Month: November 2003

Today is a historic day for me. I paid the first contractor his last check. Which means that all the major structural work on the house is done, and paid for. With one exception – the front deck that was poured concrete needs to be fixed, but he’s obligated to fix it, because he screwed it up. But everything is done!

Excellent.

October 1, 2001->November 29, 2003.

Weird. Lost a couple of posts. Looks like Blogger barfed up a bit. Basically, playing some Ratchet & Clank, Project Gotham 2, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. All excellent games. Lots of great stuff coming out in the last month or so – much too much to keep up on.

Lost my cell phone, which sucks. Vaguely contemplating getting an N-Gage to replace it, since they’re cheap right now, but unsure. Otherwise, not a whole lot going on, really.

So. Been watching some Cowboy Bebop again recently. If you’re reading this, and haven’t seen it, just go buy it on DVD, watch the whole thing. Amazing stuff. Other’n that? Not a whole lot going on. Drywall’s stalled because the inspection screwed up the schedule, not a lot for me to work on (though I’m going to NYC next week for stuff with the saw I’d been using, which is being transferred to Deer Park). Having kind of a hard time self-motivating to do productive stuff, but that’s not such a big deal – definitely sort of a vacation time, where I’m not stressing about stuff. Before, I was always *doing* something, so it’s a nice break. Maybe I’ll change the oil in the Mini tomorrow. Hopefully, if I get off my butt, and the weather stays alright.

Rowed a bit last night on the Concept 2. Nice workout, and I’ve got some soreness in the traps, which is good. Other than that, though, I haven’t been exercising a whole lot, which is pretty lame of me. Playing a lot of games, though – Sly Cooper for the PS2 is *phenomenal* for a platformer, and one of the best games of its kind I’ve seen in ages. Rainbow Six 3 has some serious problems in the online play – the accuracy of the guns is all out of whack. I’m sorry, but regardless of how unskilled I am with a gun, if I’m standing five feet in front of someone, and letting loose a clip, they’re dead. Period. But there are games where I’ll unload a clip into someone, reload (because they can’t hit me either), and then fire at them again. Eventually, one of us will die, but it’s almost totally unpredictable who or why. Very, very irritating. Top Spin tennis is freakin’ PHENOMENAL, and if you hold Virtua Tennis as the gold standard, then Top Spin’s the new platinum.

Picked up a couple other games as well (yeah, massive sale. Shoot me.) Crimson Skies is fantastic, if I haven’t mentioned that before – excellent multiplayer, more than serviceable in single player, even. Virtual Fighter 4: Evolution is also a much bigger step up from VF4 than I’d expected. Grabbed The Sims for the xbox, which is interesting (more on that in a later post), as well as Simpsons: Hit and Run, which is mighty funny. Oh, the last game of the bunch is Medal of Honor: Frontline, which I threw in for the first time tonight, and is quite impressive, at least at the beginning. Great scripting going on, but a weird sort of ineffectualness, in many ways, if you don’t know specifically what you’re supposed to do, which is weird. Still, a pretty uniformly high-quality group of games. Couple that, with the stuff I got from EA a couple weeks back, and I probably won’t pick anything up ’till next year, except maybe Counterstrike, and even that will probably wait ’till after Thanksgiving, and not come out of my pocket.

Trying the Atkins diet. It’s weird, for sure, and not even really a “diet” per se, because it’s something you have to essentially consistently do forever to reap the benefits. So it’s more like an “eating mode,” or something of that nature. I started at 225, and I’m at 215 now, which was my original “goal” for Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how well I’d be able to stick to something like this after working on a more regular schedule, though, because while dinner is easy enough to maintain, I don’t usually eat breakfast, and lunch would be at work, which is trickier, since I don’t wake up early enough to prepare meals. But this, combined with exercise, and hopefully, I’ll be in reasonable shape at least sometime sooner than later.

We’ll see.