Summertime

Happy Summer Solstice (at 11a.m. my time). Go somewhere safe and appropriate and light yourself a bonfire and revel around it, preferably nekkid.

Yesterday Rael got his first haircut. It was done by Denise and looks only ok not great but now he definitely looks like a boy.

I'm watching this ridiculous giant crocodile movie, Primeval with the older kids right now. It's really awful in the Anaconda vein of awful.

This is Where I Came In

Ten days of silence. . .sorry.

The last two weeks have had a lot of me helping out with babysitting for a friend and intensive housecleaning--all keeping my online presence to a minimum. On some levels it is a little refreshing to disconnect though--on some levels.

Yesterday my kids all showered me with my Father's Day slash Birthday gifts and well-wishes. They got me a towel, some flip-flops, blank DVDs, ballpoint pens and an Xbox360 game. My kids are awesome. I spent the day yesterday being lazy, playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion all day on the 360 and letting Denise watch the kids for me. Thanks, dear, and thanks Shel for the clue on that quest I was stuck on--you completely got me through it. Rock on.

Today, my 33rd birthday (sigh), I feel generally fine (a little allergy annoyed) and will be spending the day watching all the kids, reading some comics and probably doing some swimming. I and two of the kids got pretty bad burns last week so I need to be more vigilant with the sunscreen. Ouch.

Thanks to Drew for the DVD (I've wanted and put off getting that disc for ages) and the Communist propaganda. Thanks to Chrissy for the forthcoming night out and to anyone else for the current and future well-wishings.

I'm going to go now before I find myself bitching about the season premiere of Rescue Me.

In Love With the '80s

Spoilers of 28 Weeks Later below.

Yesterday I finally got around to watching 28 Weeks Later (far too long since its premiere). Like it? Yes. Love it? Not so much. I really dug on how the severity of action was kicked up a notch from the last one. It has the best helicopter vs zombies scene in film to date. Up until the final reel it had a good amount of the social commentary I expect from good zombie movies: there were allegories for the fall of man in an "every man for himself" mentality (and the requisite examples of the importance of caring for others), overdone examples of the American way of handling problems by squashing them. And therein lies my first dislike: just how absolutely retarded did the writers have to make the US military in order to pull off the sequence of events in their plot? What idiot lets a civilian in alone with an infected? Why wasn't there automated containment? Although, I think my first uneasy feeling came about when I realized that the soldiers highlighted were pretty much the soldiers that would include Chris in their ranks: the medical squads. I actually had a momentary worry that Chris was going to end up getting attacked by zombies. Social commentary disappears in the final reel though, where the movie veers directly into the territory that Adj hates about zombie movies--it becomes entirely nihilistic as the plague of zombie infection is now spreading beyond England. The score for this film (which is the same as that of its predecessor) is one of my favorites as well. I really dig on that music.

Dig dug.

Remember when we were kids and most of the cool video games were two-player jobs? You'd have your pals over after school and team up to take down aliens in Contra or take turns trying to save Princess Peach? Lately I've been finding myself more and more displeased with the state of the multi-player video game industry. Nowadays it seems that all of the best games are single player (by best I mean most popular or best produced) or multi-player online only; the interaction with your pals aspect of gaming is dying as any human connection is weeded out in favor of ethereal connections with strangers on the internets. Yesterday this hit me hardest when Brian was over and we wanted to Xbox 360 and all we had available for two-player action was Tetris (which was still great, but not for hours of fun). Sure, the occasional rare GOOD multi-player game does still come out now and again--about one per fifty single player jobs and it's disheartening. Why even have 4-player capability built into the machine if most of the games won't even accommodate two?

Fascinating New Thing

The cable is finally off, and the person who wanted it canceled in order to save on finances was the first person to lament its end. At the moment, I'm watching tv on dvd--Huff season one to be specific.

I've had this mystery nausea for the past two days. It's really annoying at this point, the light headedness, the nausea, the constant gag reflex feeling. Yuck.

School's out for the kids after tomorrow. I'm so ready to be able to cut back on my chauffeur duties for nine or so weeks. Lots of swimming and working out beckons.

I've been playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and I'm stuck on this quest to find clues about a stolen painting. It too is annoying, but I can abandon the quest and move on; I think I will.

Well, my head is beckoning to me to end this, so later days.

Photograph

Brian requested that I remove this video as he doesn't want to be on the internet and I'm not computer savvy enough to edit his face out of the video. So, sorry folks, the lightsaber duel (along with the background discussion of single 40-something lesbians) is gone (still on my hard drive if anyone wants).

It's Good to Be King

Today's disturbing news.

Dreams

Last night I dreamt that I'm going to have to drop out of school. I qualify that as a nightmare. How frustrating would that be to be just one class and one exam away from your Master's degree and then something happen to make you drop out? That was a rhetorical question. The dream has already put me in a mood that I only hope I'll be able to overcome at some point throughout the day.

Argh.

I really have no clue how I would be able to deal with life if that were to actually happen. So much time and effort has been put towards this degree.

I hate dreaming.