Long December

Well, took a little break from the bloggin'.

December proved to be a busy month, but we had a good Christmas. I came away with some great stuff. I got enough gift cards and money from Staci's side to purchase a Sony ebook reader at Target. I'm fairly excited about that, considering I've been wanting one for over a year now, since I first saw one. Though I still someday want a Kindle :)

The Holloway New Year's Party is coming up. I'll work on some resolutions.

Animal Crossing: City Folk - My Opinion

I became a millionaire on Animal Crossing today. It's pretty nice having a fully squatted town that everyone actually plays on every day. In fact, I haven't seen it this way since 2002, when I first played the original. It's really fun to get a lot of inside jokes and nuances going between the players and the animals.

I actually think that all the reviews I read were somewhat unfair until I really think about it. And I guess that's a good thing, because all the reviewers should really be thinking about it. The problem I have with the reviews that I have read, however, has been that they look at it more from a "how much effort has Nintendo put into this" standpoint - as opposed to the final product. What we have now is the ultimate version of a very fun series. It is just an update, really, to the DS release, but it is the best version because of that. It has a lot of new items, including new complete sets of furniture. It has WiiConnect24 going for it, so sending letters to friends in other towns is awesome.

Oh well, I'm not trying to make a feature list or write a review here. Just state an opinion. Animal Crossing remains a fun concept, and a fun game. I'm glad we're all playing it. I will always buy the next "update".

The Forced Work Rant. And a Telescope.

It was fairly cold this morning at 4am. I didn't get to see it, of course, but while working early this morning it snowed outside. And it didn't stick around long enough for me to enjoy it. Work itself was fairly boring, fraught with all the usual stress-related side effects. Including a perpetual grimace, work-worry related butterflies (will I get this done in time?), and telling yourself that it doesn't really matter anyway. Believe me when I say that almost 100% of the time, I really could care less about how Sam's is faring given the economy and how much profit they are losing to the gas prices being the lowest since when I was in high school. I really could, most of the time, care less about whether or not they are satisfied with my work, because in truth, it's just not my bag, baby.

And yet, I still get all of those stress-related side effects. The grimace is almost impossible not to get. Some of it is probably related to sleep deprivation involving getting up at 4am every day. But most of it is having a full task list, and then having to welcome an entire new one from a different manager with open and smiling politeness. Does that make me a good employee?

But, on to much cooler subjects. I have a pretty little telescope with the ability to capture astro images that I obtained as an early Christmas and birthday present from my grandmother-in-law. I haven't gotten to see much of anything yet. This is really just due to our backyard being the least accommodating to telescopes of any location. There are trees surrounding the entire yard. Next door there is an extremely bright night lamp. And, even if I could see most of the cosmos, they would shake uncontrollably due to the only possible base being a tiny bit of a wobbly deck that takes up most of the yard. That causes any images I can render to perpetually draw tiny bright circles and footballs in the lense. I just saw Venus doing this a few minutes ago.

So yes, a fairly uneventful day, really. It has forced me to write about work. I hate that.