Where the hell have you been?

Tired.

I've just been tired. Tired of everything. Tired of doing things. Tired of writing things down. Just...tired.

Now, the bronchitis didn't help. But I'm mostly better--for example, I can now walk from my car to my office without feeling like I need a nap--and I'm still just tired. In a lot of ways, it's kind of reminiscent of the first few weeks of my spinal injury last year.

But I'm mentally tired, too. I think I just need a vacation.

It's been a while since I've blogged. What's been happening?

• I've been playing Half-Life 2 on the Xbox 360. It's like old home week, and it's made me remember how awesome it was running Chunky Boy's Firearms Server (R.I.P.). The only problem? I'm getting motion sickness! Really bad motion sickness, too. It's a little alarming; Quake 2 games (like the original Half-Life) never did that to me, and hell, I played Descent without feeling like I was going to barf. But I can only play HL2 for an hour or so before I have to stop. (Prey was like that for me, too.)


• I bought Guitar Hero III. Fun, but the songs are kind of lame. The wireless guitar is good, though, and it works with Rock Band.


• I've been considering buying a new PC and ditching the Macintosh entirely. It'll be a pain switching my iPod and iTunes library, but I'd have a gaming PC again. I thought I would switch entirely to console gaming and never need a gaming PC...but I think it's not happening. I'd ditch the Mac because it doesn't feel right for me to have three computers on my desk. I'm trying to figure out a good small form-factor loadout that will play games--if you have any ideas, let me know.


• I haven't been writing my script for Script Frenzy, and I don't think I'm going to. My brain doesn't want to work, so I will allow it a vacation.


• I've been reading the latest Company book by Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven. Kage Baker is great, the book is great. There's something about the phrase "the Botanist Mendoza" that hits me right. I wish I could explain it.


• We've been taking a stab at cleaning up the house. Still a work in progress.


• We've been making plans to celebrate our anniversary a little early this year. We're going to go to L'Etoile again. I'm looking forward to it. We've also been looking ahead to our fifteenth and trying to come up with plans for a trip. That's in 2011; we're looking at places in the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest and maybe (maybe) the Caribbean, but that's kind of just how it's shaken out--we're trying to concentrate on places that we've never been. If you have suggestions, let me know. Money is sort of no object, although we're not really looking at places that cost a thousand bucks a night. (What that means is that money IS an object, but we can do better than a Motel 6 and a trip to the dinner theater on route 30.)


• I've been watching "Top Chef". This is the first season I've really been into it. Shows like Top Chef really point out the deficiency of TV, though--you can't smell the food, you can't taste it. But damn, it sure looks good. Anyway, there are a lot of volatile personalities, and since they're drunk for the judging it makes for some...interesting television.


• The new season of Deadliest Catch starts on Tuesday.


• I e-filed our taxes this year. I'm not sure I'm going to do that again; it cost nearly forty bucks, all to save a few sheets of paper and a trip to the post office. I don't think it was worth it.


• The Child is doing her science fair project on ladybugs. I've been trying to guide her in her presentation--but I haven't been doing any of the work for her, so she's very proud of the work she put in on the project, and it's all done and arranged the way she wants it. My guidance was limited to making sure that she planned out what she wanted to say (it's a report, not an experiment) and that things were spelled correctly.


• For the aforementioned project, I printed out a couple of PD and CC-licensed photos at Walgreen's. When I did that, they called me and said "These pictures are too good. You need to sign a release when you come in to get them." Uh, okay. At work, we have a product that prints photos over the Internet (using technology built into Windows), and I've printed a lot of photos--some of them better than these two--at a lot of different places here in town and I've never had to sign anything. It's a little annoying, and while I understand that they need to cover themselves, they have no criteria other than "it looks too good." I kept pressing them for an explanation, and they couldn't provide one.


• David linked to this video the other day. It's great. As he says, be sure to watch at least half of it. But I think the ending is fantastic.
  

I guess that's it.