Home Alone
Tonight I ate ramen for dinner and finished season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. I must be home alone!
Katie's in Springfield for a month. Being home alone is pretty lame. There's no one here to talk to except Chester and the cats. They're not exactly talkative either.
Sing blue silver
I can't listen to the Deftones' cover of Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" just once. I have to put it on repeat for half of a day.
Work sucks. All the four day weekends are gone. We got rid of our satellite tv receiver last weekend so I'm almost at a loss for things to do after work. I'll probably get a lot more gaming done, until the cables I ordered to hook a laptop up to the TV come in, then I suppose I'll be crashed on the couch watching Hulu all night.
I recently read Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War". It's basically a literary response to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" based on Haldeman's experiences in the Vietnam war. It's an amazing book. Coming home from two year long deployments was always something of a shock. So many things had changed that it's like I was put in a box for a year and brought out into this bizarre new world and Haldeman illustrates that kind of culture shock when the main character returns to Earth decades after he left, though time dilation causes him only to age a year or two. Everything he remembered from before he left seemed to have gotten bleaker, less enjoyable, the same way coming back from Iraq to a Bush-ravaged economy was to me. It's like in the span of a year, the whole world had hit a downward slope at a faster pace than I could've imagined.
It really made me want to read John Steakley's "Armor" again so that's what I'm doing now. Another amazing book.
It begins.
Today I scheduled my first pre-seperation counseling. This will probably be the longest year of my life.
I’ve clearly angered someone.
I'm in a gaming rut. There's nothing in particular that I really want to play that I already own. This weekend I spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at my game collection, trying to work up the nerve to install and play one. I want to play Doom 3 but it doesn't play well with 64bit Vista. I kind of want to play Deus Ex but then I remember that I hate Deus Ex. But hey, what's like Deus Ex except fun? Deus Ex: Invisible War. And I just so happen to own it on Steam.
I install it. As it downloads I find that wizz-bang new High Definition textures pack. The game finishes downloading, I install the texture pack, and run the game. Crash to desktop. No error given. Okay, maybe the texture pack isn't playing nice. Uninstall the texture pack. Run it. Crash to desktop. No error. Fuck. Maybe the texture pack didn't uninstall cleanly. Delete the game, re-download the game, run it. Crash to desktop. No error. The support forums have mention of the same problem but the answers are never the same for each post. None of the solutions work. I'm just fucked.
Today I'm on 24 hour duty. I'm using my laptop, which runs Windows XP. Maybe I can play Deus Ex: Invisible War! Slowly download it. Run it. Holy shit, it's working. Get in the game, start to enjoy myself for about 20 minutes, the power goes out. Turn it back on, it's giving an overheat error. This is an old laptop. It's never overheated before but this is not unheard of. I try a couple more times to make sure it wasn't something else with the same results. When I go home for dinner, I made sure to get my small tools to bring back with me. I open up the laptop, dust out some old Iraqi crap, pull out two dust bunnies conveniently located around the fans, and put it back together. When I start it up, I can hear one fan going. The other isn't. Okay, that's an improvement. Run the game. Start to enjoy myself. Power cuts out. I'm fucked again.
I can sit here and watch Battlestar Galactica for three hours straight but I can't play a game for longer than 20 minutes. I don't even want to bother with playing a less graphically intensive game at this point. In conclusion, the laws of heat transfer can go to hell.
Craigslist: It works!
So we got a new stove about three weeks ago. Our old stove still works but it's kind of crappy. Our new stove shows up, it works great, now we have a hunk of metal that's just taking up space. It's not garbage because it still works but there's no way in hell it's fitting in the back of my Corolla. Katie tried contacting someone on Craigslist who offered free appliance pickup and disposal and they totally flaked out. So today we gave it another shot, this time we'd list the stove and let people come to us.
I published the ad and in an hour I already had two offers. It's only been up for six hours and I've gotten five offers. Provided the first one doesn't flake out, by 9am tomorrow I'll be free of one enormous paperweight. The power of the internet! Or the desire of people for something free.