Jennifer's 365 Project

Between 4 and 4:30am Chris and I headed out so I could drop him off at the airport.  He had an early flight to Pennsylvania for work.

Getting up so early meant a lot of extra time in the morning before work.  So I did a little bit of cleaning and played a little bit of Lord of the Rings Online.  Not a bad way to start the day.

With the magic of Skype, Chris and I caught up on the happenings of each others day.  Even the cat stopped by while we were chatting to say "hi."

Dual-boxing (controlling two characters at once in a game) is one of those things I've always kind of been interested in but never really explored.  It always seemed like a really complicated setup and I never felt like I had a decent way to do it.   Well, no more.  Yesterday I did some reading at dual-boxing.com (which has a nice wiki) and downloaded some software to try.  I didn't have much success but I didn't spend much time. Today was better, though admittedly I need to research some more before really being successful at it.

As you can see, I'm using World of Warcraft for this experiment since I know the game well and there are a lot of tutorials geared toward it.  Eventually it think it would be fun to try this on other games, but first I have to try to get it working in one I know. So far I've got the keystrokes passing from one computer to the other, but I still have to figure out combat. That's alright through - World of Warcraft trials are 10 days long.

GVSU has, apparently, an annual Renaissance Festival on campus.  It's completely free and run by the student organization. So in the morning Chris and I haded over to Allendale to see the event.  It's an interesting mix, seeing students in renaissance garb mixed with a modern campus.

We ran into Amanda, who was working the event and is a part of the student organization.  Her outfit was very cool, right down to a neat make-up job.

Anyway, here is a slideshow of a few shots I took while we were there.

Originally we started out the day with plans to hit both the local Renaissance Festival at GVSU and Robinette's Cider Mill.  Plans to visit the festival at GVSU were quickly scrapped after noticing they were having a home game for football.  I'm not a fan of football and I'm not interested in fighting to pay for parking when it's normally free.

So we headed over to Robinettes for some tasty cider and to partake of the obligatory fall cider mill festivities. I was pretty hungry when we arrived, so a quick doughnut and cider were scrapped for a full blown sandwich.

There were lots of people around, and tons of children enjoying the warm weather and all the various structures Robinettes has play on.

I thought about the corn maze briefly, until I remembered my horrible sense of direction and quite frankly, the area had too many people for me to be relaxed.  I took a few photos of the area, and we headed home (where I promptly took a several hour nap).

It was a good day and I'm looking forward to checking out the Renaissance Festival at GVSU tomorrow.

The whole Chris being on vacation thing this week is really working out for me. Dinner is cooked every night, brownies, clean apartment - everything! Well, everything except the cat being more calm in the evening, but I attribute that more to being hungry due to the diet than anything else.

So this evening Chris whipped up a tasty quesadilla and some refried beans. Yum! He even bought a rice cooker earlier this week so he made a small batch of rice as well.

Fantastic Friday!

After another tasty dinner Chris cooked we took a short stroll around the neighborhood.  There's one part, a little in from the 44th street, that looks like it might have been an older portion of Kent Trails.  Chris went over to check it out while I hung back and tried to snap a quick shot of him.

Other than that it was a pretty quiet day, which is always a nice thing.

After the delicious steak dinner Chris cooked for me, we took a stroll down Kent Trails to enjoy the nice fall weather.  The leaves are turning so the trees are even more colorful than in the middle of the summer.  Plus, the light coat of recently fallen leaves really makes the ground quite vibrant as well.

As an added bonus, weather is still warm enough that it's comfortable to take a stroll without having to bundle up tightly.  Hoodie weather is great weather indeed.


Of course, with the sun setting and the trees heavily shading the path, I had to bump the ISO up to the max my camera does, 1600, which means a lot of noise on the pictures.

Chris is on vacation all this week, which means there's been a plethora of food cooked and baked so far this week.  Chili yesterday, brownies today (plus he picked up all the provisions to make Sundaes!).  And it's only Tuesday!  Today he swung by my work and picked me up for lunch.  We headed out to Little Mexico Cafe, which was tasty.

And then there's the tasty brownies.  After eating a tasty dinner he prepared, out came this massive plate of brownie and ice cream. So tasty!

It's been a good day!

Ok, so it's not EXACTLY a fall color tour when you just walk a bit down Kent Trails...but you do get a range this time of year none the less.  Greens, yellows, oranges, reds - all mostly still hanging on to their respective branches.

Anyway, while we were walking down the trail a little critter appeared and began following us - or should I say following Chris.  I'm not sure why I didn't get video of it, but she basically followed him from one side of the trail to the other for a good stretch before finally giving up and waiting for the next passerby who might give her more attention.

My parents came out today to check out ArtPrize in Grand Rapids and celebrate some birthdays with family.  So we all spent a few hours walking up and down the streets of downtown, checking out the various art exhibits.  We spent most of the time walking outdoors since the weather was relatively nice.

Today was a long day of running around to different stores and a whole lot of not buying anything.  In the evening we did end up with a new laser pointer for the cat, which he seems to be enjoying.

Today's lunch was an ArtPrize filled one.  Lori and I met up and walked through The B.O.B., around it, and into the Huntington Bank building.  It's about the halfway point for each of us on lunch so it was a good meeting spot.

Saw a lot of interesting things, including some very colorful sculptures of ice you see to the left.