Dream of Waking Ne Cede Malis

I jinxed it.

I guess talking too much about it hexed me and now I'm waking up bright and early on my Saturday to go in for my 24 hours of sitting at a desk. I guess this will give me plenty of time to finish A Clash of Kings and Megaman ZX. I might get so much done that I'll be bored next weekend, when I'm doing it again except on a Sunday.

Megaman ZX is beyond awesome. It's basically Megaman Zero with a Metroid-Castlevania open-ended design. You still take on missions and fight bosses and minibosses but there's hub areas connected to those levels and hidden stuff is everywhere. You also get different armors, each one being a copy of a major character in the X series. There's the X armor, the Zero armor, Harpuia, Leviathan, Fefnir, and Phantom. They've all got different crazy abilities. I'm about three or four hours in and just finished the first four bosses so it'll probably end up to be around 10 hours of gameplay, which is twice as long as I spent on Megaman Zero 4. And that's without hunting down every single secret in ZX.

So I've got one single shred of hope that I'll walk in tomorrow and whoever they found to replace me will already be there. Or else I'll be sitting there, asleep or finishing off Megaman ZX.

Huge gland

I've got a gland on the back of my neck that has grown to enormous size. It's below the bug bite behind my right ear.

I was watching X-Files on my X-box tonight. It was X-treme.

Tomorrow will be a good day. Tomorrow is Mega Man day. Mega Man ZX comes out tomorrow. I'm very excited.

So I've been home for close to two months. Everyone else came back last Friday. At my unit we keep a kind of help desk manned 24 hours a day. It wasn't manned 24 hours while we were deployed but shortly before everyone came back the guys who stayed behind started doing it 24 hours again. When the first flight came back (after mine) I sat the desk because everyone was pretty spread thin and I didn't have anything going on that day. It was basically a favor. I was doing it to help out, not because I was scheduled to do it or because I belonged there because I didn't. I didn't spend the whole year in the States, not even close, I just came back early and took a tiny bit of leave before I got back to my task at hand.

So imagine my surprise when I saw I was on the duty roster to have that 24 hour shift again. Twice. On two consecutive weekends. It's as if the person who did the schedule said to themselves "well he may have a job to do all week but he won't mind sitting at this desk and forfeiting his weekend too". Alright. I, Specialist Hub, probably don't have the authority to say "hey guy, that's fucked up" so I sat on it. Patience is a virtue.

Today I was talking to my supervisor (who just came back on that last flight) and somehow duty rosters came up so I let him know they've got me on it already. He said it's not right and he'll do what he has to to get me off. I'm optimistic. He's pulled me off some stupid crap like that before. So now I've got a weekend to look forward to again.

Birthdays, Corneria, eyeballs, etc

So this weekend was my birthday. A rather low-key event this year as we used the money we would've used to come to Springfield to get the brakes fixed on the Saturn. 3 hours and $200 later we have a new rotor and new pads and no more grinding sounds.

I got pancakes for breakfast and a strawberry cake and a Nintendo DS lite and a (second) copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters and Silent Hill (the movie) on DVD and the first season of Darkwing Duck. I traded in my DS fatty and got Killer7 for gamecube and Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for DS but RE was really just the first one all over again and I don't think I can go back to no ammo, no fun Resident Evil anymore after playing Resident Evil 4. So I took it back and got Star Fox Command and pre-ordered Megaman ZX.

Star Fox Command is fun and hard. I haven't really played a Star Fox game since the first one on SNES and Command is a different creature. Instead of linear shooting levels you start with an overworld map and from there you intercept wings of bad guys with your fighters to keep them from getting at your base. Once you've encountered a wing, the game goes into a timed free fly mode where you sue the stylus to fly around and blow up and required number of bad guys within the time limit. Your time limits carry over from one level to the next so you can't waste a lot of time goofing off but there's power-ups that give you more time that are worth the effort to find. I'm on my fifth mission and this game is kicking my ass but it's from lack of practice and not insane difficulty so I'm working on it.

I had an appointment with the laser surgeon today. They took pictures of my eyeballs until the nurse asked how long I'd had my contacts out. It was about 12 hours at that point and she said they needed to be out for two weeks prior to today and that we were wasting our time since they'd been out for only 12 hours. What a pain in my ass. Now I have to spend the next couple weeks contact-less and then I have to call them on the 15th to get my next appointment. If they had told me when I made the appointment in the first place, this wouldn't have been an issue. Making and remaking appointments and wasting time make me want to strangle the kind people at the laser clinic. It's okay though. Two weeks of glasses to remind me that I won't be needing these when they're done with me.

Silent Hill the movie was totally awesome. Very true to the games and the story almost exactly follows the first Silent Hill but with a female lead with a very appropriate ending.

That's about all there is to my weekend. Two more days of work and then I get another. I love weekends.