We got a visit from that neighbor last weekend. We were dismayed to learn from him that Tiger Mountain Alpacas had to sell their animals, which for him meant that his pasture was empty and had been for nearly a year now and the grasses and weeds were getting out of control. He stopped by to ask if we were interested in putting our boys on it — free grass for us, free pasture mowing for him.

After some questions and a quick walk up the road to check out the pasture we decided it was a great idea. Our summer here in the northwest has been terrible for growing anything so our pasture is growing pretty slowly. We figured this was a great way to extend our pasture’s viability a little bit and maybe allow us to give our boys just a little less hay this year. We’ll only be doing it through July and August — after that the bears start hanging around our neighbor’s area for berries and get a little unpredictable, he says.

We figured we’d start with bringing them up for just a day, which we did last weekend, then start bringing them up Saturday morning and leaving them until Sunday evening, and maybe bringing them up before work in the morning and going to get them at dinner during the week. He lives a five minute walk away but it’s somehow far more remote than our place — his pasture has some lovely views of some of this side of Tiger Mountain. I’m a bit too nervous to leave them up there for several days at a time just yet. While we know that our boys are farm animals and serve a purpose they’re also quasi-pets, and not seeing them out in their pasture is still just a little bit unnerving for me.

But that said, we haltered them up and took them up for their first day last weekend. What’s great about this is that it’s giving us a chance to halter them two or three times a week right now, and we’re using that time to also get them used to us trimming their toenails. We feel like old pros now at catching them and haltering them all. Cinnamon still gives us a hard time when doing his toenails and we still find it nearly impossible to get all his feet in one session. But we’re working on it.

Matt and I led the boys out of their pasture gate and headed up our gravel road toward our neighbor. The boys were immediately intrigued by this. Silverton and Benz were walking slightly ahead of us, looking around at everything, and at nearly every driveway or cleared brush area they wanted to visit and check it out. We walked by one neighbor washing her car who burst out in laughter at the sight of two people walking three alpacas. “I just love those alpacas!” She shouted. The boys were too interested in where we were going to stop, though.

We got to the pasture and set them up, and as we walked away from the gate they clustered together and stared at us hilariously from the tall grass. Cinnamon looked at us as if to say, Don’t exile me! I promise to be good next time!

We came back that night after they had about a full day on the pasture. Herding them toward the gate was no problem — they almost seemed anxious to leave. Even while walking home they seemed to trot ahead of us as if they knew that’s where we were going.

We repeated the process today, only tonight they’ll stay up there overnight and we’ll go get them tomorrow evening. This time as we walked they were a little calmer and as soon as they got into the pasture they started eating, so maybe they feel a little more comfortable this time. It was already hot out so we even gave them a belly bath to help start their day, and they immediately settled into cool dirt piles that they or the previous alpacas had started.

So I’m sure they’re fine. Between the pasture owner and his neighbor they have four dogs to scare off anything lurking around there. But it sure is weird and a little uncomfortable not to see them out of my kitchen windows. Part of why weekends are so awesome is that I get to see my alpacas doing alpaca things all day. Matt assures me that we can always take a walk up there after dinner and say hello, just to check in on them. I might do that.

After we got to our beautiful little cabin right on the beach we decided to walk out toward Haystack Rock even though it was late in the day and a bit windy and cloudy. For those of you who are our age you already know Haystack Rock — it’s the huge rock that One-Eyed Willie’s ship sails away from at the end of The Goonies. We picked a spot on some driftwood trees and just sat taking in the view with a little chit chat. All of a sudden, Matt got down on one knee and took out a ring, and he asked me to marry him.

So, yeah, our trip was pretty freakin’ awesome.

The ring is one that Matt designed himself and had made at a Seattle jeweler — he couldn’t find anything, he said, that fit his definition of The Right Ring, something that he knew was totally me. So, being that he’s an artist himself he decided to design it. The jewelers apparently balked at first but he said, “just trust me, guys, this’ll work.” Apparently at the end of the process they were suitably impressed and loved the ring so much that they took photos of it for their portfolios. It’s definitely gorgeous.

My beautiful ring. Yes, my hands look withered and old -- I blame the week of sand and surf and northwest wind.

There was a yarn shop in Cannon Beach, Coastal Yarns, that of course I stopped in. They had this huge hank of locally-produced 100% silk yarn in what I thought was a beautiful sea-ish color, a light, airy blue that really stuck out to me. I thought, hey, I could knit a shawl with this. Then I thought, hey, I can knit a wedding shawl with this — it’s not only knit from yarn bought on the trip where Matt proposed and is the color of the sea, reminding me of where we were, but it’s also blue, an essential component of any wedding assemblage!

1000 yards of beautiful sea-colored silk yarn.

I spent a day wondering if instead I should spin the yarn that I would knit a wedding shawl out of, in order for it to be more personal. Eventually I decided that, no, occasionally it’s perfectly acceptable to use yarn you didn’t spin yourself to knit a very personal item when that yarn has a bunch of other factors that mean something to you — in this case that it practically shouted at me in the store as being perfect in every aspect, from the fiber content to the yardage, from the color to the place and circumstances under which it was bought.

We’re more excited than I can convey in a mere blog post and we have some planning to do because we don’t feel the need to wait long. We still have people to update and things to plan. Exciting!

Matt bought me that iPod for my birthday in June and had even had it engraved with my long-time gaming industry nickname: Hellchick. I knew I was going to love it — I had really wanted one — but I didn’t realize just how awesome it was until I had it. I use it for everything. We have a wireless network set up at home and so I’d much rather curl up on the cozy couch to check up on email, Twitter, Facebook, and the news rather than use my PC, and in my fiber room I have an iPod dock to listen to music or my podcasts.

This morning I had put my rather large mug of coffee in my lap for a second while I went to navigate to something on my iPod. It slipped right out of my hands and down into my coffee mug. Ports down. Like it was docking with the coffee. It couldn’t have slipped the other way where the case probably would have saved it. Oh, no.

I squealed and leaped up off the couch, ran to the kitchen, and grabbed paper towels. I dried it off as best I could and immediately started trying to dry the ports. But the iPod was already dying in my hands: the screen was flickering and it was getting dimmer…and dimmer…and dimmer. And soon all I could see was a barely visible Apple logo on the screen. The fact that I take coffee with cream and sugar — nay, take some coffee with my cream and sugar — was probably only making it worse.

Eventually, when I figured I couldn’t get any more liquid out on my own, I set it down on the counter and vowed not to touch it until it dried out. Of course I couldn’t help but finger the power switch helplessly hoping for a miracle. I felt awful, not just because I love my iPod but because it was a gift from Matt. For his part, though, Matt started making jokes immediately. “I’d post on Twitter, ‘R.I.P. iPod 2010′ but…well, I don’t have an iPod to pull it up on now.”

“Too soon!” I cried.

I hoped against hope the warranty would cover it, but this must be the world’s most common iPod issue because it specifically mentions coffee on their warranty information as being something they will not repair damage from. Well, crap.

I went back to the couch and after heaving a heavy sigh, picked up my coffee and took a sip. “Tastes like technology,” Matt said.

So let’s just break it down into digestible chunks, shall wel?
The new gig
I decided to leave Raven Software and Madison, Wisconsin for Gas Powered Games in Redmond, Washington, moving out here at the beginning of July and diving headfirst into Space Siege, Gas Powered Games’ space-themed successor to Dungeon Siege. Can’t talk much about it, obviously, but a trailer and a preview or two have been released, so check those out. As for enjoying the new job, well, I am very much, thank you for asking. It’s great to be working on something other than a first-person shooter and something in the Quake, DOOM or Wolfenstein universes. I love those franchises like a brother, but a girl’s gotta branch out, you know what I’m sayin’?
The new town
So I very sadly had to leave my wonderful house in Monticello, Wisconsin. It’s currently getting a huge facelift in the hopes that it will sell well, and I think it will given that it has lots of charm. In the meantime I’m living in Kirkland and working in Redmond, and it’s great. It’s a stone’s throw from Seattle and Bellevue, and there’s something to do every second. Which leads into my next bullet point…
The new hobby
I’ve taken up bellydancing. Don’t ask why, I have no idea either, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And it turned out to be — I’m absolutely hooked. I’m taking Egyptian Cabaret style with Alexandra, a local teacher and dancer, and I’m about to start American Tribal Style classes with a troupe in Seattle. And I ain’t half bad!
So there you have it. I’m still living out of a box here and there — a smaller apartment than the house you left tends to do that — but I’m hoping to get some more knitting stuff up and definitely some more gaming-related entries here (I’m currently playing Bioshock like the entire rest of the world). Back soon. I promise.

While visiting my family in Washington state, Matt took me to a shooting range in Ravensdale and let me fire a rifle and a couple of pistols that his dad, a gunsmith, actually made himself. We started with the rifle, which Matt assured me had no kick to it. Let me warn you about something: if a guy in a flannel shirt hands you a rifle and says that it “kicks like a squirrel through a pillow,” do not believe him.
But regardless of the bruise the gun left on my clavicle and the deafness despite the ear protection, I didn’t too badly (after we spent some time adjusting the sights). Then we switched to the two .45 pistols. I don’t know why, but this is where I really started feeling like a bad ass. My shot groups at first were abysmal — the pistols had a bit of a kick, and they were heavier than I thought they’d be. Matt would shoot a group and then I’d shoot a group, and then we’d compare our side-by-side targets. I’m a highly competitive person, and it irritated me that my groups weren’t as good as his. So I’d tell him, “again!” And we’d each fire another round. And then another. And another, until finally we put the guns down and checked the targets and I heard Matt say, “damn…your groups are better than mine.”
“Now we can leave,” I said.

One of the main changes is that I’ve finally, finally created a damn Hellchick logo. You’d think after all these years of being know as (drumroll and jazz hands) HELLCHICK I’d have had some kind of semi-corporate identity a long time ago, but alas, it took me wanting to promote my knitting of all things to finally spur me into making one. So yes, all of the graphics and the design of the site I created.
Another new thing you’ll see is some of the knitting and other hand-made stuff I’ve created featured to the left. It points to my Etsy shop where you can buy some of the stuff I’ve made. I’m actually hoping that with the first few items I sell (eventually) I can buy myself a Wii or a 360. Cross your fingers.
I’ll update more as I add things, and I apologize in advance for the Internet Explorer 6 users among you…things may stay broken for you a little longer as you’re actually the minority visitor here. But most of it should still be pretty functional. The worst you should see are a few broken graphics here and there because of IE6′s inability to handle transparency.
I plan to use this redesign to fiddle around with AJAX, implementing some custom layouts to highlight either knitting content or gaming content, depending on your preference.
So feel free to let me know how you feel about the new design. Just bear in mind that this is more of a beta version as I roll it out and fix the last few things left to do.

A couple of things.
First, Richard Cobbett has written a side-splitting article that will teach anyone how to write the perfect article about women and video games. If you aren’t aware, the consummate article about women in video games is one of the most popular cliches in gaming journalism, and I can’t say that I haven’t committed some of those cliches myself when I was in gaming journalism. I believe the subject of women who play video games, why they do, and what they look for in a video game as opposed to men is still an interesting subject, but it’s very difficult to write about it without reducing it to a page of tired and rehashed bullet points that include Lara Croft, men playing a female avatar for a day in an MMORPG, and how women — as if we’re one amorphous blob of conformity — want heavy social interaction in their games. Richard Cobbett highlights all of these in his great satirical article.
Recently I was approached by a friend at GameSpy that I used to work with; he and I had talked in the past about a good regular column about gaming and women in games done right, and he recently asked me if I was interested in doing it and if I’d do a sample article for them. To be honest, I’ve been struggling with writing something that doesn’t fit the cliches. I’m still trying to decide what kind of article would fit into such a column that I’d be happy with writing. My feeling is that there’s value in an article that discusses video games from a woman’s perspective. I do believe that while all women are different — as Hellchick I, along with Stevie “Killcreek” Case and a few others, have been the token female first-person shooter gamer examples of women who don’t fit the assumption of what women want out of video games — there are some very interesting sociological areas of discussion having to do with gender and video games. How to explore these in a regular column without being a qualified sociologist myself is the trick; I don’t want to just write a regular column about what games I’m currently playing.
The other thing I wanted to mention is the cool gaming bracelet featured in the picture above. A friend at work saw this charm bracelet featured on Girlz Gaming House — the charms are weapons from Quake 4, the game we made at Raven. A bunch of us loved it. It turns out that the web site was having a contest and these were the prizes, so I entered, and apparently a couple of other colleagues did, too. And the shameful thing is that I pulled out all the stops — I namedropped like a shameless hussy, including “Hellchick” and “Raven Software” and “We made Quake 4″ in my contest entry.
The guy running the site wrote all three of us from Raven who entered and said that he’d be happy to just send us some bracelets. We got them the other day and they’re fantastic! I’m planning to put mine proudly on my purse.

Preserving and canning is something I’d never done before, but with the prospect of a huge garden and the fact that I picked gallons of berries from our yard last year, it was something I knew I’d want to do eventually.
My mother-in-law is the queen of preserving, and last year she’d sent me an entire kit: a boiling-water canner complete with tongs, magnetic lid lifter, funnel, jar lifter…the works. I called her for tips this week and decided to just jump in and give it a try because I still had gallons of currants and at least a couple of cups of raspberries in the freezer. And with the good weather coming, I figured I’d better do something with them now as I was going to get just as many berries this year. I also figured now was a good time to practice since I’m planning a huge garden this year and expect to have plenty to preserve at the end of the summer.
The first attempt today yielded something, but I’m not entirely sure it’s something edible. Following a recipe from the Ball company preserving bible, I cooked two cups of raspberries with two cups of currants and lots of sugar. I got it to gelling consistency when I realized that I still needed to replace the pot that was boiling the jars on the stove with the canner, and that the water in the canner needed to get to boiling temperature before I could fill the jars and put them in. By the time I organized everything, the fruit had gone a bit beyond gelling to candy-like consistency, and I have a feeling that when I open the jars they’ll actually be filled with raspberry-currant candy instead of the jam I had tried to make.
But Len realized that we could free up the burner on the stove by boiling the jars in a pot on the little portable burner that we use for our shabu shabu pot. So I took another four cups of currants from the gallon bag in the freezer — leaving another half bag in there still — and made another batch. This one came out much better and I think I’ve got my technique down now.
Tomorrow I’ll get to open up the half-jar that I filled with the last bits and check it out. If it’s good, then my friends can look forward to having jars of preserves foisted upon them later on.

Since a Mr. PenguinX asked what the latest news was on the model, I thought I’d put up a quick update.
Practically as soon as Paul put up his concepts, he got several emails from modelers in the community asking if they could model her. He told them that as long as I was given the rights to distribute the model, he was fine with people taking a stab at modeling her.
One modeler in particular has really made some progress on her. So much so that this is probably going to be the first model to be released based on the concepts. I think it’s fantastic work, especially the z-brush pass on her horns on the second page, which is where I snagged the pic from. (By the way, the page contains nudity and copious discussions of nudity. You’ve been warned.)
Arshlevon is doing fantastic work. I’ve emailed him to let him know how much I love the model so far and I’ll be promoting her here as soon as he’s done with her.
More on the comic as it progresses. And it’s definitely progressing…Paul has done all the roughing out of the comic pages and is now working on the detailed line work. Progress!