So Much for Summer

I don't know where it went. I really don't, but now it's Autumn, and that's my favorite season, so I guess I have that to be excited about. The air is cooler. I get to wear a jacket again, which, aside from the warmth factor is also like a security blanket. A security blanket with extra pockets for me to put things in. Like my keys. So I don't have them in my pants pocket which is highly uncomfortable when sitting down, and also limits where I can put my cell phone.

I can't say a whole lot has happened since last June. Teresa's brother got engaged, so Teresa and I will be in the wedding party for their wedding in January. I've been stressed out of my mind at work. Being the controller for a failing company, and not being able to do much to help it has not been fun. The company is still here though, and I still have my job, so I guess it's not all bad. I'd rather not dwell on it here though. Suffice it to say, work has sapped a lot of my energy that used to go into writing things like this blog. Most days I get home and we watch television shows on Netflix, or play Xbox, or anything else that requires little movement and thought.

Another awesome thing about the coming colder weather is the grass isn't growing as much anymore. I mowed the lawn last weekend, but I'll probably have to do it at least once more time before the winter sets in and yard work becomes a memory. Which is good, because then we can work on the inside jobs that never seem to get done. Although I did get a chance to organize the attic storage last weekend. I think I did a pretty good job myself. I impressed Teresa, and that's not an easy thing to accomplish.

We're looking forward to my family visiting in a couple weeks. It's been quite awhile since I've seen my parents and grandparents, so it should be a lot of fun. Also working on a trip to Oregon in December. So the next few months should be pretty busy. Hopefully I can find time to write in between all of that, and hopefully more than just an update every now and then.

Addendum: I failed to express the coolness of the person that my brother-in-law is getting married to, and will soon be part of my family. Her name is Catherine and she is the coolest nerd I know. I knew she was special when I first found out she liked to play Xbox with David, and that she was totally in to Mac computers. And along with her great fashion sense, she also is a tremendously fun person to hang out with and has some very lovable dogs at home. My apologies to Catherine for short selling her earlier in the blog post. I truly did her a disservice and I hope she can forgive me.

Summer Update

Teresa and I are doing well. As is Hannah. I've been busy with work, Teresa has been doing odd jobs for a friend in Black Mountain and recently had an interview for work in Black Mountain., so we're crossing our fingers for that. We've made a couple trips to Greensboro and Raleigh on account of David, Teresa's brother. One for a college graduation, and the other for a going away party. He went to Alaska to fish for the Summer. More on that below. It's been day to day for the rest of it. Where to start?

I've probably mentioned it before, but I'm currently working for a small business as their Controller. I control the money. Or rather, the lack thereof. The company wasn't in good shape when I started, but it was supposed to get better. We're still waiting for it to get better. I can't go into all the details, but it's plain enough to say that work is a major source of stress for me right now, which leads to a lack of motivation to write, or to do anything exciting around the house or around the town.

What I have been doing is playing video games, but that's not a shock to anyone I'm sure. I've started blogging about games specifically over at Gamespot. A website I've been a member of for years, but have now decided to fully utilize. This way, those of you that like that sort of thing can read about it there, and those of you that don't will be spared from long boring posts about World of Warcraft or the Xbox 360 on this blog. Most of the time. I reserve the right to gush about Rock Band 3 and the introduction of keyboards to the game. But I'll save that for later.

Last weekend we had a good time with Teresa's family in Greensboro sending off David to fish in Alaska. He's set net fishing in the Cook Inlet with a family friend of mine who we know from our church up in Soldotna. He'll be in Kasilof. He took his friend Jackson with him, and they're already having an amazing time up there. I know this because I read their blog. And you should too. Even if you don't know them, it should be a good insight into fishing in Alaska from the perspective of two outsiders. Of course, all of their talking about it makes me miss it. But it just gives me more resolve to go back there again, even if Mom and Dad have moved back to Oregon now.

The house we're in now is the first house we've lived in that requires any amount of yard work maintenance. I can mow the lawn easily enough, but when it comes to pulling weeds or thinking about planting things, I just sort of get overwhelmed. Our back yard is big. It takes about an hour and half to mow, and yet we don't use it for anything, so sometimes I wonder what the point of it is, other than just for it to look nice. It still isn't fenced and that's something I really need to do. Money kind of plays into that though. So it still might be awhile. Sorry, Hannah.

Teresa and I have been burning through our Netflix queue as well as catching quite a few good shows over the instant streaming options. We recently watched the first three Karate Kid movies. The first one was great. The second one was okay, redeemed mostly by the theme song. The third one was painful to watch. It's clear that Daniel Larusso learned nothing from his first two movies. And no matter how much Karate he learns, he always gets his butt kicked until the final show down. Interest in these was sparked by the new Karate Kid movie in theaters soon. I've heard it's pretty good. We also watched The Goonies. Teresa had never seen it. Now that missing spot of iconic 80s culture has been filled for her. We also watched the first season of Castle, and we're currently watching Leverage, which has turned out to be hilarious and awesome at the same time. Especially for geeky people like us.

We'll be heading to South Carolina for Independence day, and then it's the wide open Summer. Hopefully we'll be heading to Maryland for the Renn Fair again, but that won't be until Ocotober. 2010 is flying by. Time to make something of it.

A LOST Post

If you have not watched the season finale of LOST, or if you have not even watched the series, then you may be spoiled by the topic discussed below. Because the topic is LOST. If you have been completely under a rock for the last 6 years, LOST is, err... was an hour long drama on ABC. And now, from this point on, I will assume you know about the show and have watched the end of the series.

When I was just out of college in 2004, I was working for a small web developer doing Flash animations for websites and interactive business cards. My first post-college job. Not glamorous, but it paid the rent, and I enjoyed it. I usually worked in the evenings after normal business hours because I had a second job at a book store, and eventually doing actual accounting work, but that's a tangent I don't want to get into. The point of all this is that I watched the very first episode of LOST while I was at work. I had seen promotions for it, and if I was honest, I wanted to watch it for two reasons.

1) Merry Brandybuck was going to be in it. Or rather, Dominic Monaghan, and I was a big fan of Lord of the Rings.

2) J.J. Abrams was producing it, and I had just recently started watching and loving his other show, Alias.

So I found myself at work on the night it premiered as there was a TV in the office, so I turned it on to watch while I worked. I ended up not working at all, and was instead glued to the screen. Don't worry, I didn't bill my employer for the time I watched. The Pilot was incredible. I watched the whole season from the office. I didn't get TV at my house, so I watched it at work. And because I was at work, I never thought to tell Teresa about the show. Or maybe I did, but it didn't really interest her at the time.

Anyway, soon after the first season was over, Teresa and I got married and moved to Boston, so now we have TV and we live together and I'm not working weeknights. If I'm going to watch this show, she probably needs to be on board so we can watch it together. After watching the first season with her, she was hooked, and the rest is history.

And now it all really is history. Sunday night, the last episode aired and LOST is officially no more. The joy of LOST was that it was a mystery, and a journey, and a character drama all wrapped up into one. There was fantasy, science fiction, romance, action, and then crazy stuff that you can't really categorize. It was a great show. Like any show it had its up and downs, but it kept bringing us back for more each and every year.

I think it was in Season 3 where it was announced that they would end the show after six seasons on purpose, regardless of ratings in order to make sure the writing was purposeful and that it didn't just dwindle and get canceled without a solid ending. I'm glad they decided that, but it's still funny to think I don't have anything to watch tonight at nine o'clock.

So for those of you that have watched it. What did you think? Did the ending satisfy you? Did you see it coming? Did it make you mad? The narrative of the story has always been about character development both on and off the island. For this last season we've seen a strange parallel world. Now it turns out that parallel world was a fantasy. A place where the spirits of those have passed on figure out that they're dead and remember the people and things that were important to them. It's not explained exactly how this world came to be, except that it was willed into being so they could see each other again before "moving on." I've seen some people say it was Hurley, as the new protector of the island, who created this place for everyone.

I'm okay with it. It's a nice safe way to show everyone being happy and remembering the best times of their lives. But it's also not enough for me. While lots of people posited that the passengers were dead and in purgatory on the island, the show was never about the afterlife for me. It was about the island, and why they were brought there, and how it affected them when they were there. Now that it's over, I want to know more about the Light on the island, the people who have protected it, and how they chose to do so. I want to know what the island needs protecting from now that the Man in Black is dead. Honestly, I'd be thrilled to see some episodes dealing with the misadventures of Hurley and Ben on the island. Though at this point, a comedic spin off to LOST seems kind of silly.

There's also a lot of Dharma mysteries to be expounded on. What they discovered, what they did with it, how they found about it, and what Jacob's response was to it. In the end, the writer's decided these weren't important things for us to know. The important things were the character's journeys, and how their times on the island were some of the best times and relationships they had ever experienced.

Maybe sometime in the next year or two we'll go back and watch it from the beginning. I'd really like to see if watching it with the knowledge of how it ends highlights anything that we may have missed before. I think LOST was a unique experience that will be some time before it's reproduced on television. In the mean time, I'll have to find some other programs to fill my entertainment needs.

Published on the Internet Still Counts, Doesn't it?

It's not a huge deal, really. It's a paragraph on a Warcraft related website. But it's mine!

WoW Insider asked people to submit 100 words on what we want to see at Blizzcon 2010. A convention run by the makers of Warcraft, Starcraft and the Diablo series. You know what a convention is. This one is just centered on the franchises of one game company. I've never been to one. I doubt I ever will, but the news and information stemming from this convention relevant to my interests. So I submitted my 100 words, and hoped for the best.

The email came that they would be using mine (and several other people's) submissions in their article on the website. WoW.com is essentially a blog reader for World of Warcraft news and articles. They stay up to date on things so I don't have to. Kind of like reading a LOST blog, only with many contributing editors and articles on every aspect game. Not only were they using my submission, they were paying me for it. Awesome.

Oh, here's the link.

I like to write. I've always written for myself. I write a sporadic blog, so obviously it's not hard to get your words on the internet. But submitting something to a news article site and having it accepted and published with my name on it and getting paid for it makes it all seem so much more validated. Take something you enjoy, like a hobby, or a TV show, and imagine writing something about that and then someone paying you to share what they thought was a cool written work with a lot of people. That's pretty neat, right? Right.

The way they took the submission was pretty interesting too. WoW.com is part of the AOL network which has a program called seed. You sign up on the seed website and you can browse postings for submissions on various topics. That's how I send in the submission for WoW.com and got accepted. I sent in another submission on another topic recently. I'm waiting to see if they like that one too. If they don't, I can always post it on my own blog.

In other news, I should be getting the Xbox and FF13 on Easter weekend. Yay! Easter weekend will be in South Carolina with Teresa's family. Yay again! No, I mean that. And I'm currently engrossed in A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. It took me awhile to start it, but now that I have, I have a hard time putting it down. I'll post more on that when I finish it. Work has been kicking my butt, which may or may not have been a contributer to the lack of posting on this blog. It appears it will continue to kick my butt well into next month before it (hopefully) starts to get better. It's not all in my control either. Most of it is a wait and see and hope and scratch and scrape to keep things going until that time. I took on a lot of responsibility when I took this job a year ago. I'm starting to feel the full weight of that now.

Spring is trying to break through. The weather has been a mix of cold and not cold. No snow, some rain, and I broke my windshield wipers a few weeks ago so that's not a good thing. But at times we've been able to have the windows open in the house and let the breeze in. Something Hannah does not like. Actually, she might like it, but it gives her ample opportunity to stare out the window and bark and the slightest sound of anything.

Final Fantasy XIII Out Today

Alas, I do not yet have it...

I have never had a burning desire to own a Playstation 3 or an Xbox 360. That's in part due to only really playing one game over the last 3 years, and with nothing coming out on the PS3 or 360 that really would drive me to buy it when funds are tight, you tend to pick and choose your entertainment options. I'm sure I'd own two or three of them if I had money to spare, but I digress... for the time has come.

With the release of Final Fantasy XIII, I finally have a reason that I MUST own a PS3 or 360, and lucky for me, my brother-in-law is selling me his old 360 for less than half what I'd pay in a store, so I'm excited. Excited that I'll have it soon, sad that that is not yet the case. I think it may be as early as this weekend that I'll have it. We'll see.

This is par for the course for me. I grew up a Nintendo fanboy. Sega was the devil, (well, Sonic was fun) and everything Nintendo did was amazing. My first taste of Final Fantasy was FF2 on the SNES. I nearly beat it over a weekend of renting it, so I had to buy it. I eventually went back and played the original on the NES too. Then FF3 came out. Best. Game. Ever. I played the crap out of that game. I probably put hundreds of hours into it. Not lying. No, I don't regret that. Well, okay, maybe a little, but it was still awesome.

Then Squaresoft, the publisher, had the nerve to put the next Final Fantasy on the Sony Playstation and not the new Nintendo system. We also learned that Japan got a lot more Final Fantasies than we did, so the numbering system was messed up. My loyalties divided, Square proved the winner, and when FF7 was released, I bought a Playstation and the game. I'm trying to remember how I had all this disposable income as a kid. I distinctly remember saving and purchasing with my own money my SNES, N64, and the PS1, but that was all before my first real job. Huh.

Another fun fact on Final Fantasy 7. After having the game for a week, I distinctly remember my mother seeing the game timer at 30 hours of play time. Aghast at how I had spent 30 hours, nearly a full time job and during a school week no less, playing it, she made me turn it off for awhile.

Playstation 2? Bought it when Final Fantasy X came out, which oddly, I think was shortly after the launch of the system itself, so I paid a lot for it. The graphics were beautiful though. Then XI was released as an online MMO. I have never played it. You think I would have, but MMOs were not a possibility for me during college.

And thus we come to today, where I have evaded the urge to buy a "current generation" gaming console because my gaming has been almost entirely on the computer for the last few years. But today is not just any day. Today, Final Fantasy XIII is out, and I have stayed true to tradition. Soon I hope to be happily seated in front of the TV, enjoying a game I've been waiting for for nearly 4 years. I hope it was worth the wait.

Oh who am I kidding, it's Final Fantasy! Of course I'll love it.

The House You Grew Up In

My parents recently moved out of Alaska and back down to Oregon where I was born. The reasons were many, but I think they had lived out the adventure in Alaska enough and were ready to return to a place close to home. That was a few months ago, and now Dad is about to start a new job in Salem, where I have never lived, but is relatively close to other family. That means that mom and dad will be getting a house in Salem and moving there, probably very quickly.

Well, this got me thinking. They'll be living in a house I've never been to, have no memories of and is new to them as well. While growing up, we moved several times. First we lived in apartments, then more apartments, then a duplex, then a move over the mountain to a house, then a mobile home on the farm, then an apartment in Alaska, and then a house where I spent my High School days until I moved out to live on a college campus, only returning for Summers. That's a lot of different buildings. All of which I grew up in.

Compare that with my mom's parents, who have lived in their house for as long as I remember. I think mom spent most of her childhood in that house. If she didn't, I've never heard of the place she did. Dad's parents lived in a house in the same town as mom's parents that dad's brother is living in now, so his family is still growing up in that house. Teresa and I live about a 10 minute drive away from the house her dad grew up in, and the family still owns and uses. We visit her grandparents in South Carolina often enough in the house Teresa's mom grew up in. Even Teresa's parents house is where she spent most of her childhood.

So what I'm getting at is that I don't have that "one house you grew up in." I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just something that a lot of other people experienced that I didn't. I have memories of each place we lived. Good ones. But I can't really think of going back to any one of those places and calling it home. The house in Alaska probably is the closest thing to that, but that's probably because I have more recent and vivid memories of that one. It's not even the house I lived in the longest, though it may have been for my parents. I would say it's the same for my sister, but she lived in the Alaska house longer than I did, so she might think of that place as where she grew up. Even so, that house isn't around anymore for us to go back to, like the other examples above.

Even after college, I've been moving around a quite a bit. I lived in a townhouse after college, moved to NC for a few weeks and got married, then trucked it up to Boston to live in an apartment for awhile and then a two family home. Then back to North Carolina for a few months and then finally rented a house all to ourselves. One thing I am sure of, we're tired of moving. Another thing I'm sure of, is that we'll probably move again before we're really settled. And even then, I wonder, will we really settle? It seems I may have inherited some sort of nomadic tendencies from my parents, who still haven't settled to my knowledge.

So if you're reading this, I'm curious. Do you have a house you grew up in? Or do you have several houses? Which one feels the most like home? And can you still go back there if you want to? Out of all of the places we have lived, I think I would most like to go back to the farm. Being young and stupid, I wasted a lot of time living on the farm staying indoors. Now my fondest memories are of playing in the barn, the smell of the hay, and the things I did that were out of the ordinary like training a llama to walk over a bridge. So I'm a bit sad that I didn't do more of that when I had the chance. I wish I could do some of that over, but that being impossible, I might like to find a similar place to settle and finally live in a house I can grow up in.

Mythbusters

Have you heard about Mythbusters?

It's been on the Discovery channel for several years now. I had heard about it awhile back, but we don't get those fancy cable stations, so I had never seen it. That was until we got Netflix and I started watching streaming episodes of Mythbusters online. The show is a blast. Sometimes literally.

As you can tell by the name, the premise of the show is that they take "myths" or sayings, or stories, or historical things and they put to the test whether it could actually be done, or if it was just a tall tale, or a lie. Some of the myths are fairly well known, others more obscure. Some of the ways they come up with to prove or disprove the myths are pretty cool too. The two main mythbusters are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Their backgrounds are in special effects and props for movies, so they have the ability to create very inventive contraptions and things to test all of these myths.

I'm not sure what season of the show I'm watching. It's called the 4th collection. I think in the first few seasons it was just Adam and Jamie, but now they've got another three mythbusters, the build team, that tackles myths separately, sometimes together with, the main two guys. I've watched a few of the episodes where it was just the two main guys and I have to say that I enjoy watching the ones with both teams more. They get to tackle more myths in each episode that way, the personalities and interactions of the different mythbusters is very entertaining.

Adam is the goofy, fun, try anything guy. Jamie is the straight man, rarely laughing and just being very practical about it. But both of them are fairly ingenious at testing all of the myths they come up with. They often start with models and small scale tests before ramping it up to a full scale test.

Here are some examples of the things they test:

• Can an airplane achieve lift off from a conveyor belt?
• Can you really build an airplane out of bamboo like MacGuyver did?
• Are the gadgets that Batman uses actually possible?
• Some of the viral videos on the internet are pretty crazy, but are they true?
• Could cockroaches actually survive a nuclear blast?
• Can you really drive a car up in to a semi trailer while both of you are driving 55mph?

And that's just stuff from the 4th collection. There are three other collections to go through, plus some specials. I saw one episode where they went to Arcatraz and reenacted the escape of the only three prisoners ever to escape from the prison.

Anyway, if you're a geek like me, and into science at all, you might like Mythbusters. Check it out on Netflix or watch it on the Discovery channel. You'll be glad you did.