Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

I've been a bit absent from this blog lately. Blame it on SWTOR. Actually, most of the blame goes to my spending two weeks of winter break at my parents' house in Massachusetts. I was hoping to get my yearly dose of snow, but no luck this year. Aside from the lightest of light snow for maybe 15 minutes on Christmas morning (enough isolated snowflakes so you're pretty sure it's snow instead of ash or pollen, but not any more than that), and one similarly brief though slightly heavier flurry another evening, the Boston area was snow free for those two weeks. A couple of the days were even surprisingly warm (50s F, 10-15 C)--though still freezing by Hawaii standards, I suppose. I thought maybe we'd spend New Year's on the mountain in Vermont, where there is more reliably snow (see my sledding video from two years ago), but we decided our 15 1/2-year-old dog wouldn't be able to make it up to my uncle's cabin.

Even without snow, I had a great time. I get along really well with my brothers, who were both there. We played a lot of board games, actually: Battlestar Galactica, Dominion with both the Intrigue and Prosperity expansions, 7 Wonders, and Pandemic. All fun and different games. I was new to 7 Wonders (each player gets to be a civilization responsible for one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, gathering and trading resources, building their cities and their Wonder to earn points) and Pandemic (cooperative game in which each player has a special role in a team fighting the outbreak of four highly contagious diseases around the world), and I'd never played Dominion with any expansions, so it was challenging but exciting to learn new games.

We also watched the entire first season of Community, which I'd never seen before. I'm not a fan of Chevy Chase, but luckily he's not exactly a likeable character on the show, so I didn't mind it so much. And the paintball episode is EPIC! So awesome. I hear there are some other epic episodes in Season 2, so I'm looking forward to catching up on those.

I have been playing a fair bit of SWTOR, though I'm switching between two mains (a Sage and a Guardian), which is slowing me down. It makes sense because I wanted one character that I could pair with my brother's Gunslinger and one that I could solo, but it hasn't exactly worked as smoothly as I'd hoped. But I'm settling into the characters now. Once we finish the main stories with our first characters, we'll start with Imperial characters--I have an Inquisitor and Agent ready to go. There are just too many good choices to stick with just one.

I'm back in Hawaii, now, and enjoying the warm weather. I like having some winter, but it's nice to have fresh air and birdsong coming through the windows, the warm breeze carrying scents of tropical flowers. Nice until I have to go back into work.

I'm planning on holding a giveaway soon! Though I'm still caught up in SWTOR, I can't forget that Mass Effect 3 is only a couple months away. So I'll be doing a giveaway of one of my N7 bracelets. For non-Mass Effect fans, I'll probably do a giveaway of a beaded bracelet with one of my other designs (e.g. R2-D2). For the guys who don't want a bracelet...I'll have to work on that. Anyway, keep an eye out for the giveaway, it'll probably be up in the next week or two once I get it all organized.

In the meantime, I hope your new year has started off well. Best wishes for a happy and complete (...not apocalyptic) 2012!