Nightmares & sleepless nights
I'm up in the middle of the night because I had nightmares that frightened me and I can't go back to sleep. I have nightmares a lot, but not often so intense. You wanna hear it?

I don't remember the start of the dream, usually they start out calm and then turn into something frightening... apparently this was the same. I remember I was going to visit some friends (I have no idea who these friends were, I can not recognise them now that i am awake and thinking about it)in a nearby town (not sure nearby to where...) and I had the kids with me. As I got to the friends house, some ruckus broke out, and we heard shooting outside. We went to look, and there were these dark military vehicles on all the streets and men with weapons piling out of them. They seemed to be searching every car, every house, every person, and sometimes killing people. But most they let go. For some reason we got in the friends car and started driving around and trying to figure out what was going on. We were stopped several times by these foreign soldiers (we could now tell they were not American) always there were 4 soldiers, and they all pointed a rifle into the car at us while they inspected us. No idea who or what they were looking for. I kept trying to call my husband, but couldn't get hold of him. I called and called. When he finally answered I was totally panicked, and said he had to come get us immediately, and I needed him with me. We made it back to the friends house, and I saw my husband trying to get through the guards, he came around a back way and avoided most of them. He got out of the car and came running in the house just at the same moment we heard an eerie silence fall over the city. We thought at first that it (whatever it was) was over. And the soldiers were leaving. So we walked outside to look, and the place was almost empty of residents. People had escaped in their cars or were hiding in their houses. The friends and my husband were saying how it's safe now and we could go back inside. Then I saw over my shoulder 3 people hanging from ropes in the neighbors garage. One of them was a young boy. I restrained myself from screaming but I told them, we have to get out of there, and my husband wanted to go back in and pack some clothes and important things, and I looked to the other end of the row of houses and saw a soldier with a hatchet dripping blood, and I begged him to just help me get everyone to the car, I said "They are killing the children! Lets just get out of here with our lives!" then he saw what I had seen, and grabbed our daughter and I started ushering the boys to the car. And our friends got in and they seemed to let us drive away. They were letting anyone leave who wanted to leave. But they were "silencing" everyone who stayed. I woke up at that point. Now I can't go back to sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see that scene again... Is this what it is like to live under terrorist rule? It was just a dream, I know it was just a dream, but it was terrifying.

It's only 3:20. I've been up about 2 hours. Still 3 more hours left until morning. What a terribly long night...

-Sparkling

Dragon drawings
No time to write, but thought I would post these pics of dragons that I drew last weekend.

The first one here was my requisite contribution to the treasure chest. I have no idea who won my drawing. I hope they enjoy it, whoever it was.

This second one was drawn mostly at the event on Sunday morning, but I didn't get time to finish the tail until today. I was intending for a smooth, almost worshipful dragon in this drawing, as it rises to greet the sun in the early morning.

And now I have to get back to work. Blessings to you all!

-Sparkling
www.visionsgame.com

Been a while
I have returned from my first expedition back into the realm of the SCAdians. The event itself was fun, happy people, and freindly. But I didn't sell even 1 drawing. And made several very expensive mistakes. Namely: leaving our main tent, grill, fuel, and coffee cups at home. We had plenty of food, and what looked like overkill on the water turned out to be just about right, if we'd been there another day it would not have been enough water. Oh, and I ended up just buying a square pavillion that was on clearance, was less expensive more compact, and easier than trying to locate an umbrella and the materials needed to build that other booth idea I posted about. I never would have been ready in time if I had tried to build that insanity...

I think perhaps attending SCA events could be listed as a weight loss program. The heat causes you to lose your appetite, you're so thirsty that you drink 3x more water than you normally would at home (which I am told is also important in encouraging weight loss, plus it's just good for you to drink lots of water), and you sweat so much that what food you does eat gets burned up before it ever has a chance to be converted to fat anyway. And that's just the merchants who have to sit in their booth all day! The fighters actually encase themselves in mobile ovens they call armor, swing weapons at one another until they all collapse from heat exhaustion, and then the Autocrat administers awards to everyone. The children are entertained by the Pied Piper, who also gives out trinkets which makes everyone happy. It's quite the experience!

Although we have GOT to figure out a better solution to the sleeping arrangments. Both my hips and my back are bruised from trying to sleep on a scattering of rocks hidden under the floor of our tent. I got all of about 6 hours of sleep in the course of 3 days, then last night when I finally got into my own bed I had nightmares all night. /sigh I just can't win for losing. Our next SCA event is in... 2 or 3 weeks?

Should be fun! At least the next one is closer to home.

-Sparkling

Places to go, Things to do, People to see
We haven't been to an SCA event in about 5 years, since our 3rd son was very small. And I have never attended an SCA event as a merchant. This month I am going to drag my family up to Washington and attempt to be a merchant at an SCA event! Yes, I very well might be insane. LOL But the Merchantcrat has been very kind, very accomodating, and very friendly, who can refuse a warm welcome like that?
So, this coming week, I will be attempting to construct a pavillion from which I can merchant my drawings, that hopefully doesn't cost too much money and is easy to set up and take down. This is a sketch of my idea as it occurred to me this morning:

It should look something similar to the Round Pavillion on this page, only without all the trip lines extending out from the sides. And no fancy writing around the edges either I guess... but the main thing I'm concerned about is breaking the wind so my drawings don't go flying across the camground. And hopefully we can find a pole tall enough that we aren't constantly hitting our heads on the cieling.

If anyone is interested in attending, I will be at Dragon's Down and at Acorn War. You can get information on both of these on the official Kingdom of An Tir - Upcoming Events listing.

Blessings to you!
-Sparkling

Lift up your voice in Praise!
God is GOOD!

And He is making Himself real in our lives daily. I have been praying that God would help us to bridge the cultural gap in making our game, and He sent a Messianic Rabbinical Jew to help us! We have been praying a long time for God to help us with the game engine, and he sent us an Angel Investor to provide Torque Game Engine licenses for us, exactly what we had been hoping for!! Exciting things are happening with Visions! We do still need more people to help, but slowly people are following the lead of their heart and coming to help us. Praise the Lord with me! And continue to pray for us, for I always need guideance that my decisions will be wise and my actions will be fair. There is much to do and my schedule is busy as always so I don't have much time to write. I just wanted to share this update with those who are interested. Thank you for your continued support!

God bless you, your families and your friends.
-Sparkling

Another weekend of busyness
Where to start... been a busy few days. I've had a couple responses to my search for more volunteers to join the Visions team. One of the responses turned out to be more interested in entering legal proceedings than actually helping with the project though, so that person is not on the team. The second applicant joined our team to help in the research and writing. He is an enthusiastic fellow, and I think will be a good addition to the team.

Then yesterday we journied to Newport to see some old college friends. On the way there we encounted perhaps the most ill planned bicycle race we've ever seen. About 1000 bicyclists were traveling down a high traffic, narrow winding road with many blind curves and no shoulder for a distance of about 20 miles. The person who planned that race on that particular road put every one of those bicyclists lives in danger of traffic. That road can be dangerous for cars, infinitely moreso for bicycles. One entertaining sight though was a man who took his Pomeranian with him, in a little box carrier on the back of his bike. That was cute.

Once we got to Newport we had a good time. We all played at the beach. There were 5 adults and 11 children at the gathering. And at least most of us enjoyed the beach. My daughter experienced the power of water, as a wave knocked her down, which got her soaked and freezing cold and she spent the rest of her time on the beach huddled in a blanket. Then we all went to dinner, waited in line for about 20 minutes before we were seated (we're not used to having to wait in line at restaurants around here LOL), and everyone had plenty to eat. We didn't get home until 11:30 last night though, thus we all slept too late this morning, and didn't get up in time for church. So we are just having a family day today.

This is a picture of the beach we were at that I took as we were leaving.

And in closing, a little update on the game development and website upgrades for those who are interested... We're having some difficulty getting the messageboards working for the Visions website. Namely because I know nothing about setting up a messageboard that isn't already created for me. I can manage an EZBoard messageboard just fine, but they have too many commercials on their site. So we are trying to set up our own private customized messageboards instead, and that's a little more challenging. Those of you who have been awaiting a message board to interact with others about the Visions game development, I apologise for the delay. Thank you for your patience. It is very important to me that I get these set up so it will happen. It is just taking longer than anticipated.

I hope you all have a wonderful week!

Blessings to you.
-Sparkling

Dripping
Have I mentioned lately that it is hot here?

Well, it's hot.

Not like Saraha Desert hot (yes I realise it could be worse) but still quite uncomfortable. We are adapted to cool temperatures here. Wearing shorts with a t-shirt in 60 degree weather is perfectly acceptable. We don't normally put a jacket on until it drops down to 40 or 50 if it's raining. So this 98 approaching 100 degree weather here is about 40 degrees beyond our realm of comfort. That's a lot of heat! If you turn the oven up 40 degrees hotter than it's supposed to be, you will burn your cake. That's how we feel, we're burning up!

I miss my clouds. I want them to come back and shade my home and cool the air. I like clouds. You see this picture?

I just went outside and took the picture a moment ago specifically for this post. Not a single cloud in the sky. Oh sure it looks all pretty and blue, but really it is HOT. And the plants are thirsty. And everyone is irritable and lethargic. That's what a cloudless sky represents in summer time. When it's too hot to sleep and too hot to work and too hot to go outside. And everyone around you is hot and cranky, and they always think that they are suffering from the heat more than anyone else. Some of them were probably complaining 6 months ago about how they couldn't wait for summer because they were so tired of the cold and rain too! They were probably complaining about the cabin fever. Well, we've still got cabin fever, because it's too hot to go outside! I try not to complain about the winter months because you can always put on more clothes to get warm, but you can only undress so far, and then you still feel hot! I like the spring, and late fall... when it's cool and refreshing... ahhh... that will be nice...

We should do a Christmas in July play sometime. It's too late this year obviously, as July is almost over. But that would be fun, to pretend it is winter and snowy and Christmas-time right in the middle of the hottest part of summer. I hear that in Australia, December 25th does in fact come in the middle of summer. So it would be like having an Australian Christmas in July! hahahaha

I also heard somewhere that ... um... I just forgot his name... (hangs head in shame) the singer/composer who wrote the modern traditional Christmas song that starts out, "Chestnuts roasting in an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, Yuletide Carols being sung by a choir and folks dressed up like Eskimos..." was written in one of the hottest months of summer in New York, when he was desparately wishing for some cooler weather.

Little bit of food for thought there for ya. =)

Blessings to you.
-Sparkling

A lull in the storm
Ahh finally, a chance to gulp for air in the drowning chaos. I have had a chance to even catch up on emails today! I was looking through my addressbook and realised there are a LOT of people whom I have not heard from in a very long time, some for 1 or more years. I've spent the morning and part of the afternoon sending out short little, "Hey! How are ya?" type emails, and as suspected many of the old email addresses are no longer valid. But I have heard back from a couple of people. So that is exciting. I hate losing friends, and I don't let go easily. It's so hard to find good friends in this chaotic world we live in. We gotta hold on tight to the friends we have! And I think perhaps, if we have lost friends in the past, it's never too late to try and make amends.

As long as we are still breathing, God has a purpose for our lives. He commanded us to "Love one another".

Blessings to you all, and may friendship warm your hearts for all the days of your life.

-Sparkling

Frustration and more Chaos
Today was just ... MONDAY. The internet (at least on my end) has been cranky and irritating all day. It took me 4 hours of fighting with the internet to get to my mail. My connection was S-L-O-W like acting as if it were dial-up slow. Definitely wasn't getting the value for my $ for cable internet today. I spent the day running Spybot and Housecall and Windows Updates. In addition to normal family chaos, and trying to catch up on some work and bookeeping that I have been too busy to keep up with over the past month, I just felt very stressed today.

Didn't start out bad, I was getting some drawing done and had a fairly quiet morning. A little sad that after only 1 month I quit the DawnTide team. I learned a lot through that experience. Mostly I learned that I need a team that is courteous and respectful to everyone, or I don't perform well. I do not thrive well in a high irritation environment. But I also gained something positive from the experience: Hope. I learned that it really is possible to gather a team of volunteers from around the globe and produce an online game. And I learned a couple ideas of how to accomplish that as well. I'm sure there will be complications, but I believe that with God, all things are possible.

Thank you for your prayers and your attention.
Blessings to you.
-Sparkling

Wierdness and Chaos
Okay, i have STARTED to submit an entry to this blog for 3 days over the past week. Each time I have had to leave the house, reboot my computer or some other moment of chaos has taken over my life so that I was not able to complete my post, and I've had to start over. So here I am, trying again.

I really wanted to post about the wierdness that detailed my life last Friday. Perhaps some of you can relate. And those of you who can't relate, well, you can just learn from my experiences that sometimes strange things happen which are beyond your control, regardless of any action on your own part. This type of thing happens to me on a more subtle level quite frequently, but Friday was just "One of THOSE days".

The night before we had gone to our friends house for a visit, and so my husband could fix their computer for them. Comcast went to their house to fix their modem and ended up breaking their network, so my husband fixed it for them. We went in the car, instead of the truck, which is unusual because the car only seats 5 people (we have 6 in our family) but one child was at camp, so it was ok this time. Friday afternoon I was supposed to go to clean house for the lady who gave us the puppy. I had planned to leave the house about 1:00, around noon as I was finding all the kids shoes and getting everyone ready to go, I realised I didn't know where my pouch was. I looked everywhere. I looked in the truck 3 times. I looked everywhere in the house again. I called my friend to see if I had left it at her house. No where to be found. So I called my husband at work to have him go look in the car. A few minutes later he calls back, yes, it's in the car at work with him. So I have to call the lady and explain all this to her and postpone the housecleaning for later that day, because I can't leave the house until my husband gets home from work with my pouch. Within 20-30 minutes of hanging up from talking to her, my cousins show up on my doorstep. (They live about 3 or 4 hours from us, and have never been here before, so this was rather a surprize I can tell you!) I had absolutely no clue they were coming. Her husband was complaining that MapQuest doesn't give proper directions to our house, and I'm explaining how very lucky they were to find us home at all, because I was supposed to be out of town cleaning house for the lady at that moment. They had come to pick up their laptop which my husband repaired for them, and after a bit of a misunderstanding about the cost of the repairs, they left to find some food. My husband left work on time (as opposed to getting overtime, so it was like he was leaving early) so that I could get up to the house and do the work I had agreed to do. Thankfully the housecleaning experience was without frustration or chaos, and went quite smoothly. However, I was very tired afterwards, and it was hot out, and we were about 2 hours past our normal dinner time and everyone was famished, so my husband decided it would be alright if we spend a little bit of his computer repair money on a cheap dinner at Wendy's. I very gratefully agreed to this idea. So I'm standing in line quietly, waiting my turn. There were about 2 people in front of me and 2 behind me. When I got to the register the lady behind the counter asked me, "Is this for here?" And I said, "No it's to go, I'm ordering for my whole family." She replies, "Oh dear." And then she looks at the man in line behind me, and asks him, "How many items will you be ordering, Sir?" to which he answers "Oh I don't know. Just a hamburger and cup of chili I guess. Not real sure yet." So she looks at me and asks, "Would you mind if he goes first?" I stand there for a moment of stunned silence, and then say, "But I was here first?". She waved her hand and said "Oh, well nevermind then."

I still can't beleive she said that... I have never had to defend my place in line at a place of business before to the chashier! In grade school when I was in line for the school lunch, kids used to push me out of line, and then tell the teacher I was taking cuts when I tried to reclaim my place. And I had kids push me out of the seats on the school bus when I was growing up. But supposedly we're all adults now, I've moved 1500 miles away from the town I grew up in. And this was a professional place of business. I'm planning to order 6 meals (which actually she didn't even know how many people were in my family because they were all out waiting in the car with my husband, all I said was that I was ordering for my family), which should equate to a fair amount of money in relation to the per-person sales. And she is asking me to step back in line? People are strange.

So, fast-forward to today, and we are again at a food establishment. This time, it is a city program to provide free lunches to the children in the community during the summer when public schools are not in session, adults pay a modest price if they wish to eat with their children. It seems like a good program. It provides meals to disadvantaged families and bored children alike in a very non-judgemental setting. There is no application fee, or disclosure of personal financial status. Just if you are a kid you eat free, if you are an adult you can opt out or pay a modest fee to eat. Neat huh? And then afterwards the kids can go out to the school yard and play on the playground. So I met a friend and her children at the cafeteria, I took the kids to eat, I had already eaten at home. My children, due to being homeschooled I suppose?, are not used to eating quickly and by the time they were done eating our friends had already left the playground. But I decided to let the kids play a while anyway. They have different toys on the school playground than at the city parks we usually go to, and it looked like fun.

I won't be taking the kids to the free lunch at the school again. While I was out on the playground with the kids after eating, one boy called me over "Hey Lady!" So I responded, and he said "Isn't Pot good for you?" I said "What?" He said "Pot is good for you right?" I said "No. No it is not." and he said "But it prevents cancer and stuff like that" It seemed he was trying to convince his friend to try pot. I said "No, it is not good for you. It destroys your brain cells and adulterates your behavior patterns so that you can't make wise decisions." And he said "But I can make wise decisions" and then started this lying game where one minute he says he never has smoked pot and the next he says he smokes it every day. I just gathered up the kids at that point and left.

I suppose this is the type of socialization that pubilc schooled children get that everyone says our children are missing out on? Thanks, but no thanks! I thank the Good LORD and our government legislators who have made it legal for me to school my children at home where I can teach them the difference between truth and lie, the difference between medicine and drug abuse, and the difference between right and wrong. From that brief interaction with that boy, I can see that such values are not upheld very highly among school children these days. I may be subject to random moments of uncontrollable chaos, but I like to hang on to as many variables as it's possible for me to control. And I am thankful for the chance to homeschool, a privledge we have in this country that I can control how my own children are educated, and by whom they are educated. People fuss a lot about freedoms, and lack of freedoms, in the news and media. But I would like to salute our American Soldiers who dedicate their lives to making sure that we have such freedoms as these.

God bless the USA!
-Sparkling