Road Signs

We finally got Summer back from the shop. This involved a fair bit of juggling. D went to the shop and sprung her out, then took the rental back while I got the kids and picked her up from the rental place. On our way from the rental place, traveling down Bandera in rush hour traffic, I saw something epic. You simply can't make this stuff up. I saw two people in a small car, talking in sign language. That's not so epic, except that one of these people was the driver, and she was using both hands to talk. That leaves her with no hands to drive her small car in one of the cities worst traffic spots. She drove for a good 5 blocks before making a right, and hardly touched or even glanced at her steering wheel. I almost got into an accident watching this.

We decided to go to Denny's for dinner, since it was late and the service was spectacular last time. Not so much this time. Not sure which substance our server was abusing, but it sure made for an unpleasant waiting experience. It took forever for us to even get drinks, and we had went through nearly three rounds of drinks before our order was up. Yup, that's almost 3x forever before we saw our food.

After dinner, I dropped myself off at the body shop and got Summer, gave the convertible to D and started her up for the first time since she'd been in the accident. And wouldn't you know it, they left it in gear and I killed her. -.- Welcome home, Summer. She was low on gas, so I filled up before I came home. I'd been feeling pretty burned out by all the running around and the insanity of children, so D had already marched them all to bed. Silence...

Finished out the night by burning off the ring charge from the night before. The effect hadn't expired, so we were actually able to use up the entire bonus over the course of two nights. There was only one other person there, and she spent half the time we were there dead waiting for a Raise 3 and left shortly after being raised. We pretty much had the zone to ourselves. Keri tried her hand at also playing Talonshard, since he was out of town. We got just enough to not waste the charge and left. I ended the night by taking pictures of sahagin for zeni. We have a ZNM night coming up on Friday, and I'd like to do a few with my own pop items. Emma also decided to tell the LS her cell number in case people needed to talk/text to her, so I sent her a random picture from my cell of my Oscar Night trophy. She's sooo getting random drunken texts...

I'm going on the record and officially calling an end to the BLM static. We have had an absolutely fantastic run. I've never been in a static before this that lasted longer than 5-6 levels. Usually just something to get through dunes/Qufim/jungles/sub-job blah blah. The fact that this lasted over 15 levels was just phenomenal. The problem? It has been harder and harder to schedule a time that we all have free without someone having some random thing come up or stepping on the LS's collective toes. Keri and I have been just as guilty as TS, Ame, MC or Andro when it came to having real life things come up or just not being up to it that night and we had to cancel. Don't get me wrong: it's been a good run and I'm very happy with where we were able to get. Not bitter or angry or anything. I'm just done trying to force 4-5 people's real lives to fit in the schedule of a video game. We might still manaburn together, but it will be less of a planned static and more of a spur of the moment thing.

Open Box Policy

When I got to work this morning, I saw what could quite possibly proof of the impending apocalypse. I'm in the break room 5 minutes before work, making my morning coffee and minding my own business, when the talking head box in the break room assaults me with stupid. You've probably ready that I don't hold a very high view of modern programming. Even when a network manages to produce something of modest value, it is completely destroyed by the sheer dumb by which it is funded and surrounded - the commercials.

I just happened to walk into the break room while Headline News was in a commercial break. I didn't know I could take so much stupid-elemental damage in the time it takes to put my lunch away and brew a cup of coffee... The first commercial was one of those "Have you been injured by..." commercials. You know the kind I'm talking about. The target audience: those who have been injured by those Electro-Muscle Stimulation doodads you can buy on late night infomercials. If you've never heard of them, the idea behind them is that you strap these electrodes to your skin and start administering electric shocks to the underlying muscles. You'd rather buy a machine to work you out, and shock yourself stupid in the process, than do it yourself the old fashioned way. They had several winning case testimonials. The best one was from a guy sitting in a wheelchair, missing chunks of hair and dressed like he was assaulted by Austin Powers' closet, who had won "several millions of dollars." Like he played and won some great Darwinian lottery.

If that wasn't enough to cause an early morning aneurysm, the next one was going to try harder. It was a Nutrisystem ad. These fool spots usually enlist the aid of some easily recognizable celebrity names to give an endorsement. Past testimonials have been provided by Dan Marino and Tori Spelling. Well, there's a new guy in town. He's a Cable Guy. He's Larry the Cable Guy. Git-R-Done, Delta Farce, Witless Protection Larry the Cable Guy. Not that I mind Larry the Cable Guy, in fact I enjoy a lot of his original stand-up. I'm just way more likely to buy a keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon than I am to buy Nutrisystem when he comes up in an ad. He even did the Git-R-Done catch phrase at the end of the ad, just after dropping an armload of prop bowling balls, snapping his fingers at another guy's wardrobe to make it match his own and stating that "Loosin' fity pouns like loosin fi' bowlin' bawls!" My head hurt the rest of the day.

In other news, the surface of the sun called down to San Antonio today and demanded we return their weather. The Vue was supposed to be finished on time today, but (surprise!) it hadn't come out of the paint shop yet. I guess our poor Summer has become the victim of some internal office politics, so the manager cut $100 off our bill to compensate us for the cost of a rental. Which was good, because D would have either needed a her car back or rental for tomorrow's interview. She made the arrangements to pick up the rental, we got the kids and made it to the rental place just after they closed. Lucky for us that they waited.

After dinner and getting children to bed, we made a quick WalMart run for some things that we had unexpectedly come up: D needed some clothing for tomorrow, Clara needed wipes, my car needed some gas and we were looking for FFXI. Umm... Yeah. FFXI for the XBox360. The big compendium package had finally been discontinued, and it took a pretty big price hit, so we decided to finally get it for the 360 upstairs. I had managed to track one down to the Gamestop at the WalMart that we were at, so we went in there to check it out.

They had it, but there was something very disappointing about it. It had been opened. For most games, this doesn't pose a problem to the end consumer. But this game doesn't work like most games. The media inside the case is next to worthless. This game revolves around a content code to function. A code found on the instruction manual. An instruction manual in the case. A case that was clearly opened with an instruction manual that was clearly rifled through. It's like providing someone with a credit card, saying they are responsible for all charges against said card, and then providing the card number to 50 different people. Account theft is bad enough as it is, I don't need to make it easier for people to steal my stuff. As clearly presented as we could make it, for some reason, we could not get anyone to understand this problem. We got one guy tell us that if something was wrong with it we could simply return it. Soooo... Let me get this straight. I'm going to make a trip all the way out here and pay good money for something I know I'm going to have a problem with, only to have to travel all the way back out here and get my money back. That costs me an hour of time and at least a gallon of gas. -.-; No, thanks. I'll order online.

We tried to level BLM that night, but it was nearly impossible to do with all the competition for monsters. Epic waste of a Emperor Ring charge. I resigned to go and take pictures of morbols for zeni. As much as I love pokemon-ing, it was not what I wanted to do with my night...

D has an interview tomorrow. I'll be praying for her, and I know she'll be fantastic at it. Hopefully I'll have a status update on the car as well.

Safety Dance

We're supposed to get the Vue back tomorrow. That'll be nice. The only problem is that the body shop closes before I'd be able to pick D up and take her there. Seriously, we'd get there about 10 minutes late, and that shop becomes a ghost town at 5 minutes to quitting time. So she decided that she'll just take the bus after work to the shop. But, having never used the buses in this town, she decided that it would be best to use it to get home today, just to know what to expect and make sure it would get her there in time. What she didn't anticipate was, after finding that it would work just fine, that she still was being dropped off today at the nearest bus stop.

For all of you who have never seen our home or it's location relative to the nearest stop, it's quite a hoof. A good half mile at least. In 100+ degree weather. No joke, when I opened my car today it was like opening the hatch to a blast furnace. The local weathercast gives the daily high forecast in numbers that are ON FIRE. She had a good 20min hike home in that. I'm surprised there wasn't melted rubber footprints 500 feet from the house where the soles of her shoes started melting...

Understandably, she was in no mood to DDR. I had, however, purchased DDR Universe 2 over a week ago, and it was still waiting for me, calling my name for help from inside its shiny, shrink wrap prison. So I decided I would exercise after dinner. Overall, they kept the same look, feel and timing from the previous installment, just changed the playlist. They also changed the announcer from a girl to a guy, but didn't change the lines. There are things that sounded very cutesy when the girl said them that sounded just a little bit "Ha Ha~!" when the guy said them...

So I started slogging through the new playlist, trying to learn the songs and the new steps. I was only planning to play for about half an hour, but ended playing a little longer. It was a nice mix of house, dance and electro, with a few Japanese oddities thrown in there to remind you that this game didn't come from the states. That is, until I hit the 80's. You know, I'd never seen so many 80's titles in a DDR game before, not to mention that with the advances in technology, the songs are accompanied by the original, full-length music videos. You know, the ones from the era that was still trying to figure out what exactly a music video was, and how to make the video artistically relevant to the music. The 80's were weird.

If you clicked on any of those links, you deserved what you got.

Anyway, Colin came home from his sleepover sometime while I was busy working out. After shuffling the kids to bed and getting a shower, we decided to spend the last hour of our day relaxing and gaming. I powerleveled Keri's NIN to 24 and got to save a bunch of low-level people trying to party there. Seriously, it's like SE has designed all the best places to level to be absolutely impossible to get to and from at low levels without dying. At least once.

Hopefully, tomorrow we will get the call from the body shop that the car is ready and we can return to business as usual, but I'm not holding my breath. If I held my breath for things happening according to schedule in this city, I'd have done passed going purple or blue in the face long ago and instead have assumed a permanent plaid coloring. x.X" We'll have the car rental place on speed dial.

Weekend Intelligence: At Least the Lawn Looks Good...

I admit it: I was a bum this weekend. I gamed A LOT and took naps and generally got a lot of R&R in. At least we did get some good time put into the yardwork. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

Friday was a decent day. The contract that I'm working is likely to end next week, giving me one more week at the remote location before I'm back at the office. As it stands, I've spent nearly ten times more time on assignment than I've spent in the home office. After picking up D and the kids, we baked up some chicken parmesian and set out the agenda for the weekend. There was a heap of laundry that needed to get washed, dried, folded and put away, a heap of dishes that needed scrubbing, and most daunting, a heap of a backyard that needed deforesting. >.>; Even the front yard was starting to look like the jungles: there was this creeping bush-like plant that was threatening to choke off a chunk of the grass. So there we had it, and decided it was best left for tomorrow. We didn't stay up late playing like we normally do, knowing we had a big morning.

I woke up early Saturday to get my travel check in the bank and donuts for the family. After waking everyone up and getting them fed, I set Colin to the dishes and keeping an eye on Clara, D went to start on the back yard and I pulled weeds, edged and mowed the front. We had planned on it taking two hours, but it didn't really take that long before we had most of the big things pulled. The front yard is clean and all the back needs is weeds along the back fence pulled and some serious TLC to get the lawn to come back. ;_; I miss the grass... Colin was able to fill the dishwasher, but not all the dishes fit. After I got some laundry started and folded up, I took a little bit of a nap.

D had a little too much fun the night before, so we weren't able to make it up in time for church. We spent most the day relaxing and not doing much of much. I tanked the kids until about 1pm, when Clara went down for a nap, Colin went to play with friends, and I folded up another load of laundry to make room for an emergency load. Colin came back with one of his friends who had moved away some time back. Last time, he had stayed over the entire weekend with this friend at his new house. Well, he came back and asked if it was OK if he spent the night again. I didn't mind, as long as it was OK with his friend's mom and that he'd be back after we got home for the day.

In Game:

Even though SE broke campaign, making the beastmen hordes nearly unstoppable, it is still up to me to keep my medal until they fix it. The beastmen own the world at the moment, and are continuously attacking Windurst. At least I don't have to teleport all over the place looking for a battle. :P Got a whole merit point on WHM and bumped my BLM to 68 on Friday so that I could use up a scroll that's been taking up space in my inventory.

Saturday evening, we were back at campaign, and I got a second merit in the process of getting enough notes to keep my medal. We also got a small group of people together to pop the Lil Apkallu item that I've been holding on to for some time. That monster is absolutely senseless. After you hit him enough, he uses a move that puts everyone to sleep in a certain range. At this point, most monsters would start picking off your party members one by one since everyone is asleep and can't do anything. Does this one? No~o! The crazy penguin instead runs around randomly while squawking. You just get to sit there watching while he does his thing until you wake up. An easy fight to be sure, but he's located in a bad neighborhood and he's kinda stupid. LOL We also leveled BST for a little bit much later that night.

Sunday was more of the same. We logged on to level BST and squeezed out the rest of the level we missed out on the night before. Crawlers' Nest is starting to be a little too weak, so I'll have to find a new hunting ground for next time.

The Vue is due out of the shop next week, just in time for DeAnn's interview. I'm hoping that we'll be able to exercise tomorrow evening together. Colin should be back and bouncing off the walls, and Clara will probably do something too. :P Should be a busy week!