War, war, war

yes, I know it's been a while (over a month!) since my last post. So sue me. Things have been crazy, but not in real life. Online!

I joined a few free online game sites, notably www.cybernations.net and www.lunarwars.net. Full of political intrigue, and just plain head bashing (mine, unfortunately, not theirs), it's a pretty much full time gig, if you let it be. The game itself takes probably 5-10 minutes of your day (CN at least...LW takes maybe 20-30 minutes), but all the political stuff (both intra and inter alliance politics, reading forums, chatting on IRC) can take significantly more time, and it's been a blast.

I'm in an alliance based off of one of my favorite "not news" sites, Fark.com. I originally joined CN based on a greenlight on Fark.com. Not known to me then was that the Fark alliance (Farkistan) was under attack from a rival alliance, the GOONS (Goon Order Of Neutral Shoving), who are based from a Fark.com rival website somethingawful.com. GOONS is 30x more powerful than Farkistan, and was just pounding on them. Still are. It's a complicated situation (that I'm not going to outline here), needless to say, in the midst of it, some of us found a NEW game called LunarWars, where we could start Fark (LunarFark) from the beginning, sans GOONS, and quite a few people jumped to Lunarwars (though most of us still play both).

Ah, LunarWars. Due to the new conditions, (and much more hope for a future of growth there, instead of being chased by and pounded on by GOONS and their cohorts in the Initiative), I got much more active in the politics of the Lunar Fark alliance, even gaining a seat on the TotalFark council, where I get to make decisions on Non-Aggression Pacts (NAP's), Mutual Defense Pact's (MDP's) and other sorts of foreign affairs work, as well as voting on local alliance policies.

In other words, I've been busy :)

In real life news, I got my garden going this past Sunday, with 4 tomato plants, 2 jalapeno plants, and 1 anaheim chili plant, after having tilled the whole area (I love the Garden Claw!). After planting the last jalapeno, I stood up, blacked out, and passed out.

After waking up on the ground, I got up (almost blacking out again), stumbled towards the house, where my wife saw me, said I looked half asleep. I told her I had just passed out. She took me to our bedroom, and laid me on the bed. Took my blood pressure: 96/54 pulse 105. She got me some water, and I drank some. About 20 minutes later, we retested my blood pressure: 80/64 pulse 95. I stayed on the bed for about an hour. We figured out that there were 2 (well, 3 really) causes: I hadn't had enough liquids that day (dehydration), and I hadn't eaten since early that morning (this was around 2pm), so I had a low blood sugar (we wanted to test that too, but we didn't have any test strips for my wife's old blood sugar monitor from when she had gestational diabetes).

In the future, when I'm going to be doing some strenuous labor, I'm going to make sure I eat and drink a bit right before (something healthy, not junk!)

Since that episode though, I have to be really careful about getting up too quickly, or I get dizzy and or start to black out. To be honest, I've had that problem for as long as I can remember, it just seems to have gotten really bad this past week.