I haven't written in a while, been too nuts this summer. It's been a weird one for sure, with rain, heat, busy weekends, a shift change for Cynthia at her job, summer school for Kevin. Hopefully next summer won't be quite so eventful!
I've been told that I convey the beauty of these Castle Rock evenings from the balcony here at the house pretty well, and I appreciate that feedback! It's not my intention to brag or anything, it's just I never thought I'd have a place of my own at ALL, never mind a place with a balcony (OK a SMALL balcony, barely enough room for 2 chairs) facing west into the sunset, a loving family and really a pretty damn fine life. Tonight the sunset is a deep red (almost post-apocalyptic), there's a great lightning show going on in the northwest--too far away to hear the thunder but still cool), the temperature is perfect, and basically the universe is in order for us, for now anyway. The other thing I love about this balcony is that there are no mosquitos or other nasties up here; it's higher up than they typically fly. The main problem is those small moths, they're attracted to my laptop screen!
As I mentioned, the summer has not been without its craziness, more than I generally like to see. First off, we've had a lot more rain than usual. I think I mentioned in my last post, the sump pump has been going off and on since April; I never thought the thing would ever kick in at ALL when we bought the house. I figured it would be much too dry, but not this summer. Until last week, it had literally been raining every three to five days, and I mean HEAVY rain. It's been so wet that I went out last month and took a bunch of pictures of the hood and the surrounding hills and mountains, just because I've never seen it this green out there at this time of year. Now over the last 2 weeks or so the moisture has dropped off quite a bit, we haven't had any rain to speak of. But there were a couple of other dry periods like this, only to have the rain start again in earnest. Lets see what happens this time.
We've actually enjoyed the moisture, and the timing of it has been perfect what with getting all these new plants from Lavonne and Lana. But it's just gotten rather intense at times. Last month we woke up at about 11:00PM one evening to find that it was pouring rain INSIDE the house because of the high winds driving the rain inside the windows. We wuick shut them, but then went downstairs to find that there was water dripping in through one of the built-in surround speakers in the TV room. AARGH! We were buggin that the speaker was going to croak on us, but it seems to still be working fine. There have been other nights though with electrical storms keeping us awake so that we were a wreck the next day.
Then there's been summer school for Kevin. He had to make up a couple of classes from when he went to brick-and-mortar school (and therefore had to deal with all the crap thereof). Douglas County has offered these classes online as summer classes, thank God or else we'd be screwed, no way of getting him to a physical school with both of us working. But the classes are 2 weeks in length yet have a months worth of work for Kevin to have to do. Add to that the typical summer vacation no-work-and-all-play mentality that we all have, and you can imagine it's been crazy for him to try and get all this work done. There was math class in June, then a social studies and an English class in July. They're finally done now and he's passed them all, and he gets a couple of weeks break before he has to start regular online school again in mid-August. From here on out though it should be smooth sailing for him as long as he's willing to do the work, since again he doesn't have to deal with the rigmarole of early mornings, bus rides, ridicule and derision from "peers" (like I myself had to deal with), early lunches and subsequent hunger in the afternoon--any of this ring a bell for anyone? Thanks mainly to the efforts of his mom getting him enrolled in online school, Kevin doesn't have to deal with any of that, so the rest of high school should be good.
We had a period of three weekends in a row too this summer where we had some major thing going on. I should preface that by saying I REALLY hate that. Some people can work all week AND all weekend, but I'm not one of them. By the time Friday night rolls around, I am SOOO done, I don't want to do anything during the weekend but chill around the house, maybe go out to dinner or walk around the hood, but that's IT. We could have gotten a preowned house in an established neighborhood with big trees and parks and all, but we instead chose to get a new house out here in the boonies (well sort of the boonies, feels less and less like that every year hehe) so that we would have no home improvement issues to wreck our weekends. So you can imagine it was pretty disconcerting to lose three weekend in a row this summer. During the first two, we were entertaining family, though it was still great to see them. Then the third weekend we had a wedding rehearsal and then a wedding, and we each had to work both of them. Cynthia was the greeter and I was one of the photographers. Now don't get me wrong, the cause was definitely a righteous one, and it's not like nobody killed a Saturday afternoon to come to our wedding in 06. It just all added up to a lot of work and not much relaxation, no bid deal back when we were 20-somethings but now that we're near or (in my case) past our 40's, it sort of wears on us. Does this sound like petty whining? Then so be it, but dammit we want our R and R!! ;)
Cynthia changed shifts in her job, which hasn't been a hardship on the family really, but had made for some adjustment on each of our parts. I'm actually really jealous myself. She has the same 15-minute commute (mine is 40 minutes EACH WAY), but now there's no rush hour traffic to deal with, and she can work evenings while still being at the house in the mornings so that she doesn't lose the whole day to work, like most of the rest of us do. She can schedule appointments, get Kev motivated to do school work, walk the dog, chill out, whatever she wants, then work in the evening. Now as you might imagine, the down side to this is that we don't get as much time together since she' gone during the evening. But we knew going in that less time together is only as tough on a relationship as we MAKE it; what counts is our attitude, and we've each agreed to keep a good attitude toward the situation and to acknowledge that it will be good in the end, if only for purposes of Cynthia being able to work with Kevin on school stuff. And we still chat on the computer, call as often as we can, and of course we both have access to Facebook. So we'll see how it goes, but either way its added a touch of chaos to an already chaotic summer, though it's a good chaos IMHO.
The summer heat kicked in last month, and though that's par for the course, it's evertheless somewhat taxing. Our AC unit does it's damnedest to keep us cool, but it just can't quite keep up when it's 90+ degrees out, and the more past 90 the worse it is. The 2nd floor is the worst of course, and Kevin was so hot that we finally had to move his room downstairs to the basement where he's much happier. That leaves us though, and the heat is worse for Cynthia than it is for me because she still gets headaches, which tend to play havoc with the internal thermometer. Now one nice thing for her though is that she'll now be at work during the hottest part of the day, but its still a challenge. We're better off in Castle Rock than the lower elevations are because it gets cooler at night so we can just run a window fan and not have to run the AC at night (OK window fans are a little trailer park but hey, it keeps us from spending a fortune on AC!!). But I myself can't complain; I do hot MUCH better than I do cold.
If my blogs seems extensive BTW, it's because I've always done the journaling thing to some extent. I kept a journal as far back as grade school--I should really take a look at that thing again sometime--and it's just something I've always been good at. I don't do it as much now, because generally the time you spend journaling is time that isn't going toward bettering one's life or position or status or whatever. Still, it's a good exercise from time to time.
Well, I better enjoy the rest of this evening. It's gotten even better than it was, believe it or not; our imbecile neighbors behind us actually refrained from turning on their obnoxious back porch lights, so it's actually DARK outside at night. Bonus plan. Peace!
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
June evening on the balcony
Yeah, it's the first really warm night of the year so far (though I suppose that's a relative term--up here it doesn't get as warm as in Denver so they've probably had a few already). It's actually getting a bit chilly out here but I'll blog for a while anyway. It's about 10 PM so shouldn't too late a night.
I got home a little after Cynthia tonight, and we sat down and watched a couple of episodes of A World Without Humans. Fascinating show about what would happen if every human suddenly disappeared, leaving only the plants and animals (plus all the crap we've built of course). Cynthia had a tummy ache, so after we'd watched them, she went to be while I played some Far Cry.
I bought it for 10 bucks at Office Max here in Castle Rock. Really good price, but when I went to install it on Windows 7 64-bit, it said I needed to use setup64 instead of setup32. But only setup32 was on the CD. Dumbasses; they knew by the time this cheap edition of the game was released that there were a lot of 64-bit operating systems out there. So I don't know why they didn't make it work with them, but I ended up having to install it on Cynthia's laptop which has Vista 32-bit on it, then copy that installation onto a thumb drive, copy it onto my Windows 7, and play it. Once I got it working, though, I was able to crank all the settings to their max, for the best game experience.
My patience was rewarded; FANTASTIC game just like Rich Kiovsky and everyone have said. Great physics engine, superb level design and gameplay, and music that really puts you in the game. I'm also playing Red Alert 3 and I beat Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Amazing what you can do when World of Watcraft doesn't take all your time!
I've also discovered Mafia Wars and Vampire wars on Facebook. I started doing Facebook about 4 months ago, and Cynthia and KEvin got on shortly after. I was lukewarm to these social networking sites, after trying Friendster and MySpace and not liking them, but this has truly been a solid site. It's more a platform than anything else, for updating friends with what you're doing, plus applications and games.
We've been getting a lot of plants from Lavonne this month, and by a strange quirk of fate, it's been raining like a mother so they've ben getting plenty of water from the moment we plant them. Plus the soil is nice and wet so it makes digging easy. The sump pump has been going since back in April when we had that hella wet snowstorm.
That reminds me, Alex and Logan finally moved out, wrapping up a mostly good but fairly stressful (toward the end) stay. Logan doesn't really seem to have any respect for authority whatsoever, and Alex stays with him for whatever reason. He's a really good kid, just really needs some humiliy drilled into him. The other thing is that we finally got the doggie grass in on the north side. The worthless neighbor behind us hasn't complained so far; it looks like astro turf so we were afraid she might. What a pain that was; we ordered it back in February and the installer kept telling us that he hadn't gotten it in yet, but the supplier kept telling us that the grass had not been ordered. Lame.
I haven't been able to get with Holly on the phone, only on Facebook. I need to try to call her again tomorrow. It was really windy around here for basically February though April, and like I say it's been raining a lot. What else... I beat Quake 4 finally. We had some foster dogs here for a few months, Minne and Buck. Ok dogs but they made a mess of the kitchen floor. We couldn't even walk in there after a while; you knew that if you did you'd just step in pee. But they've been gone for about three weeks now so we have our kitchen back.
There's a Microsoft Sharepoint tier III support job at work coming up that I'm trying to get, we'll see if it happens. I'm going to the TIE conference in Copper Mountain for the first time ever on June 24. Good just to have a job right now though ya know? Obama been kicking ass and taking names in office; I just hope its enough to get the economy moving again. Bush really screwed us over the past 8 years, ran roughshod over the economy and made a mockery of the White House.
I've got a Jones to get a gas line installed outside so we can get a gas grill and bbq a lot more often. Cynthia's been making dinners at Supper Solutions, and those have been tasty! We also started a membership to Costco and got a bunch of Blu-ray discs there. We just started with Melaleuca as well, so we now get organic natural products that supposedly don't have so many chemicals in them.
I got done scanning dad's photos finally; now just need to tag them and get them on the network. I'd like to get a Blu-ray burner but they don't seem to be able to decide on a standard for the discs. That blows cause I need to back up all the pictures. The pictures themselves have been awesome. I never even knew where they got married, for example, but now I actually have wedding pictures. Mom hadn't even seen the wedding pictures at all til I showed her.
Kevin has been doing Online school; it's a great system and it lets him stay home all day, but I sometimes don't think he appreciates it as mjuch as I would have. But hey he's getting good grades! Really wonderful kid; for being a stepdad I got off pretty light!
So I guess it's been a busy few months!
I got home a little after Cynthia tonight, and we sat down and watched a couple of episodes of A World Without Humans. Fascinating show about what would happen if every human suddenly disappeared, leaving only the plants and animals (plus all the crap we've built of course). Cynthia had a tummy ache, so after we'd watched them, she went to be while I played some Far Cry.
I bought it for 10 bucks at Office Max here in Castle Rock. Really good price, but when I went to install it on Windows 7 64-bit, it said I needed to use setup64 instead of setup32. But only setup32 was on the CD. Dumbasses; they knew by the time this cheap edition of the game was released that there were a lot of 64-bit operating systems out there. So I don't know why they didn't make it work with them, but I ended up having to install it on Cynthia's laptop which has Vista 32-bit on it, then copy that installation onto a thumb drive, copy it onto my Windows 7, and play it. Once I got it working, though, I was able to crank all the settings to their max, for the best game experience.
My patience was rewarded; FANTASTIC game just like Rich Kiovsky and everyone have said. Great physics engine, superb level design and gameplay, and music that really puts you in the game. I'm also playing Red Alert 3 and I beat Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Amazing what you can do when World of Watcraft doesn't take all your time!
I've also discovered Mafia Wars and Vampire wars on Facebook. I started doing Facebook about 4 months ago, and Cynthia and KEvin got on shortly after. I was lukewarm to these social networking sites, after trying Friendster and MySpace and not liking them, but this has truly been a solid site. It's more a platform than anything else, for updating friends with what you're doing, plus applications and games.
We've been getting a lot of plants from Lavonne this month, and by a strange quirk of fate, it's been raining like a mother so they've ben getting plenty of water from the moment we plant them. Plus the soil is nice and wet so it makes digging easy. The sump pump has been going since back in April when we had that hella wet snowstorm.
That reminds me, Alex and Logan finally moved out, wrapping up a mostly good but fairly stressful (toward the end) stay. Logan doesn't really seem to have any respect for authority whatsoever, and Alex stays with him for whatever reason. He's a really good kid, just really needs some humiliy drilled into him. The other thing is that we finally got the doggie grass in on the north side. The worthless neighbor behind us hasn't complained so far; it looks like astro turf so we were afraid she might. What a pain that was; we ordered it back in February and the installer kept telling us that he hadn't gotten it in yet, but the supplier kept telling us that the grass had not been ordered. Lame.
I haven't been able to get with Holly on the phone, only on Facebook. I need to try to call her again tomorrow. It was really windy around here for basically February though April, and like I say it's been raining a lot. What else... I beat Quake 4 finally. We had some foster dogs here for a few months, Minne and Buck. Ok dogs but they made a mess of the kitchen floor. We couldn't even walk in there after a while; you knew that if you did you'd just step in pee. But they've been gone for about three weeks now so we have our kitchen back.
There's a Microsoft Sharepoint tier III support job at work coming up that I'm trying to get, we'll see if it happens. I'm going to the TIE conference in Copper Mountain for the first time ever on June 24. Good just to have a job right now though ya know? Obama been kicking ass and taking names in office; I just hope its enough to get the economy moving again. Bush really screwed us over the past 8 years, ran roughshod over the economy and made a mockery of the White House.
I've got a Jones to get a gas line installed outside so we can get a gas grill and bbq a lot more often. Cynthia's been making dinners at Supper Solutions, and those have been tasty! We also started a membership to Costco and got a bunch of Blu-ray discs there. We just started with Melaleuca as well, so we now get organic natural products that supposedly don't have so many chemicals in them.
I got done scanning dad's photos finally; now just need to tag them and get them on the network. I'd like to get a Blu-ray burner but they don't seem to be able to decide on a standard for the discs. That blows cause I need to back up all the pictures. The pictures themselves have been awesome. I never even knew where they got married, for example, but now I actually have wedding pictures. Mom hadn't even seen the wedding pictures at all til I showed her.
Kevin has been doing Online school; it's a great system and it lets him stay home all day, but I sometimes don't think he appreciates it as mjuch as I would have. But hey he's getting good grades! Really wonderful kid; for being a stepdad I got off pretty light!
So I guess it's been a busy few months!
Sunday, May 17, 2009
You know spring has sprung when...
...when it's warm enough outside that I can sit on the balcony at 10:15PM and type up a blog post! It's nice out here too; the crickets and the wind chimes are going, there's a nice breeze that makes it a little chilly but not too bad. We really want to expand this balcony, since it's only big enough for 2 lounge chairs--BARELY-- but that's gonna take a lot more coin than we're gonna have in the near future.
Pretty good Sunday overall. Great weather. More tomorrow.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
A nice, pleasant spring break evening
It's the Sunday evening before spring break, and quite a lovely one it is. It's not raining or snowing yet--that's supposed to come later in the evening--but you can smell the moisture in the air. Like when you go to the mountains, maybe go skiing or something, and you get there right before the snow blows in. You go out to the balcony of the condo, or go back behind the cabin or whatever, and you don't even have to see or hear a weather forecast to know that there's something coming; you just know it. That's the situation in Castle Rock right now, and its so cool. Our house faces west, and though we don't have the best view in the world, we can generally see the weather coming down from the mountains. It got really hot in the house this afternoon, so this cool breeze is heaven-sent.
Really nice, lazy Sunday today, just the way I like them. We went and picked up a few things from Wal Mart (stuff that Target doesn't have), and that was it for running around. I did some quick yard work, then we spent the rest of the day watching movies. Cynthia always gets such good ones from Netflix for us. We watched Walk The Line, a biography about Johnny Cash, and Ray, about Ray Charles. Kevin did school work; he has some to make up from last week. The dogs--our Italian Grayhound Charle and the two other Italian Grayhounds we're fostering, Minnie and Buck--were well behaved for the most part.
Not having to be at work on Monday makes for a highly satisfying Sunday. I may read some RSS feeds on the laptop, or maybe watch some iTunes video podcasts, or watch a Blu-ray disc, or even some telly on the over-the-air digital tuner on the laptop. Cynthia had a headache and a bit of a tummy ache earlier, so she is now sleeping. Of course that still didn't stop her from fixing us blackened salmon with pasta and mushrooms for dinner. She and I love espresso coffee so I'll probably be making us some coffee later.
The Alaska cruise pictures are FINALLY done, so I'll probably be getting those up on Facebook here in the next few days. I have three days off from work this week so I BETTER get them up! Next up are the Washington DC pictures; we didn't take as many pics that trip--it only lasted three days--so it shouldn't take as long. I have a serious Jones for one of those Canon high-def video cameras, the ones that are all digital and have no tapes to deal with. There's everyday stuff around here that I really want to get video of. for example, the 2 cats that we have, Phoebe and Kawaii, like each other so much that they actually play together sometimes. Who ever heard of 2 cats being that cool with each other? It's HELLS cute and I need to get it on video. Plus if we can ever afford to go on vacation again, it would definitely come in handy.
What else--I finally got serious about looking at iPhones for the family once the contract for the evil Verizon runs out in September, and my findings are not good. For us to all three get iPhones, we'd have to pay 80 bucks a month for voice, and another 20 bucks a month PER PHONE for data. We really don't have that kind of daniero, so it's a much more likely scenario that we'll probably be keeping our current phones through Verizon and simply going contract-less until we can find an alternative. Cynthia really likes her phone and doesn't want to give it up, which I can totally understand. There is hope, though; I'm highly interested in those Palm Pre PDA phones that are supposedly coming in June. If that rollout is successful and Sprint refrains from forcing Pre owners to pay for a data plan, the way AT&T does with iPhones, then we should be able to switch to Sprint; they have the newer model of Cynthia's phone, so she'd get that, I'd get a Pre, and we'd find a phone for Kevin as well. He may want a Pre himself by then. Until then, those Apple iPod Touch devices are looking pretty good right now.
Anyway I've got a lot of relaxing and kicking back to do tonight--viva spring break!--and I better get started. Peace!
Really nice, lazy Sunday today, just the way I like them. We went and picked up a few things from Wal Mart (stuff that Target doesn't have), and that was it for running around. I did some quick yard work, then we spent the rest of the day watching movies. Cynthia always gets such good ones from Netflix for us. We watched Walk The Line, a biography about Johnny Cash, and Ray, about Ray Charles. Kevin did school work; he has some to make up from last week. The dogs--our Italian Grayhound Charle and the two other Italian Grayhounds we're fostering, Minnie and Buck--were well behaved for the most part.
Not having to be at work on Monday makes for a highly satisfying Sunday. I may read some RSS feeds on the laptop, or maybe watch some iTunes video podcasts, or watch a Blu-ray disc, or even some telly on the over-the-air digital tuner on the laptop. Cynthia had a headache and a bit of a tummy ache earlier, so she is now sleeping. Of course that still didn't stop her from fixing us blackened salmon with pasta and mushrooms for dinner. She and I love espresso coffee so I'll probably be making us some coffee later.
The Alaska cruise pictures are FINALLY done, so I'll probably be getting those up on Facebook here in the next few days. I have three days off from work this week so I BETTER get them up! Next up are the Washington DC pictures; we didn't take as many pics that trip--it only lasted three days--so it shouldn't take as long. I have a serious Jones for one of those Canon high-def video cameras, the ones that are all digital and have no tapes to deal with. There's everyday stuff around here that I really want to get video of. for example, the 2 cats that we have, Phoebe and Kawaii, like each other so much that they actually play together sometimes. Who ever heard of 2 cats being that cool with each other? It's HELLS cute and I need to get it on video. Plus if we can ever afford to go on vacation again, it would definitely come in handy.
What else--I finally got serious about looking at iPhones for the family once the contract for the evil Verizon runs out in September, and my findings are not good. For us to all three get iPhones, we'd have to pay 80 bucks a month for voice, and another 20 bucks a month PER PHONE for data. We really don't have that kind of daniero, so it's a much more likely scenario that we'll probably be keeping our current phones through Verizon and simply going contract-less until we can find an alternative. Cynthia really likes her phone and doesn't want to give it up, which I can totally understand. There is hope, though; I'm highly interested in those Palm Pre PDA phones that are supposedly coming in June. If that rollout is successful and Sprint refrains from forcing Pre owners to pay for a data plan, the way AT&T does with iPhones, then we should be able to switch to Sprint; they have the newer model of Cynthia's phone, so she'd get that, I'd get a Pre, and we'd find a phone for Kevin as well. He may want a Pre himself by then. Until then, those Apple iPod Touch devices are looking pretty good right now.
Anyway I've got a lot of relaxing and kicking back to do tonight--viva spring break!--and I better get started. Peace!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Super Bowl Sunday 2009
Last year's Super Bowl Sunday post is still sitting in the old blog, at bdoleza.spaces.msn.com. I'd have to say that between now and a year ago, it's been a pretty good year overall. We're pretty sure that Kevin's school hangups are behind us, and Cynthia is pretty secure in her new job. We'll see if
I can say the same thing once these Colorado state budget cuts come through!! For now, though, LG Life's Good!
Being a guy and all, it's naturally my contention that one of the main things that makes a Super Bowl Sunday a Super Bowl Sunday is the food! That's one of the may areas where I'm so lucky to have Cynthia. For the 2nd year now she's made appetizer meatballs for the game...nummy!! This year she made jerk chicken as well, it was so good. I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat as far as the game goes...I never am...but there's something about the feeling and the overall atmosphere of the Big Game that I just love. The 5.1 surround sound helped, of course, though honestly my main concern the whole afternoon was getting my Alliance mage to level 46 in World of Warcraft! Which I did; I'm trying to get him as high as I can before my WOW account goes away in February.
I was just spending too much time on the game, and I finally canceled the account. It's still the most fun computer game I've ever played, and I'd keep playing it except that there's so much to do in it, and it all needs to get done, just like in real life, and you get to a point where you have to choose between the two. Except for the aforementioned Alliance mage, all my other characters are at such a high level that spending an hour or two a day in the game wouldn't really get them anywhere at all. I'd have to spend 5 to 6 hours on each of the three big characters to really get them leveled up or to get them new weapons/armor or to raise their skill level in their various professions--it''s just getting too involved now. It was great when I was a single geek hermit dude who never left the house, but I got it goin' on now and need to move on.
I have other games, and eventually I want to buy parts for a full-on gaming computer (right now I just have this laptop, that does decent at games, but gets hot pretty quick and isn't the fastest computer out there). And there are console games that I want to complete as well, though I'm not the console guy in the family--that would be Kevin! What I really need to be doing is looking into the possibility of taking online college courses in graphic design and advertising. I looked at courses at Capella University, the best online school I've seen out there that I've seen to date, but I only got as far as looking at their computer program, which looks awfully solid, but graphic design is the cool stuff! And I figure I've already gone to college and studied the stuff I NEED to study, and already have the computer job, so why not lean more toward looking at the stuff that I WANT to do. The stuff that would be FUN! :)
I can say the same thing once these Colorado state budget cuts come through!! For now, though, LG Life's Good!
Being a guy and all, it's naturally my contention that one of the main things that makes a Super Bowl Sunday a Super Bowl Sunday is the food! That's one of the may areas where I'm so lucky to have Cynthia. For the 2nd year now she's made appetizer meatballs for the game...nummy!! This year she made jerk chicken as well, it was so good. I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat as far as the game goes...I never am...but there's something about the feeling and the overall atmosphere of the Big Game that I just love. The 5.1 surround sound helped, of course, though honestly my main concern the whole afternoon was getting my Alliance mage to level 46 in World of Warcraft! Which I did; I'm trying to get him as high as I can before my WOW account goes away in February.
I was just spending too much time on the game, and I finally canceled the account. It's still the most fun computer game I've ever played, and I'd keep playing it except that there's so much to do in it, and it all needs to get done, just like in real life, and you get to a point where you have to choose between the two. Except for the aforementioned Alliance mage, all my other characters are at such a high level that spending an hour or two a day in the game wouldn't really get them anywhere at all. I'd have to spend 5 to 6 hours on each of the three big characters to really get them leveled up or to get them new weapons/armor or to raise their skill level in their various professions--it''s just getting too involved now. It was great when I was a single geek hermit dude who never left the house, but I got it goin' on now and need to move on.
I have other games, and eventually I want to buy parts for a full-on gaming computer (right now I just have this laptop, that does decent at games, but gets hot pretty quick and isn't the fastest computer out there). And there are console games that I want to complete as well, though I'm not the console guy in the family--that would be Kevin! What I really need to be doing is looking into the possibility of taking online college courses in graphic design and advertising. I looked at courses at Capella University, the best online school I've seen out there that I've seen to date, but I only got as far as looking at their computer program, which looks awfully solid, but graphic design is the cool stuff! And I figure I've already gone to college and studied the stuff I NEED to study, and already have the computer job, so why not lean more toward looking at the stuff that I WANT to do. The stuff that would be FUN! :)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Lazy Sunday Afternoon...
Another lazy January Sunday afternoon. Brian here, the head of the household (OK that would be REALLY scary if it were actually true ;), and this is the first week without my World of Warcraft account. I cancelled it on Wednesday, and I've done better without the Warcrack than I thought I would! I just didn't have enough time in the day to do WOW and get other things done. For example, I got post-production finished for the last of the photos that Cynthia and I took in 2007 and 2008, something that's been on my plate for weeks now. If I still had WOW, there's no telling whether I'd have played WOW or gotten those photos done. This way, I know that I'll behave. To an extent at least; I did crank up Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and played that for a while! But I got laundry folded, dishes done, and watched Kevin install Windows 7, so I think it's been a good day overall.
I guess that would be the big news for today: a friend of mine got me a beta copy of Windows 7, and when I told Kevin I had it, he immediately was all over it! That's muh boy!! In the time that it would take most people to install it on ONE computer, Kevin effectively installed it on TWO! It was actually two hard drives on the same computer, first one then the other, but it was still mighty impressive I thought. And if anyone has the computer for Windows 7, it's Kevin. He built his own computer over the summer, and basically only an i7 Nehalem-powered computer would be faster than his. Install times for all the programs and games he's put on there are amazing. It's been really cool to see how he's taken to it; he's truly a great kid! He installed Windows Vista 64-bit last month, and he had a similarly good experience with it.
The other thing that he's really taken to is Pandora Radio, which is something that I'd recommend for anyone (www.pandora.com). Kevin made a hard rock station on it and an old-school rap station, and they've both been superb. You just tell it a song or an artist that you like, and Pandora creates a playlist of songs that song like it. It's the web front-end of the Music Genome project, which takes songs and breaks them down into digital "signatures". They compare the signatures of the various songs that they have, and from that they can tell which songs sound the same, and then from THAT they can make playlists for you. Pretty cool stuff for being free!! I'm listening to "Ran Kan Kan Radio", a station I made consisting of mambo and Latin jazz songs that sound like the mambo song Ran Kan Kan. Sounding sharp!
We're gearing up for the premier of the new season of 24 on the telly. It's pretty rare for us to be this stoked for anything TV-related; we only have 4 of 5 shows that we watch with any regularity. But we've always liked 24, and we're happy that it's still on; shows this good usually get cancelled for lack of depth on the part of the general TV audience, as happened with Serenity and FarScape.
Cythia is making us a fabulous dinner, as always. Tonight it's pork potato rolls. Nummy! Her new job is going quite well, and she's enjoying her much shorter commute. She picked up a Simplicity sewing pattern the other day, and got some fabric for it, and she cut out the pattern this morning. She found this really cool purple material (her favorite color) with a nifto pattern in it. the funny thing is, it's total de ja vu for me; I remember my mom doing the sewing thing when I was hella small.
Well, I'd say 24 is probably on now, so off I go!
--Brian
I guess that would be the big news for today: a friend of mine got me a beta copy of Windows 7, and when I told Kevin I had it, he immediately was all over it! That's muh boy!! In the time that it would take most people to install it on ONE computer, Kevin effectively installed it on TWO! It was actually two hard drives on the same computer, first one then the other, but it was still mighty impressive I thought. And if anyone has the computer for Windows 7, it's Kevin. He built his own computer over the summer, and basically only an i7 Nehalem-powered computer would be faster than his. Install times for all the programs and games he's put on there are amazing. It's been really cool to see how he's taken to it; he's truly a great kid! He installed Windows Vista 64-bit last month, and he had a similarly good experience with it.
The other thing that he's really taken to is Pandora Radio, which is something that I'd recommend for anyone (www.pandora.com). Kevin made a hard rock station on it and an old-school rap station, and they've both been superb. You just tell it a song or an artist that you like, and Pandora creates a playlist of songs that song like it. It's the web front-end of the Music Genome project, which takes songs and breaks them down into digital "signatures". They compare the signatures of the various songs that they have, and from that they can tell which songs sound the same, and then from THAT they can make playlists for you. Pretty cool stuff for being free!! I'm listening to "Ran Kan Kan Radio", a station I made consisting of mambo and Latin jazz songs that sound like the mambo song Ran Kan Kan. Sounding sharp!
We're gearing up for the premier of the new season of 24 on the telly. It's pretty rare for us to be this stoked for anything TV-related; we only have 4 of 5 shows that we watch with any regularity. But we've always liked 24, and we're happy that it's still on; shows this good usually get cancelled for lack of depth on the part of the general TV audience, as happened with Serenity and FarScape.
Cythia is making us a fabulous dinner, as always. Tonight it's pork potato rolls. Nummy! Her new job is going quite well, and she's enjoying her much shorter commute. She picked up a Simplicity sewing pattern the other day, and got some fabric for it, and she cut out the pattern this morning. She found this really cool purple material (her favorite color) with a nifto pattern in it. the funny thing is, it's total de ja vu for me; I remember my mom doing the sewing thing when I was hella small.
Well, I'd say 24 is probably on now, so off I go!
--Brian
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