Today...

My grandmother gave me one hell of a scare about noon-ish today. Y'see, she suffers from emphysema and is on oxygen... well, I was woken up by a phone call from the guy who replaces the air tanks for her portable oxygen tank. He'd come by earlier and she didn't leave the empty tanks on the back porch for him, and he'd come back to find that she still hadn't left them out. I tell him that I'll go see if she's up yet, so I try calling her from my private line. The phone rings about a dozen times and she doesn't pick up.

I start to get nervous, and head down to her apartment and knock on her door (which she'd locked). Loudly. I could hear her TV blasting some lame show, as she'd apparently left it on. I pounded on the door for several seconds and went back up to my room after I got no response. My brother had gotten the front door, talked to the oxygen tank guy, and was knocking on her door as well. I dialed her number from my private line and just let it ring. After pounding on her door some more and letting the phone ring about twenty times, she finally answered.

She'd fallen asleep with the TV on really loud, and it made it hard for her to hear us. It really worried me, though. I know her health is poor and that one of these days I'm going to go wake her up for something and... y'know.

Scared the hell out of me.

Today I ran some errands, getting ready for Origins this week, and then I hit the Book n Bean.

For some reason, I just felt kinda 'off' tonight. It didn't help much that once I'd gotten into the right mental 'rhythm' for writing a couple of regulars came in with their very loud, obnoxious kids. Two kids, neither of which seemed to understand the concept of a personal volume level below 'screaming at the top of their fucking lungs.' They ran around the place, playing with everything and bugging anyone who hadn't gone out to sit on the front porch, screaming like little monsters.

I normally don't hate children. I really don't. I'd have liked to have gotten some writing done tonight... *sigh*

Meant to mention earlier...

Well, actually, before I get to what I meant to mention, I just want to wish everyone a Happy Alan Turing's Birthday![1]

Coming up is some gaming-related stuff (specifically, it involves the Vampire LARP I attend), so non-gamers aren't going to miss anything by not reading it, but there isn't enough to be worth LJ-cutting.

At the ToD message board, someone posted an interesting request on the out-of-character board. They'd like to play a Salubri antitribu. Now, this is vaguely reasonable. They're a rare clan(designated as such), but there are a few floating around in the Sabbat. There are two notable differences between regular Salubri and the antitribu. One is their Disciplines. Regular Salubri get Obeah, which is something of a healing art, and the antitribu get Valeren, which is more offensive. The other difference? Regular Salubri are very fucking rare. As in, there are 6 of them in the world at any given time (and they're all something like 7th or 8th Generation, I can't recall which[2]). At least with the antitribu you get into the 100's in terms of population.

Well, someone wants to play a regular Salubri (with Obeah) that was forced to turn Sabbat for some reason. So one of these 6 Salubri left in the world has decided to suddenly defect? Now, the person promised she had a several-page backstory written to explain all this. And then there's the fact that her post indicates that she's not a very good typist at the absolute least. Of course, it's possible she didn't know how rare the Salubri are. Even still, she should have looked into it before proclaiming that she was formally putting in an application for such a character.

As of this writing, though, an ST has already logged onto the board and shot the idea down. Thank goodness for small favors.


[1]-- The research I did, at least, indicates this is his birthday, but some stuff I've seen indicates that this date might be wrong. Any clarification help would be appreciated, there.
[2]-- Of course, at ToD, playing a regular Salubri is either impossible or difficult. If they're 7th Gen, then it's right out as it's a ToD rule that nobody can ever run a character lower than 8th Gen. If they're 8th Gen, then you'd have to win five rounds of Paper-Rock-Scissors in a row to start a character off low enough to play one.