Thunder of Wade

Earlier this week, my sister and brother in law stopped by for a quick visit on their way back from buying a car. She had sent me an email earlier in the day to let me know they would be in the area – I replied back with a “Yes” for a visit, but they were already on the road. The rain and traffic made them a little later than they expected, but they got to the apartment safely and then my room-mate joined us for a dinner at CiCi’s pizza. After dinner they stayed only for a short while before getting on the road. The weather didn’t look good, but the weather channel said the worst would be over before they got home. Dad called my sister while they were at my place to warn them about the tornado warnings at their home, but he was neither surprised or really that interested that they were in akron. He called me a couple days later to apologize for not talking to me when he called my sister – even though she was in my living room at the time. I told him it was no big deal since I figured he was heading for shelter in the basement anyway and shouldn’t have been on the phone.

I picked up a new game recently – Patapon. I’d heard good things about it, but wasn’t sure if I could get into it. It’s a rhythm game – you tap the appropriate buttons following the beat to play. In this case, you are commanding an army of primitives by pounding the war drums to get them to march or attack. I was a little worried since I don’t have much natural rhythm, but I got the hang of it and I’m inspiring my little warriors onto battle and victory. The missions aren’t too long (there’s no pause feature), but just long enough to really get into the adventure. I don’t play too long in one sitting because the PSP isn’t comfortable to hold – but I’m enjoying it.

Finally, work has been crazy busy – I’m double booked for meetings today and considering a workers comp claim for my copy|paste pinky on my left hand. Been doing a lot of that.

Oh, almost forgot – I called my FRM’s mom last night to see how she was doing. Apparently, my FMR’s wife had a baby girl and his oldest son just moved into an apartment about 6 doors down from where FMR and I used to live. Small world…

Okay, gotta go – later…

I went to a bookstore this weekend in Wheeling, WV called Books-A-Million. Based on the store name alone, I had high hopes. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a headache when we got there. I couldn’t find a Horror Fiction section, so I headed over to SciFi and began to peruse the selection. I noticed two things right off:

1. The staff was doing some kind of inventory with those bar-code scanner guns that required them scanning every single book one at a time. The scanner gun beeped every time they did this. I was instantly homicidal, but didn’t act on my impulse.

2. They were completely missing several of my favorite and prolific authors. Irksome.

I tried another section, only to have another staffer begin beeping. My headache getting worse, I finally gave up and headed for the checkout. Before they clerk began checking out the items, she asked if I had a rewards card. I told her no and she began to explain the stickers on the hardback books and how I could get a discount if I signed up. I politely declined and she continued with her pitch. I declined again, still politely, but with a slight increase in tone.

Still, she continued with the great features of the reward card. I interrupted her and told her I was not from the area and that I had never heard of this store before. Undaunted, she asked where I was from and I finally trumped her by saying Akron, Ohio. She tried to come back by staying that they were expanding up north, but really had nothing to go on – if I’m unlikely to come back, why would I “need” a rewards card? I thought it was done, but just before giving me the total, she hauled out a sheet of paper and suggested that I could sign up for a magazine subscription. I declined again, polite in words, but not in look or tone. Transaction complete, I headed for the door and freedom.

As a coda to the story, my room-mate was behind me in line and tried to get her stopped by telling her he was from Akron as well, but she essentially ignored him in favor of her “speech”.

Rude behavior in the name of customer service. Annoying and disturbing.

I’ve got a headache again this afternoon – though I think this is work related and comes from staring at a computer screen too long. I also forgot my swim trunks today and so missed my swim.

Almost time to go home – later…

I haven’t really been in the mood for blogged in a while, but as Gurney Halleck said in the first Dune book: “Not in the mood? Mood’s a thing for cattle and loveplay, not blogging!”

Or something like that. So, back into it…

Went to a Chinese buffet for dinner on Friday and ate a whole honking pile of food. 2 full plates of “dinner items” Sweet and sour chicken, fried shrimp, green beans. 2 small plates of sushi, maybe around 14-16 pieces – mostly spicy crab and tuna. 1 full plate of dessert, various items. And 1 fortune cookie. I was physically uncomfortable. It was awesome.

My room-mate went away hungry. I know, I know. Seems like that would be impossible at a buffet. But, I think he didn’t get the concept.

Work has been very busy, but productive. Sometimes those things really don’t go together, but I’ve gotten a lot accomplished toward our big relaunch goal. There have been a couple of annoying snags, but we’ll get through it.

Yesterday, I went with my room-mate down to his dad’s house to help him clear things our. The goal was to move the washer and dryer to his work, get the curio cabinet for his secretary, and the chest of drawers for himself. The first trip to wheeling and we picked up the washer, dryer and the chest. Back to canton to unload at his work. The old washer and dryer need to be moved out and the new installed – which I’ll rant about in a moment. We left the chest there at his work as well and headed back to Wheeling. In wheeling, we picked up the curio cabinet, a tv, a metal shelf and some odds and ends. Back to canton and his work site to pick up the cabinet again since it had the shelves for the curio cabinet. Then to hartville to deliver the curio cabinet. Then home to unload the rest. He had to go back into work, but I got to take a break and played some video games. He’s head back down to wheeling today to do some more clearing out as they’ve sold the house and need to get it emptied.

Now, on to the rant about appliances… The hoses for the washer were difficult to remove – we had to find pliers to get them started. The faucets were not labeled and we had to “guess” which ones would go where. And finally, the thing that made me want to go and find an engineer so I could smack them…

Wait. The only engineering that I know is my brother-in-law and he doesn’t work with this type of consumer design. So, he’s excluded from the smacking.

Anyway, the cord for the dryer is too short. It’s not even long enough for the plug to reach as high as the top of dryer. And the outlet is at least 6-7 inches higher up than that. So, to make it work, they’re going to need to buy a longer cord and rewire the damn thing or built some kind of platform to elevate the dryer. Stupid, stupid design. We just left it undone since we were short of time, but it irked me not to be able to finish the job.

That’s it for now, I’m going to try and get some sunshine today before heading back to the windowless cube farm at work tomorrow.

later…

My room-mate is a big fan of the news. He gets the sunday paper and through the week will watch the local news, then the national news, then the local news again and occasionally Entertainment tonight. I usually avoid the living room while this is going on but I’ll wander through at some point. It seems to me that the news is getting worse. Local news has always felt very fear based, but the national and even the entertainment feels like the end of the world.

So, I’ll breeze through the room, stay long enough to get depressed, then go back to a computer game or a book.

This is not to say that I’m in the dark – I follow the news a lot on the web. In that case, though, I can take a little more open approach and mix up some of the good and bad and the other.

I understand keeping people informed, but I wonder how much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the news reports an economy in trouble, will people then behave in ways that make it worse? If a shortage on goods is reported, will that lead to a run on that good across the country? I’m not saying we should keep our head in the sand, but I just don’t get all the bad news.

Instead of the news, I played a new game last night – God of War, Chains of Olympus. Interesting story – someone has kidnapped the sun god Helios and without him, everyone is falling asleep – including the greek gods themselves. And then the god of sleep is taking over. Good story, good controls, not always quite as clear where to go. I can only play it for so long since the PSP is little less comfortable to hold than the Playstation controller.

I’m in training this week for some new software. It’s not too bad, but the timing is a little rough – so much going on.

Better get back to looking like I’m paying attention.

later…

I had a somewhat stressful and – in my eyes – overly long meeting yesterday just before lunch. When asked if I had somewhere I had to be at a certain time since I kept glancing at my watch, I replied, “well, I’m getting hungry”. The crew waited for me and we headed over to Chipotle – I drove since there were 4 of us and I have the 4 door car. I was still stressed from the meeting and cranky at the drivers and at the long line since we were running later than usual.

But, one of my coworkers bought me lunch since I had helped him out with a lighting issue. And I got a Sprite+lemonade+lime wedge drink that was excellent. And the actual burrito was excellent. The parking situation threatened to push me over into a bad mood, but the good stuff and the bad stuff of my lunch excursion neatly balanced out and left me with a sort of null mood.

Had some messed up dreams this morning.

1. Dreamed that I was at a large picnic, waiting for a military helicopter to land to pick me up. I had a large backpack with a lot of paper and books in case I got bored. The helicopter landed, scattering the picnickers and I got on. The huge helicopter took off and one airborne I set down my bag and wandered back to the breakroom, past the kitchen. Yes, it was that big. The soldiers there were asking me about the mission and I told them I had no idea. I explained that I had gotten a letter saying that I was to report to a specific area and get picked up by a helicopter. I told them I figured it might have been a joke until I saw the actual helicopter. They were very surprised that I was a civilian and had no training or special skills. The conversation sort of stopped at that point and we sat quietly and waited.

2. The second dream was a just a fragment – I was in engineering on the starship voyager trying to help the them navigate at high speed through a region of space that was almost filled with solid mathematical representations of their ship and a borg cube. Once we got through that – and it was amazing to watch – I headed to the mess hall and watched while the cast of Angel tried to reason with the teen-aged clones of themselves. Very odd.

later…

I had a dream last night that I was behind a desk in a hotel and the lobby was filled with zombies. I was with a few other people and we were unnoticed until one of the zombies exploded and their “juices” flew everywhere. They hit some of us and a woman in my group screamed – alerting the zombies to our presence. We managed to fight them off, but it was too late – I was already infected. The group forced me to leave before I turned, so I struck out on my own. In a short amount of time, while wandering the streets, I turned into a zombie, but managed to keep my intelligence through an effort of will. I was a zombie, but I could control myself. I didn’t really get much time to figure out what it meant before I woke up.

My tattoo – you know, the one I got back on march 27? – was actually starting to heal. And then last night I flexed my wrist and I felt something tear. It was a scab and I started to bleed. I got it bandaged up and put more neosporin on it, but it’s still annoying.

Yesterday at lunch I put up some foam board instead of the blue transparency. Worked really well. So much so, that my co-worker wanted it set up in his cube as well. We’re both prone to light-induced headaches and I’m hoping this helps. I’m also going to offer this to the rest of the crew – but I’ll need to get more foam-board.

That’s it for now…

I played more of Divine Divinity last evening, here’s how it went. My character managed to get out of the endlessly wearying caves and I sent him over to the Imp Castle in search of the Heart of the Dragon. When we got there, we found that it was a gem being guarded – strangely enough – by a dragon. Every tactic I tried met with failure and death for my character.

Finally, I summoned a “Demon Knight” creature as a distraction and ran for the exit – figuring I’d come back later when the character was stronger. Unfortunately, the nearest teleporter required a scroll from that castle, so I wandered around for a bit and then decided to head back in there to get the scroll and then run away to teleport back to the town.

I tried to avoid the dragon, but he was blocking the path and I figured I’d try to run past him. When I got close, I realized that the decoy Demon Knight was still alive and still fighting. Even better, he’d worn down the dragon so that a couple of hits from me was enough to take him down. I picked up the gem and headed out of the castle, stopping only long enough to pick up the scroll. So, learned a new plan. Get some decoy warriors going and run screaming for an exit like a little girl that just saw a spider.

Not very manly, true – but, come on, it was a freaking dragon! You’d run too.

I ran an errand last night for some project supplies and saw a car haul-ass across the parking lot. Not down the “roads”, but across the parking spaces. They were going way too fast and clearly weren’t paying attention. Kind of a pet peeve of mine. It bothers my room-mate a great deal as well, although he does it to. He justifies to me that he “pays attention” when he does it – which I think is funny in a way that makes me glad I have good insurance when I ride with him in his car.

The supplies I picked up included some transparent blue plastic for some filters over the lights in my cubicle here at work. The lights are always giving me a headache – time to do something about that. We’ll see how it goes…

That’s it for now…

My room-mate asked me to go to Lowe’s to pick up some dirt for some minor lawn repair – the deal being that if I got the dirt, I wouldn’t be obligated to do any actual work. Seemed like a good deal to me.

I headed over to Lowe’s and grabbed a shopping cart, then headed back to the garden area. The instructions were “two large bags of cheap dirt” – which I found in the non-roofed section of the area. One of the bags had broken open and with the recent rains, all the bags were pretty much covered in mud.

I’m not a strong person. I can swim forever, but I’m just not physically strong. So, it required a great deal of effort to get the first bag up onto the cart – and I ended up covered in mud.

A sales clerk came over and offered to get me a flat cart. I said that would be great and he wandered away to find it – then brought it back. And then he – this much taller and obviously stronger guy – watched while I struggled to move the bag from one cart to another, then add a second bag. He took the first cart away and I headed to the front of the store.

I got in a short line at the checkout and waited, I think, .5 forevers as the cashier struggled with the transaction. Eventually, I gave up and moved over a lane. The cashier there was very friendly, but a little daft. She blamed it on the cold medicine when she inadvertently did a split transaction and I had to run my card twice. While the second transaction was processing, she reached down and got a tissue. I thought she was going to offer it to me since my hands – and the rest of me – was covered in dirt. Instead, she blew her nose.

I finally got out to the car and struggled again with the bags to get them in the trunk.

Plenty of opportunities for the crew there to really make my day better – but instead I got the minimum and it ended up being more work than my room-mate had when he dumped the dirt onto the lawn.

This is a little psychological to start, had some thoughts about humanity in games. I used to play Diablo 2 a lot and while it was a really fun game, it was still just a game. I rarely felt drawn into it in a single player mode. In my many times through the game, I only felt really a part of it playing a lightning magic user in the Difficult mode. Even with all the might this character could create – and she was very powerful – there were still times when I would have the character wander into an area and find an ambush of highly powerful ranged attack monsters. Just as power as she was and just as fast. And sometimes, either through random placement or the AI of the game – organized. Suddenly, the game went from “vaporise the slow-moving zombies from a distance” to “run from the skeleton fire-archers”. And there was excitement and a little fear. And then the game really got fun again.

Tomb Raider has a few moments like this as well. The ambush of gorillas in the arena, the lions in the temple, the ‘whatever-they-are” in the final levels. Those are quickly subdued and the brief rush of excitement fades when the twin guns start blazing. TR stands out for me for another reason – vertigo. There are a few shots where Laura Croft reaches a very tall point in the landscape and will invariably look down. Even in the original version of the game, with it’s low resolution, the scene would trigger my fear of heights and I would carefully back Laura away from the edge even though she would calmly stand right there for hours on her own. Fear again, but of a different flavor.

There have been other games that sparked the “jump out at you” fear and at least one that sparked the vertigo as well – but I’ve now found a game that makes me tired.

My character in Divine Divinity had his teleport stones stolen, but since the game must go on, I sent him into the depths of a evil undead infested cave for treasure. Well we found a lot of treasure – and a quest with a promise of adventure. The problem is that the character can only carry so much at one time. When he carries over a certain limit, he can’t run. And since he can’t teleport, he can’t drop off the treasure and exotic weapons he finds. So, the poor dude is wandering around the increasingly deep cave, loaded down with potentially expensive shields, fighting monsters and occasionally camping down there. Since he can’t run at this point, it’s a slow and almost painful walk . The character has a very limited range of actions and no emotional stance, but I can still feel for the guy. Heavy burden, no light at the end of the tunnel, increasing work and danger, endless battles, no shortcuts.

Sounds like work some days. While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been working on a plan to get him out of there and then come back for the loot. He’s still got a ways to travel, but I think I’ve restored a little hope.

Back to the game… later

My gas tank was close to “E” last evening when I came home from work, but the challenge of entering and exiting the nearest gas station at that time of the day was too much to consider after the day I had. I went on home and stopped this morning to get some gas. Not “fill up” at $3.45 a gallon, but get some and be on my way. As I pulled to a stop at the pump, the Check Gauges light came on – which is pretty good timing on my part.

The car on the other side of the pump caught my eye since the driver had gotten back in the car – which you’re really not supposed to do. Even worse, on first glance it appeared she was smoking. I went back to pumping my gas and tried to puzzle that out. Was she really smoking? Should I say something? If I made an issue, would she throw the cigarette out the window of her car, making things worse?

While I was debating this internally, she finished getting her gas and drove off – still smoking. I’ve never seen anyone do that before and was unprepared – next time, I’m going to say something to them.

Last night, I watched The Mist on DVD. The cover of the box proclaimed it to have “one of the most shocking endings in a movie ever!” Which had me a little puzzled since the book’s ending wasn’t really all that shocking. But, it’s a Stephen King book, so the movie is bound to screw it up somehow.

Surprisingly, it didn’t – at least at the beginning. The movie was right on track with the book – scene for scene and shot for shot. Even the dialog was really close. It was well done and encouraging – I was really hoping they wouldn’t tack on some cheesy Hollywood ending.

Well, the ending was different from the book. Far, far darker and very disturbing. Uncomfortably so. I was almost wishing for a cheesy happy Hollywood ending. I figured I’d have nightmares about it, but my sleep was untroubled.

that’s it for now… later.