Technically, my first post for this blog was June 16, but I don’t want to wait another half a month to make this announcement. June 2008 marks one year that I’ve been writing this blog on a daily basis. There are many posts dated before June 2007, but they were not written for this blog — they were posted in group emails or on message boards. (I think all of the older posts are gaming related.)

As of this post, there are 452 posts on this site:

310 posts in the Life category (some posts are attached to more than one category)
24 posts in Hometown
14 posts in Site Info
12 posts in Travel
24 posts in Movies
7 posts in Comic Books
3 posts in general Computer Games
57 posts in World of Warcraft (includes some on Guild Wars)
7 posts in Table Games
4 posts in general Role Playing Games
28 posts in Dungeons & Dragons (plus many more pages discussing and reviewing some specific classic D&D adventures)

I know it’s patting myself on the back, but I’m proud that I was able to keep up my goal to post every day. I missed about 10 days here and there due to technical problems, but not one day because I just didn’t feel like it (and there have been several days when I really didn’t feel like writing anything).

There have been over 4,600 visitors to this site — that’s visitors, not just hits. I never imagined that many people would see this thing. Now, I know most don’t re-visit regularly, and many may never return a second time, but still, I’m happily surprised. For a lame-ass blog by some unknown Southern good ol’ boy, writing about mundane stuff in his life, any number higher than the number of people in his family is impressive.

Anyway, that’s enough of me ringing my own bell.

Thanks for coming by and reading. And thanks to my brother (brogrit) for regularly posting comments (since I started using blogging software, in April 2008, that allowed readers to make comments).

Y’all come back now, ya’hear.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was at work and my cell phone buzzed. It was Cowgrit calling me from home. “Hello,” I answered. I could hear the Calvesgrit in the background, and it sounded like the littlest was crying.

Cowgrit said, “Calfgrit3 is hurt. I need you to come home and help me.”

“OK,” I said, “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” (It’s a 15 minute drive from the office to home.)

I saved my computer work and hustled out of my office to my car. I wasn’t worried because my wife didn’t sound upset.

Cowgrit is a nurse (RN). She was a full-time pediatric nurse for several years, and she’s been a part-time (four days a month) maternity ward nurse since Calfgrit7 was born. I’m thankful for her knowledge and experience in pediatrics almost daily, and especially with incidents like what she called me for. No matter how bad something with the boys looks to me, if she’s not worried about it, I can stay calm. I knew, whatever this problem was, she sounded calm on the phone. If the hurt was really bad, she would have told me to meet them at the hospital — so probably nothing broken or bleeding a lot.

But before I got home, she called my cell phone again. She was taking him to the doctor’s office, and I should go to meet them there. She said Calfgrit3 had fallen and hit his head, beside his eye, on a table. The area was swelling faster than she could stop it with an ice pack, so she wanted the doctor to see him. She said she didn’t think there was any serious damage, but it was bad enough to get a doctor’s opinion.

She was still calm, but I could tell the concern in her voice. Calfgrit3 had stopped crying in the background. (He was eating some crackers; Goldfish can soothe any crying child.)

I arrived at the doctor’s office just a few minutes after my family. When I stepped into the examining room and saw Calfgrit3, I said, “Whoa!” He had a big ole goose egg on the corner of his eye. It looked like he had half a golf ball under his skin. He was playing happily with Calfgrit7, apparently unbothered by the injury.

Cowgrit told me some of the swelling had gone down — good lord, how bad was it before I saw it? She told me the story of the incident: They had gone across the street to visit a neighbor. Within moments of them getting in the house, Calfgrit3 tripped and fell, hitting the corner of his eye on a table. The bump had started growing immediately, so she rushed him back across the street to put ice on it. She also gave him some pain med. She checked to see if it looked like his eye was damaged, but she thought it just a bump. But when the bump just kept getting bigger, to the point of closing his eye, she decided the doctor was needed.

Eventually the doctor came in and examined Calfgrit3. The doc checked his eye, ears, nose, and the goose egg. She felt around his eye socket to determine if anything was broken. She said everything looked fine, and that this was just a bump. “Keep putting cold on it till it goes down completely. It’ll look real bad for the next couple of days,” she said. But there was apparently no real damage to his skull or eye. Whew.

A day later, sure enough, it looks real bad. The swelling is mostly gone, but all around his eye is various shades of black and blue, and green and yellow. His eye lid is all black. Calfgrit3 acts perfectly normal, like he has no discomfort. It’s kind of funny, in a disturbing way, to see a cute, smiling little boy looking up at you with that big, ugly shiner around his eye. In a few more days, there’ll be no sign of this injury. Kids heal so fast.

Cowgrit is great at moments like that incident. Had I been the only parent with him when his eye swole up like that, I would have freaked out. I’d have probably gone directly to the hospital emergency room fearing a concussion or lost eye.

And if a degree and experience in pediatric nursing was not great enough for a mother, she also has a degree in elementary education. I am so lucky to have Cowgrit as the mother of my children.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

My game group is starting a new D&D campaign. It’s been a few months since we played D&D — we only played two nights of the psionic campaign back in January. This time we’re going to all share the Dungeon Master duties. We’ll each run one adventure, for two or three game sessions, and rotate through us so everyone gets to play a character and run an adventure.

I’m pretty excited about this campaign, because I like DMing and playing a character. I usually DM when we play D&D, but after a few months to a year of running the game, I burn out and need a break. It can be a good deal of work to run a role playing game, and I just don’t have the free time for the prep work that I used to.

So, anyway, in anticipation of being able to play a character after I DM the first adventure in our campaign, I got a Reaper Mini catalog. I like to find a cool game miniature and build my character based on it. No one has to do this, and most people don’t do it this way, but it’s just something that I like to do. I can build dozens of characters just off the top of my head, but it’s a little bit of a simple challenge to build one based on a miniature. Besides, it’s extra cool when you can show your fellow gamers exactly what your character looks like by sitting a 3-dimensional representation of him on the game table.

<- This was the character I chose to build for our game. I dubbed him “The Holy Hammer of Hessia” and I was excited to play his the personality and mechanics. (For you readers who aren’t familiar with D&D-type miniatures: the figure in this image is about twice the size of the real thing.

I ordered this mini, and half a dozen more, through my local game store a few days ago. When they called me to let me know my order had arrived, they apologized that two of the minis were not available.

I knew one of the two would of course be this mini, and it was. I had already designed and written up the character from the core rules, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this guy for over a week. And now, sadly, I can’t get the mini. I may end up playing the character anyway, without the figure representation, but it just looses some of the cool factor without the mini on the table.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com