The Tyrannical Gods of the Internet Bless Grandma Once Again

The cable company installed our internet today as scheduled; Grandma immediately logged on to my e-mail to check her messages which, thanks to all you folks, took a bit of time. We appreciate all the comments and e-mails about the move everybody. It made Grandma feel at home.

So! We have a lot of catching up to do, you and I. We'll post later tonight about Grandma's adventures ordering Dragon Quest VIII online at EBGames.com; we'll talk about the t-shirts tomorrow including pricing, sizes, and action shots of folks sporting the first batch; and we'll talk about some new features for the site and get your input on how things should be done.

Today, however, I'd like to tell you a little about our new home.

Mantua is on the far South East side of the Greater Cleveland area; cows and corn replace cheap apartment buildings and drugs stores. It's a tiny village that's vilified by AAA travel guides as a speed trap. It's really a nice little burgh when it comes down to it. Mantua's only claim to celebrity was Jack Lambert, some asshole who played for the Steelers. Probably a great football player, but the locals know him only as "that dick they named the stadium at the high school after."

Squeezing six of us into a tiny ranch home was never easy. Grandma's room at the old house was narrow, somehow fitting all of her systems, her television, her dresser, an armoire, her bed (queen sized) three bookshelves, a cabinet for her games, hundreds of cookbooks, all her gaming magazines, ceramics, art supplies, a curio filled with angel figurines, her desk- (holding her computer, my computer, fax machine, printer, phone, cable modem and router) stuffed animals, linen and a sombrero.

In this new house, Grandma has a decent sized bedroom with a full closet, tons of storage space for all her crafts and magazines, and most exciting: a game room.

Right now, it's a mess. This is the corner of the room in which Grandma will probably spend most of her time. If this were a zoo and Grandma were a monkey and had a nifty habitat-cam, this would be the swinging tree from which she would propel her feces at the handlers as they desperately try to inject her with vitamins. We're trying to figure out what to do with it; we could have the TV stand in the corner surrounded on both sides by the speakers with the console stand on the right and the game cabinet on the left. Or we could make everything squared off like it was, have the wall hold the TV, the stand, the consoles and the speakers and put the cabinet elsewhere. Whatever we do, she has to have the recliner at such an angle that can provide a path to get the the tiny half-bathroom for those in game emergencies. (The game room has a fucking bathroom of its own, how cool is THAT shit?!)

Also, the room is going to need a name. "Game Room" sounds too much like a place set aside for the pool-table nobody uses anymore and a broken pinball machine that's missing the right flipper button. So we need ideas. IDEAS!!!

Grandma and I are setting up the room now so she can get back into the groove. "I haven't played for FIVE FUCKING DAYS, it's about god damn TIME we get this shit hooked up" she told me in a gentle hint that I needed to stop putting my bed together and get to the important things in life ;)

I'm going to need to drill some holes in the floor to run the ethernet cable to her consoles to access XBox Live, so it might be a long night!

Game on!