Thanksgiving week. . . all 19 days of it

Dear God, it's actually good to be back in some sort of routine! This past week was good and busy and crazy and sad and lazy all at the same time. Aren't holidays always like that, though? Here's a brief synopsis of my week:

~Monday: work. Holiday work. That is, not very productive work.
~Tuesday: Airport driving trip. I had to take my mom to the Baltimore airport for her 4:40pm flight to Utah; it took me 2 hours to get there, and almost 4 to get back. Damned beltway rush hour.
~Wednesday: work. Sorta. Also holiday work, just more so.
~Thursday: Thanksgiving, yaaay! My dad and brothers and I all gathered and ate too much. It was nice to have all the men-folk together one last time. . .
~Friday: Vegas or Bust! My older brother and younger brother loaded up two cars, and off they went! David is moving out to stay, Michael just fancied a road trip. They are stopping off in Utah to see my younger sister and the new baby, and to say hi to my mom. Then it's off to Vegas to see Dave's new apartment, unload, go to Glitter Gulch for about 18 hours, and then Mike will wend his way homeward.

Not much else to mention. I have my house to myself for the month, so I'm gonna be a Grinch and not bother with decorating. The cats have enough things to destroy as it is, they don't need more excuses to freak out. . . I have a bunch of unused vacation time, so I might take off every friday in December, just to do some house cleaning and take care of personal business (*coughSTAROCEANcough*). Oh, and I might be joining a sportsman's club soon, which would mean I could shoot my guns indoors, all winter -- shaWEET!

Did anyone else lose their precious data to the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo? Apparently, Sony's 2004 Holiday Game Demo disc has a bug that erases the data on any card in the console if you play the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo. (I feel for you, Joe!) To the casual gamer, this might not sound like a serious matter. . . but we hard-core RPGers have hundreds of hours of our lives distilled into those saved files. I would crawl under my bed, assume the fetal position, and weep softly for a whole week if my Carnage Heart files were wiped out. I wonder if any lawsuits will come from this. . . how do you place a monetary value on saved game data? And how do you convince a gamer to brave sunlight and human interaction long enough to appear in court? And how do you convince that gamer that wearing a Chrono Trigger t-shirt and referring to the female judge as "yo, hammer lady" isn't a good idea?

I have too much entertainment to get through. Anime: 10 new DVDs of Urusei Yatsura, Big O II, Aquarian Age, Metal Fighters Miku, Aura Battler Dunbine all in the 'To Watch' pile. Games: still playing Hot Shots Golf Fore, dammit, when I should be playing Star Ocean, and I will have Ace Combat 5 at some point. Books: almost at the halfway point of The Dark Tower, the last novel in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. After that, there's the original Dune trilogy, two volumes of The Year's Best Science Fiction, Dies The Fire, Tales Of EarthSea, and about seven others. Plus, I really need to get back to practicing Japanese for a while every day.

Hey, anyone who reads this can leave comments. . . see that little "comments" thing in little type at the bottom of the post? Click on that and it will let you leave your own message. I like getting comments! (a million thank-yous, o Empress of Dairy Queen!)

Hopefully I'll have some more pics up next post. In the meantime, go to www.funnypages.com and read the cat haikus. Good stuff.

TTFN