Sick. Cough, snort, hack, moan, snort. Now Tony has it also. A fitting end to 2001, which was by all accounts one of the suckiest years in American (and our personal) history.

Happy New Year's, everyone. Our resolution is to make 2002 an improvement.

Still sick. Dozing and groaning all day. But my holiday box finally arrived, full of Circa stuff from Levenger so I'm cheering myself up by punching holes in things with my new Circa Punch. Joy!

Rhonda sick. Sick big bad. Sleep now.

I got the bug to add my game info pages to the new site TONIGHT (more content!). If you have not seen them before, go to Games, then List of Tony's Games, then click on any company to see details on what it was like to work for that company, what games I did for them, and trivia about creating those games.

The only section still under construction is the EA.com area. I'll update that sometime soon.

Xmas was lovely but wiped us out. Exhausted today and officially in hiding -- we're not answering the phone or getting out of our pajamas until further notice.

Real life will intrude soon enough. Our garbage disposal just died. The washing machine is uttering its last gurgle. Come January, there will be jobs to pursue (we hope), book revisions to finish, programs to write.

In the meantime, though, we're still hiding.

Phase Three of Operation Faucet: It works! One of them does, anyway. It required a few attempts and another trip to Home Depot, but we now have one and one-half working faucets. I'll post pictures later. We also ended up purchasing a third faucet, sort-of by mistake (don't ask), so we're going to replace the old ugly one in the other bathroom as well.

Tonight we're planning a romantic evening by the fire. I'm trying to think of an appropriate movie to watch. Nightmare Before Christmas, perhaps? It's one of our favorites.

Happy xmas eve!

Has anyone noticed how cool today's date is?

12/22/2001

Have a good one.

Phase Two of Operation Faucet hit a snag. We puttied down the faucet, but when we went to reattach the flexible cold water pipe we discovered that it was quite inferior & flimsy & about to snap off. So now we have a faucet but a big problem under the sink; we have to turn off the water for the entire house and attach a new pipe somehow.

I suspect it would be a good idea to wait until after xmas to attempt this.

It feels strange not to be travelling anywhere this winter. I am craving Africa.

Did a quick update to the main page, so you can now see the news (as you can clearly see by reading this...)
Also, some other maintenance work, such as adding a Favorite Games section under the Favorites section and making the images uniform sizes for faster downloading.

Phase One of Operation Faucet is complete. We bought the materials, including two faucets, plumbing tape and an overspecialized tool called a basin wrench. All a basin wrench does is unscrew the two nuts attaching the water pipes to the faucet, which seems a rather small job for $14, except that you can't replace a faucet without one. Bad for us, good for the basin wrench. Anyway, we crawled under the sink, turned off the water (sort of) and removed the old faucet. This was in fact very easy. Sadly, we are now stalled until we buy putty to hold the new faucet in place when we attach it.

This is all fairly amazing when you consider that the biggest home project we've done until now was fixing a doorknob.

By the way, an extremely cool person emailed to say I was giving poor advice about mypoints.com yesterday. This was somewhat bad timing since I'm still experiencing the joy of receiving all those Home Depot gift certificates in the mail, but she does make a good argument -- I did have to click about 11307641 sites to earn those points. If I find an easier way, I'll let you know...

The Coca-Cola Chicken recipe we tried turned out tasty but a little soggy. So, last night we tried Chili Chicken Drumsticks -- even tastier but still soggy. Hmm. Today we settled for Taco Bell, but that doesn't mean we're not going to try again soon... maybe Potato Chip Chicken next time. Simple equation:

Layoff = lots of free time & less money for take-out = willingness to experiment in kitchen.

We also received $150 in Home Depot gift certificates from MyPoints.com, so tomorrow we're off to buy the new faucet! Installation should be quite an adventure -- I'll be sure to post before and after pictures. (BTW, MyPoints is a great program for getting free stuff. If you want to join, please email me so I can refer you.)

Nothing much going on today -- playing Camelot and peering out the windows, grateful that the bad weather is out there and not in here. Later we're going to try a recipe for Coka-Cola Chicken. Yum?

Decided to give y'all the link to the site that the 12/11 quote came from: check it out.

(Yes, it's naughty, but in a fun way. Try the 'In the Beginning' link on the left side of the page.)

Did an major update to the site today, adding the beginnings of the Store and the Games pages. Check 'em out!

Writing, Photos and Links pages are still under construction. Also, Rhonda hates all the old button art and is getting ready to draw a new set. But since we just got Return to Wolfenstein, it may take a while before they surface!

Still no progress on the faucet, either.

Quote of the Day: "Well behaved women seldom make history."

Faucets are harder to fix than one might think. So are guestbooks -- I worked on one for this site yesterday and it didn't quite work out. But our Amazon Associates stuff is going great, and we'll be putting a store up soon. (I suppose that No Current Income = High Motivation For Shameless Internet Begging.) Hah. Seriously, though, if you're thinking of buying from Amazon.com this season, wouldja click the Amazon Associates link on our home page to get there?

Happy Hanukkah, all.

Welcome to the re-birth of Goodspear! We've spent most of the morning getting this news page to work; it's managed through blogger.com (thanks for the tip, Heather!) Now we're taking a break. We have to fix our bathroom faucet. Have a great weekend!