Lots of Thinking

Tuesday I did end up going to the Haven, and I watched Gene and Steve play Warhammer for the fantasy campaign that's going on. They didn't finish until about half an hour after closing time, but it was so fascinating that I didn't feel like going home until they were done. I've watched bits of two different other Warhammer games since then, and I think I might want to learn the game. But I won't buy an army for myself unless I really get into it--and then, only a few years or so down the road. Until then, I'll just use the armies they have at the store for club use.

Last Saturday, I went to Allegheny Optical and got my eyes checked. I found out that it'd been four years since my last eye exam. It's funny--I never realize how long it's been between exams until I put on/in my new prescription in the optometrist's office. I put in those new contacts, and everything was much, much sharper. It made me realize that having trouble reading road signs from the short distance I'd been having trouble at was not normal. I've resolved to go to the optometrist at least once a year from now on, or at least listen and schedule further appointments as recommended, instead of waiting for the money to be there and then scheduling the appointment. I also got a new set of frames. They're like the frames I had two prescriptions ago (which I still have), but they're copper-y colored, instead of gold.

Kayla's currently in Alabama, visiting her family, so when she gets back this weekend there will be two episodes of Pushing Daisies and Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction to watch--much fun! I have yet to get caught up on Psych, Numb3rs, Bones or Smallville though. I'm thinking I'll just catch them on Sidereel later. I've also not yet finished watching my MacGyver DVDs--I've been in the middle of season 4 for at least a month and a half. Plus, I want to re-watch at least seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy and seasons 4 and 5 of Angel--I don't remember much about Angel, and I've only seen those seasons of Buffy once, with a few episodes here and there from when Anna and Kayla were going through the serieses.

I've been thinking too, that I might give up on re-reading the core DragonLance novels--I've been in the middle of Dragons of Winter Night for months now, and I've only read that much because I needed something to read while I got my allergy shots every Monday.

BUT! A girl at the Haven this past Tuesday (not the one with the Warhammer) brought a bunch of books she was getting rid of, and I took 7 or 8 that looked promising (I haven't added them to LibraryThing yet, but I will this weekend), including Sister Light, Sister Dark, which, if I remember correctly, Heather recommended to me a few months ago and sounded extremely intriguing. So, if I do decide to quit on DragonLance, then I'll be reading those books.

Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to catch up and read fast enough to actually make the 50-book goal this year.

Didn't Quite Get Things Finished, but Had Fun Anyway

After setting up the modem and such on Friday night, I found out that my DirecTV receiver had already been delivered (three days before that). So I set it up in my room, but apparently the installer guy who did the first receiver didn't hook up the satellite to the whole house--just that one receiver. So, they're sending another installer guy to hook up the satellite to my room and Stacie's room on Wednesday.

Because I didn't know the receiver had been delivered (and didn't know the cable hook-up on my wall wasn't connected to the satellite yet), I missed both Psych and Smallville. There was no episode for Numb3rs last week.

Saturday, I did my financial figuring, paid the bills, got groceries and gas, then packed up to go to Mom & Dad's house. I've decided that I'll probably end up spending at least Saturday nights there every week, now that Kayla's moved out of the townhouse.

I got to Mom & Dad's around 4pm with all the stuff I'd brought: clothes for Sunday, the novel I'm reading, my Astronomy spiral and various accoutrements so that I could do homework, my flashlight, my glasses case, my vitamins, half-a-case of Lipton Green Tea with Citrus (to share with Anna) and six games.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the board game
• Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit
• Aggravation
• Skip Bo
• Harry Potter Uno
• Phase 10

I put my stuff up in Anna's room, and we played the Buffy game with Kayla and Jason. I was Willow and Xander, Kayla was Buffy, Jason was Oz, and Anna played the evil side. We played two games--one with Adam as the villain, and one with the Judge--and Evil won both times. Then I watched last week's Psych episode. It was fun (of course), and I like the fact that Chief Vic is no longer just the interim chief anymore.

By that time, it was around 7 or so, and we were all deciding what to have for dinner. It took us about an hour to decide where to go (Arby's), then Dad, Jason and I played Skip Bo while we waited for Anna, Kimba and Kayla to get the food. After dinner, Anna played with us and Jason went to bed.

About 10, Kimba, Anna, Kayla and I went to the house of one of Kimba's friends and hung out. The only other people I really knew there were Amber and her boyfriend Chris (one of three guys by that name in the house that night).

We got back to Mom & Dad's around 1:30 or so in the morning, and then Anna and Kayla and I played some more Skip Bo on Anna's bed. Then we played Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit. Kayla won, and none of us could really remember anything all that well since we hadn't watched the movies in a while. Throughout the game, Kayla kept saying that if it was Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, we wouldn't have been having so much trouble remembering things about it. Anna and I agreed, even though I had had slightly less trouble than they had--I still remembered some of the more obscure character and place names. We watched the first half of Comedy Central's Roast of Jeff Foxworthy before we fell asleep.

Yesterday, I finally woke up all the way about noon (the dogs were crawling on me long before that), went downstairs, got some breakfast, and then waited for everybody else to get up while I called Stacie so that we could order a DirecTV receiver for her--I used Mom's computer to login to my account to do that. A little while later, Kayla, Anna, Jason and I were playing Phase 10 on Anna's floor when Kimba came in to tell us that one of her clients, his mother and his sister were coming over in about an hour. We were all like, "Okay, we'll finish this game and then get dressed."

That lasted about five minutes, when her client's mother called again to ask for directions--they were already on their way! So we had about 10-20 minutes to get dressed and such before they got there. I still needed a shower, so I took my clothes down to the bathroom and got one.

That was the fastest shower I've even been able to take in over a year! Seriously. I mean, the water pressure in my house sucks, so it takes so long to rinse all the soap/shampoo/conditioner/whatever off. The shower at Mom & Dad's was so much faster than that, it was awesomely refreshing.

The people came and left, and then it was almost dinner time. The five of us "kids" played Phase 10 until dinner. Since it was such a hit last week (and there were still plenty of ingredients leftover), Dad had decided to make pizza again--yum! Camille and Betsy came over too, and they both loved Dad's original pizza--the ballpark.

Seriously, that is the best special-topping pizza I have ever had, including the ones we get at work from Vocelli's. It's basically what you'd get at a ballpark, only on a pizza: hot dog, mustard, ketchup (well, it's pizza sauce in this case), and a bun (crust). Dad also made a hawaiian and a meat lover's (plus ¼ cheese only) pizza. The hawaiian was completely gone by the time everyone was full, there were only two slices of ballpark left, and about 3/4 of the meat lovers.

Camille and Betsy stayed to play Imaginiff. There was one extra name space on the board, so we put in Darth Vader, which was kind of funny, because one of the cards which he got picked for said, "Imagine if Darth Vader was a 70's movie. Which would he be?" and then one of the six choices was Star Wars. After the game, Camille and Betsy left.

Dad, Anna, Jason, Kayla, Kimba and I played 90's Trivial Pursuit (three teams of two--Kayla & Jason, Me & Anna, and Kimba & Dad) before Jason had to go to bed, and then when he and Kayla won we all kind of broke up to go separate ways: Dad to the living room; Kimba to her room; and Anna, Kayla and I to Anna's room.

I asked Anna if we could watch the Smallville episode from last week, but she wanted to play Buffy instead. This was around 10:30, and I was thinking I'd have to go home within the next hour and a half so that I could sleep before work this morning, but either Anna or Kayla lent me some clean pajama pants, Kimba lent me her MNDC tee shirt to wear today, and Anna asked Dad to copy the Smallville episode onto a DVD so that I could watch it at home today instead.

The three of us did play Buffy one more time then, this time with me playing evil, Kayla playing Oz and Willow, and Anna playing Xander and Buffy. The villain was the Mayor, and good won. We had a snackage break in the middle, during which I ate the last slice of ballpark pizza (someone else had eaten the other one earlier).

We decided then (about midnight) to watch the rest of the Jeff Foxworthy roast to go to sleep by. I turned off my cell phone for the night, since my charger was at home and I didn't want to be stuck with a dead battery at work. The show was finished around 1:30 am, but none of us were quite ready to sleep yet, so Anna started this other Comedy Central special by Mike Burbiglia called What I Should Have Said Was Nothing. Anna and Kayla fell asleep in the middle at about 2, so I paused it, turned off the TV, and went to sleep myself.

The alarm went off at 7:30, I got dressed, had breakfast, turned the cell phone back on, picked up the DVD Dad had made for me from the dining room table, and asked Jason to help me put everything I'd brought (minus 4 out of 6 bottles of Green Tea with Citrus) back into the Bug. I left the house at 8:05, and I've been at work since about 8:15.

We didn't play Uno or Aggravation the whole weekend, and I didn't do any homework or reading either. I've been procrastinating the Astronomy for too long, which surprises me because I actually want to do it. I should know better than to bring books and homework to Mom & Dad's house on the weekends, I guess.

I miss my cable TV . . .

We got our DSL startup kit on Thursday, but Verizon had forgotten to order a modem/wireless router for us, so we got the whole kit minus that. The modem is supposed to come today sometime, but we won't be able to hook it up until Verizon e-mails me to say that the service is set up and ready to be used.

I returned the cable modem to Comcast on Friday evening. Except for finding a way to get to the place in all the one-way traffic of downtown Frederick, it was a piece of cake. I had disconnected it on Thursday evening when I got home from work, so I didn't get to record Smallville, since the modem was what gave us our cable TV.

I spent practically the whole weekend at Mom & Dad's house. At 1:00pm on Saturday, Kayla and I went to the stake center to watch Jason's basketball game. We saw Anna there, and decided to meet her at her house after the game, since she had to go to the pet store and we had some more of Kayla's stuff in the car to take to the house.

We got to the house and met Anna's new puppy, Mandy, then I watched Psych with Dad. She's a beagle and fox hound mix, and she's so cute! If Bambi were a dog with beagle coloring, he'd look like Mandy. Seriously, her legs are so long, and her neck is too, but she's got a beagle's coloring and soft, floppy ears.

Anyway, Anna got back a little later with Jason, and all of us (minus Jason and Dad) decided to watch Buffy and Angel for a while. Around 10 or 11pm, Anna asks, "You guys want to stay over?" and since I was already thinking about it, we decided we were going to do just that. So Anna dragged out the air mattresses (Jason's twin-sized one and Kimba's full-sized one) and some blankets and pillows. She lent me a pair of pajama pants too.

Sometime during the late night hours, my dad decided that he was going to get rid of some of the books on the shelves in his den--including his entire Star Trek novel collection. He got rid of a few others (most of which I took--not the Star Trek) and rearranged what he had left to his liking.

Once we were all settled, we watched some more Buffy and Angel until about 2:30, when we decided to go to sleep. That's the first time I've slept in that house since I moved a little more than a year ago. The somewhat-strange part is, Anna's new room is my old room.

We woke up between 9 and 11 yesterday morning and had some breakfast all around. After the beds were put away (or at least stood up against a couple walls so they wouldn't get in the way of rambunctious dogs) we watched Smallville, and then some more Buffy and Angel. (Are you seeing a theme here?)

Around 3, I went home to take a shower and pick up Jenn after I set up the phones that Kayla had given us. We now have a phone in the kitchen, one in Jenn and Amit's room, one in the 2nd-floor common room, and one in my room. Turns out, I didn't need a phone jack in my room, because I can use the extension of the one in the common room.

The DirecTV guy came to the house last Friday morning. I wasn't there, but Jenn and Amit were. Apparently, the guy asked if there was a main TV, and Jenn and Amit weren't sure what to tell them, since Kayla is going to be moving soon and the main TV is going with her. So the guy installed the DirecTV receiver in Jenn and Amit's room. The dish is on the roof (back left corner), and it looks like the cable for it goes over the roof and down the front right side (tucked into the corner our building makes with the one next door), into the ground somewhere.

Since the receiver is hooked up to Jenn and Amit's TV, the rest of us still don't have any cable at the moment. I asked Dad if a splitter and amplifier after the receiver would work, but apparently it wouldn't. Everyone would be forced to watch whatever Jenn and Amit were watching, since the receiver only has one tuner. We've been trying to figure out where the cable comes into the house from the dish, so that we can split and amplify it to the rest of our TVs if we need to. If we can just plug into the jacks with satellite-ready TV's and VCR/DVD players, that would be great though (especially if we actually have satellite-ready equipment).

I'll have to look a little closer this evening when I get home from my allergy shots (and before I go across the street for the preliminary voting machine setup). I think there might be some sort of splitter in Stacie's room, or somewhere near where the cable looks like it ends.

Heck, I might even be looking at the wrong cable--it might just go through the roof into the attic crawlspace, and then I'd have to look up there to see anything at all.

Boredness

Went to Mom & Dad's last night, but Dad wasn't home. He went to Grandma's house. So Mom made tuna fish so we could have sandwiches for dinner.

I ate my sandwich, then decided I wanted to do a cross stitch project, 'cause I was bored. I picked out a pattern with two quail on it, and started working on it last night. I haven't gotten very much finished, but that's all right. I don't have all the floss I need anyway, so I should probably stretch the floss I do have as long as I can so that I more time to get the other colors.

I also started watching season 1 of Psych last night. Kayla borrowed it, plus the first three seasons of Numb3rs from Kimba. We decided that I would watch Psych while Kayla watches the first season or two of Numb3rs, then I'll start on Numb3rs when I'm ready.

I only got to watch the first episode of Psych before it was one o'clock in the morning, and I had to go to sleep. But that's okay. It was funny.

I keep hitting Ctrl+P while I'm typing this, when I usually mean to hit Ctrl+I, and it's getting a little frustrating that it keeps posting my blog entry before I'm done typing it, so I'm going to stop now.