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!