you haven’t heard… http://www.quitfacebookday.com/

We went to the Medieval Times restaurant in Toronto…

getting ideas for my library… i like these fabric panels on the wall!

the knights costumes were so beautiful that it was hard for me to remember to watch the games.

see, I was looking at these mini banners instead of the jousting going on like everyone else.

We were seated in the Red Knights section and cheered for him all night. He was very sweet and threw a flower really far into the crowd to reach our princess. She was thrilled and waved it ceaselessly. Her effort was not in vain, for he was in the end, the victor of the tournament, defeating the evil green knight thereby freeing the captured white shining prince!

A couple of days later, we had our own medieval tournament as we challenged ourselves to play a game of all-expansion Carcassonne, one of our favourite board games. Huzzah!

First the city is placed with its enclosing wall and then the river begins…

“In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be lookin’ for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross
even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I’ve been looking for
In the middle of the night”

Our river is finished and we have started on some large castles, even finished a few small ones…

the pieces add up fast and the kingdom grows rather large. we anticipated this by clearing everything else off the kitchen table and even adding the leaf to it. Here is where we stopped the game after several hours of play in one night.

and here is our final board! we managed to make a “pretty” one this time with very few holes. I love this game! all total it took us about seven hours to play, though in our defense it was our very first time playing with all of the add-on expansions so we had a lot of discussions about rules and what to do when.

If this looks like fun to you -- SOO much fun -- and you like board games, try these options…

Xbox Live Arcade has a simplified version of Carcassonne to play. That’s where I fell in love. It’s the ONLY game I have a perfect achievement score in. Darn hard work, but soooo much fun. hehe

Or, you could buy your own big box and play like us!

Toys R Us sells the basic Carcassonne and a few of the expansions. Wait, have I explained “expansion”? It means that you play it with the main game, not alone, it is only adding more pieces, rules, intrigue, strategy, FUN, you name it, to the original game.

The Big Box like we have probably would be found at your local specialty game shop. You know the one that sells all the collectible action figures and Dungeons and Dragons rule books.

Good evening to you, my lords and ladies.

ps. I wish my template were bigger to accomodate larger photos. These don’t look their best at such small size, but you can see the full images in my Picasa album if you click on any of them.

having organized two kitchen cupboards, folded a mountain of laundry and made deliciously greasy hamburgers for supper, I’m sitting down to tell you about something I love. because I need to unwind and I need to smile.

santa — yes virginia, there is a santa clause! — was very kind to me this year and left me an ipod Touch under the Christmas tree. when i first heard of them, i didn’t want one. what use would it be without a phone?! plus knowing i can’t afford a monthly iphone bill, my analysis was simple = don’t go there. Still, I’m so glad that the old guy from the north had the foresight and imagination to leave me one because…

it’s brilliant! the little thing doesn’t leave my side for long — no matter where i am in my day: home, work or out and about.

what do i use it for that makes me love it so much? so glad you asked!

it’s the apps.

there really is an app for whatever you can think of and then some.

Here is a list of my favourites and how I use them…

[full disclosure is that i simply love these apps and have recieved nothing to rave about them. hehe]

1. grocery gadget: keeps my grocery list, the pharmacy list, the walmart list, any shopping list your heart desires. and it’s like a puppy, you train it to do the tricks you want it to learn and it does!

like, say you can’t find an item in it’s database, add it and it will be there at your fingertips forever more. good boy.

best of all, it has a corresponding free web application that your family can use to share lists. so now hubby can add those hickory smoked almonds he’s been craving to my list when he gets an envie. cool.

2. evernote: one amazing monster and it’s hard to say what i don’t use it for. Ah! to start…

• remember how much I loved Annie Lammott’s book bird by bird and how i swore ever after to carry index cards to jot down inspiration and quotes and thoughts and references to the world around me and books i was reading. i did that. i really liked it and was so proud to have adopted a healthy habit.
• well now evernote keeps virtual index cards for me. i start a new “note” for each book to keep bits, page numbers, quotes i want to add to good reads and my thoughts. eventually that miasma become blog posts, act as a mini-diary of what i have read and just make me so happy. ’cause, no offense Annie but the index cards were sometimes hard to keep track of.
• evernote makes my living cookbook recipe archive mobile for use in the kitchen and at the grocery. invaluable.
• i save my current weekly menu, i save pdf files with photos of crafty things i want to make with the kids, i save lists of library books i want to show the kids, gift ideas, restaurants who have kids-eat-free-nights, my favorite podcast and firefox extensions list in case the computer explodes, i save everything. it’s my mobile me. LOVE it.

3. mobile RSS: lets me take my love of google reader anywhere. all my feeds are downloaded into it when i am online like at home and can be read when i am offline like at work on my coffee break. in other words, it lets me read my chicks anywhere! sweet.

and it works with…

4. read it later: which is like my online to-read list. articles i don’t have time to scroll through when i find them, recipes i can’t archive in Living Cookbook right away, pages i want to revisit to see the latest update like discussion posts or polls of which book the bookclub is choosing next

5. wordpress: definitely not to be forgotten. lets me jot down an inspiration, quote, anything that moves me to later flesh out into a real life blog post. i can write anywhere. wow.

6. podcasts: my  favourites are in iTunes, they sync to the Touch and voila, i can listen anywhere. we eventually bought a small portable dock and speaker system for it too. washing dishes and ironing are suddenly not quite so boring.

7. remember the milk: my to-do list software. it goes where i go.

• the positives: i have consistently used this program. adding and completing tasks is so easy, fast and i don’t forget. things don’t slip through my fingers like they used to do on occasion. i know what needs to be done and when. i choose to complete or postpone. somehow i feel like i have way more choice in my life and am leading my own life rather than letting my life lead me. that’s quite a benefit from a piece of software.
• the negatives: i don’t find that the mobile app syncs very well with the web application. you are supposed to be able to add tasks at either place and your lists should to be identical. it doesn’t seem that good to me. always a bit off. however, the whole point of it is that my to-do list is mobile and i find i use it on the Touch not on the Web 99.9% of the time and so just ignore the ingruency and go on my merry way.

EDIT several hours later… these negatives got me looking for something better and i found it. it’s called TouchToDo with the same basic functionality, a one-time small fee rather than a yearly subscription fee, plus a sync with Google calendar. win.

even better, it’s easier to use. and if you type in the word “call,” you add pick from your contacts to auto put in whoever you need to call. same when you type in “email.” you can make notes about an item on your to-do that is visible on the main list. wow, now i think RTM is royally ripping people off.

8. goodreads: has an iPhone app now and the Chapters bookstore where I shop has a Starbucks with free wi-fi which all adds up to being able to see my bookshelves when i really need them. yay!

9. stanza: free e-books in a beautiful and smart interface. no brainer. i’ve actually switched my whole purse philosophy because of this app. no more need for bulky purses to carry my latest read. i bought this one instead. (almost identical, same colour, only London Fog.)

10. tweetdeck: has long been my favourite twitter client anyway and i think it works even better on iPod devices than the desktop version. tweet me, i’m Kalanna.

12. always having a calculator to figure out how much that 20% off sweater is really going to cost me

13. alarm clock! night shift is crazy and sometimes my sleep schedule is wacked, even to the extent of affecting where i fall asleep. if i’m starting to doze off in a strange place, i can always be sure that i’ll wake when i need to.

14. words with friends: play Scrabble with your friends who are in the next room or really really far away. play with me, I’m Kalanna. lol

so, there you have it. this is what i do with my ipod Touch. so very very much. and the crazy thing is that you could do so much more in the States where public wi-fi is available at more places than in Canada.

“i can’t be the person that i was before this thing came along” — Lou, from the tv show Chuck, episode chuck vs. the truth, season one

this is my life
i love it

how technology can be all wires and tangle
yet when it is sorted out

be simple and perfect and full of form