Wondering as I'm doing right now, that perhaps I might utilize my time a little better during my breaks. Usually I break out the PSP and start watching something, but maybe I should write some creative prose during my breaks. After all, I don't usually have the time after work to do that, or I'm just too tired to consider anything creative, so maybe my writing needs to happen earlier in the day. I've heard of writers taking the mornings to just write, and then take the rest of the day off in the afternoons. I don't have that luxury, but I can adjust accordingly perhaps. Hmm. Let me think about this while I watch a movie on the PSP.

Found out that Mariokart Wii was out today, not Tuesday as I thought, so we went and got it today. I have to say, the wheel that comes with the game is a joke, a hunk of plastic that looks plain silly when you're holding it in front of you mid-air. Don't know if its just me, but the controls feel a little different than before, a little looser. But I like it overall, its a good game for the kids, though a little tougher for them to navigate than Smash Bros Brawl. Button mashing for brawl isn't quite as difficult than the precise motions needed for Mariokart.

One of the few reasons that I didn't mind the cold weather is that I get to wear a jacket, which is a good way to hide my ever present junk food gut. Its probably not that big of a deal - I'm at the playground now and a lot of dads have the same spare tire that I do. So I'm in the right company. I was wearing my jacket today when I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and realized that the jacket wasn't working, I was just a fat guy in a leather jacket. Good thing my dating days are behind me.

We decided to get prescription glasses today, snce lenscrafters had a 130 dollar sunglasses deal. And even though the asterisk did warn, and I did expect a higher cost due to the strength of my prescription, I did not expect that our total cost coming out of there to be 600 bucks. So I'm a tad grouchy. Just a smidgen.

De-Zombie-fied!

Finally, my overtime debacle is over and I am, at least temporarily, human again. Having worked 60 hours last week, 52 hours this week, including my 12 and a half hours yesterday, I went into a self induced coma last night and slept about 10 hours. I was just dog tired last night after being on my feet for 12 hours.

This morning when I woke up next to my wife and said my first words, she said immediately, "There's my husband." Evidently when I'm tired, I become a completely different entity.

So while waiting for my phat paycheck next friday, we are busy making plans to spend every dime we've earned. Bunk beds, new clothes, birthday funds for the grandkids, perscription sunglasses, and of course, GTA IV and Mariokart later this week. Its almost tempting to just take Wednesday off, haul the ps3 into the room, and just play until my eyeballs peel off my face.

All my fawning about NPR and one of my favorite shows is actually not NPR. It might be PRI or something, but its "This American Life," hosted by Ira Glass. This weeks episode, called "Mistakes Were Made", was about Bob Nelson, who was into cryogenics in the 60s, and they were so rudimentary in their implementation of preserving the bodies that it involved several bodies in a metal container that was cooled with liquid nitrogen and dry ice. Then things turned for the worst. Fascinating stuff, free for download this week, so do check it out.

Started watching "Rome" on DVD, as well as "Gun". The latter was a HBO series that has a good deal of sex and violence, as well as a pretty good storyline. It makes for careful and discreet watching at work. "Gun" was a anthology series in the early nineties, interesting in concept as we follow a gun through different hands in each episode, but it only lasted six episodes. The one I watched first was okay, a bit silly in realism, but that's just me.

Well, gonna spend the day with the fam now!

Stuff

Finally caved and got a 2 gig card for my phone, because sometimes it seems like a good idea to have a touch of music in the car when I don't have my ipod. Also, having access to podcasts can be nice as well. The sidekick has a decent speaker so it does make for a nice little music device, though I've still got to work on getting a working adapter for the headphones.

Kids really have zero concept about time. As far as they're concerned, all they ever have to worry about is what their tiny little bodies tell them, unaware that their bodies have been set to an internal timetable that we have imposed upon them since the day they were born. Ah, but the youngins are getting wiser, even though they cannot read time, they have learned to associate nighttime with bedtime. So naturally, when the sun starts peeking at 6 in the morning, the boy erronously decides its time for him to wake up. I'm thinking of flashcards of when he should wake up and when he should go to bed, we'll have to see how it goes.

I can't really take credit for Dansen switching to a mac, but I wonder how much influence I had in that decision. Anyway, he's going to be a machead soon, and he will never go back. I really should be working for Apple, considering my fanaticism for them. I'm hoping I left my ipod in my locker though, since I can't find it anywhere at home. There's a potential foe acquiring an ipod touch from a friend of a friend for about half the retail price, but we'll see how that all pans out. I'm only about 25% sure that will even happen.

Yes, it is true, I had two leftover KFC thighs for breakfast this morning, along with diet coke at around 5 in the morning. I should be voted to be most likely to die from a eating related incident.

Twitter and Spending Money

So NPR talks about the Twitter goodness that goes on, and how it's changing forms of communication and it's all Web 2.0 and whatnot, so I decided to reactivate my account after losing interest and deleting my account. Well, got back in, and then to my disappointment it doesn't support my prepaid Sidekick plan, which means Twitter is just pretty much microblogging on the computer if I don't use it from my mobile. Hmm. So, there it goes, can't use it now. So much for Twitter.

Spending a bit of money on this odd Sunday, which has alternated between snow and a bit of sun. We've been hit by some odd April hail and snow, but after we emerged from Costco, it was a sunny spring day. Odd. Spend over 160 bucks at Costco, but also booking tickets for our Alcatraz cruise in May. Thankfully the kids are small enough to be freebies, otherwise it'd be costing a lot. Anyway, I'm fighting temptation to buy anything because it about a week I'll be blowing about 100 bucks on GTA IV and MarioKart. So I gotta be good for a while. But gaming goodness will be bestowed upon me.

Still doing the 58 hours a week schedule, though this week should be the last of it, and it'll likely only be a 48 hour week since the fiscal year ends on a Friday. Whatever, the OT will be worth the trouble. I never used to be a OT whore, but since I've had a month or two without any OT, I started to notice that cushion that the OT provided was actually kinda nice.

My friend loaned me his spiffy new iPod so that I could load it up with music and any video, and it helped inform me what to shoot for when I do have to replace my own iPod. My iPod's been acting up a little, but not quite worth replacing yet. It still does what it needs to relatively well, despite some soft resets throughout the day is inevitable. Not terrible of a reason enough for me to get a new one. But anyway, it doesn't settle any decisions about what I want to get, but it sure weigh it better. But man, 80 gigs is a lot of space to fill. I've thrown audio and video at it and there's still 40 gigs to fill. We're talking 3000 plus songs plus 6 or 7 movies and a bunch of podcasts. It doesn't stop.

The kids have been acting more human lately, and we believe that it's a strong correlation to the limitation of sugar we've placed on them. Way less junk food and candy makes for more agreeable kids. A noticable difference for sure.

Anyway, I'm distracted so I'll just end it here.

60 hours

The reason for the tumbleweeds drifting through thr columns of this blog is because my work is owning me. It is the end of the fiscal year and there has been tales of long hours and general evilness, and this past week I was doing 60 hours, Monday to Saturday, 10 hours each. Same will go for this week, followed by a 50 hour week. If I wasn't trying desperately to make up some dough for vacation, I wouldn't bother. Then again, it's not like I have much of a choice anyway.

There really haven't been much else happening when one works so much, other than develop a unhealthy disdain for one of my co-workers. I am cordial with him, but I don't show much interest in what he has to say, mostly because he thinks rather highly of himself. Well, I think highly of myself as well, but I don't throw my weight around and order people about. Ah, i'll just drop it now. Too much time is wasted on the issue.

My wife had 5 days off, because of some ironic karma, so when she told Zoe she had to go to work today, Zoe was pretty teary eyed and sad. Nothing a little Smash Bros Brawl didn't solve, but it was nonetheless a little secretly comforting to my wife. See, Alex for the past few days have been asking if my wife is working, and is disappointed when she isn't. He likes it when its Daddy watching them. We figured out later that it was linked to my phrasing. Whenever Alex asks if he could play Mario fighting game, I always say, "After Mommy goes to work", so that the kids wouldn't just ignore it when my wife leaves and says goodbye to the kids. Well, Alex interprets it as we never play the game unless Momy is at work, as if it were something secret we do when mommy isn't home. Silly tots.

Dansen and I have done a couple podcasts now, and they are slowly improving over time. Biggest issue right now is syncing, the first one was horrendous and the second one is much improved, but the audio doesn't quite sync up. So like a responsible friend I simply forwarded the audio to Dansen and just let him deal with it. Like I mentioned: 60 hours. I get a little picky about how I spend my time.

I'm looking forward to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, coming out later this month to much hype and pretty good previews. I'm ready to drop sixty on the bad boy, although the experience will undoubtedly be dampened by not being able to play it 90 percent of the time I'm awake, because those are the times when the kids are awake too. Poor me. I'm having the same problem with Half Life, not being able to play it unless everyones out or sleeping. Because the game has zombie elements as well, that even rules out when my wife is around. But nonetheless, still excited about the game.

Well, my thumbs are getting a little numb and the kids are starting to picket, so I best be starting some form of entertainment for them. Maybe more later when I figure out something to say.

Wife Post - Alex's Mobile

So Alex has gotten a little attached to his "cell phone" lately. It's a pretend phone but obviously it is rather important to him. So much that when we are now going out to exciting places like a picnic he will call up an imaginary friend and have a conversation with them telling them what is going on and inviting them. He really sounds quite grown up about it and it almost always sounds like he is really talking to someone on the other end. I think it's really cute. Well today he did it a couple times. Once to let the "person" know we were going to Redmond Town Center and the playground, another time when we were getting hot dogs at Wetzels pretzels but I found it really endearing when Zoe fell and scraped her knee, leaving us to head for home. On the way back to the car he told the doctor "we have to go home now Zoe has an owie." He talked some more and hung up telling me the doctor said to give Zoe lots of loves and bandaids. Taking his advicce that's exactly what I did. I am so glad he called the "doctor".

Audio

Inspiration Struck and Hit Dansen

Yeah, it's been a while since a posty posty, but it's mostly because I was trying to let the April Fools joke take effect, since I know not everyone reads the blog everyday like my wife does. And then I got lazy and inspired!

So I was listening to the podcasts at work, slighty worried because twice in the week static electricity had travelled up my ears and shocked them. And yeah, it hurt like hell to get shocked inside your ears, and you do really hear a pop before the pain follows. So anyway, listening to podcasts and actually missing broadcasting. Shooting the witty banter and doing a bit of creativity. I thought about how to possibly find a mate to do it, and I couldn't figure it out. Then I thought of a guy whom I had great chemistry with, but he's in Japan. So we met up, he's game for it, and we're going to give it a go tomorrow night. We'll see what happens. A lot of technical obstacles, i'll say.

Work sucks.

Production had been on hold for the past 6 weeks and it had been absolute torture. They want us to stay busy, but there's really nothing worth doing. So I've been doing odd little menial tasks, like scraping old stickers off carts and moving shit around. Well, there was a glimmer of hope for about a day, but now a field action is causing us to basically be on hold for another 4 weeks. Aside from the additional dead time, it also means that all that sweet overtime that I've been anticipating is going down the drain. Because the company fiscal year ends in April, I doubt there will be any overtime for a while.

Apart from the homemade electroshock therapies I've received, my ipod is trying to fail on me. It freezes in mid-podcast, forcing me to reboot and rehunt where I left off. I would say about 8 reboots every day I work, which can be quite a nuisance. So I've done some research, and I've come up with a plan to get a nano sometime in September. Why then? Well, every September since its launch there's been a new redesign, and I'm guess they will likely bump up their base model to 8 gigs, easy. Furthermore, I'm siding with the nano not only because of the price, but also because it, like the touch, has a flash drive. The 3.5 drive in the classic is skipping in mine, I suppose they're not really made for too much movement or drops. So, that's the plan. If the ipod does die, I'll try my best to substitute it with something else. Between my PSP and my phone, I should have some alternative.

Right, its late now.