A night NOT spent at the Haven

Ryan's been back in town for the last week or so, and asked if I wanted to hang out and catch up. I took him up on that offer, of course. He met me after work, and we walked over to Five Guys to eat.

After that, we stopped off at the Haven for a few minutes, 'cause I'd told him about it and how cool it was--and we were nearby anyway.

He had a bit of an errand to run--picking up his other car from the shop, which wasn't the one he parked in the Church Street parking deck--so we drove there in my car, and I followed him to his house to drop it off. From there, we decided to see a movie.

We managed to get to the 6:45 showing of Knowing, the new Nicholas Cage movie, while the previews were still rolling. I liked it a lot; they packed a lot of stuff into two hours and fifteen minutes, and it felt longer than it actually was. Ryan said he liked it up until the end, because it "couldn't decide what genre it was supposed to be" (if I elaborated, it might spoil the ending), but I think it worked--the mix of genres kind of helped with the character development, actually.

The movie was over at 9:00, so we went back downtown and walked up and down Market Street for an hour before heading back to the parking garage so he could get his car. He gave me a ride back to my car, and then we went to our respective houses.

It'll be nice, having Ryan back in the same time zone again, since that means communication will be quicker.

When I got there, Mom and Jason were in bed, but everyone else was downstairs talking. Anna and Tim were talking to Dad about cutting costs on phone lines--Dad's going to look into VOIP (voice over internet protocol), which sounds like a good thing to have when everyone has their own personal cell phones. It also sounds a lot cheaper than a land-line, and is something the four of us kids would get when we have our own house. There could be issues with power outtages, but as long as everyone has cell phones, there isn't much of a problem there.

Turns out, Anna had forgotten to tell me and Tim that we'd been approved for the mortgage loan up to $130,000 with certain specifications, but we're not going to go for a house which will cost us more than $110,000, except in certain circumstances.

We're not going to pursue the house on Vienna Court either, even though it was really nice. The lack of a basement, or any other "growing out" space is a major minus. So, it's back to the house-hunting.

I bought a one-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold so that I could connect my NetFlix account to it. Then after the phone conversation was over (and shortly before Camille left--she'd been talking to Kayla in the dining room), activated the NetFlix on it. I didn't have anything in my instant queue yet, so I didn't watch anything though.

After that, I downloaded the trial version of Castle Crashers, and played as long as it would let me. I almost beat the first big boss before it stopped me, and I think my little character guy was up to level 5 or 6 by that time. Maybe I'll buy a couple thousand marketplace points tomorrow (gotta pay the bills and go grocery shopping first) and get the full version, or maybe not.

I came up here sometime around 12:45, but I wasn't sleepy, so I decided to do some NetFlix queueing. I put 19 things on my DVD queue, and 22 on my instant queue, starting with Medieval Lives, a series of eight episodes that I'd seen half of at the Haven, but didn't catch the rest of yet. Among the rest of my queues are Quantum Leap, Shark Week, Murder, She Wrote, and SeaQuest: DSV. I've got a few movies and such on there too, but the serieses take up most of the queue lists.

I think I might actually be sleepy now.

More House Hunting, etc.

Anna, Kayla and I went house hunting last Thursday. We took Jason with us, because he wanted to go to the Haven with me afterward. We only found one house that we were even remotely interested in definitely pursuing--all the others were low maybes, at best.

It was on Vienna Ct, and if it had had a basement (not to mention at least one more parking space--we do have three cars between the four of us, after all) it would've almost been perfect. As it is, if we do pursue that house, I'll at least need to sell a good half of my stuff--including my desk--since there will only be room for basic living items (bed, dresser, night stand) in the bedrooms, and only the kitchen, dining room and living room as common areas to put other stuff.

But, oh well. It's not like I've actually been using most of that stuff for the last eight months or so anyway--it's all been in storage. But I have been finding that I need to get things out of storage every once in a while; if I sold the stuff that I wasn't using, then one day I might actually need to use it, and wouldn't have it anymore to use. Though the money from selling the stuff could help in a more immediate manner, I'm sure.

I'm on the 9th Discworld book, Eric, and while I listened to Wyrd Sisters a few books back, I noticed that a lot of the plots so far have parallels in other stories. For instance, Wyrd Sisters is a very definite MacBeth parallel (it would probably be more accurate to say a "perpendicular," I think), and Pyramids is like a mélange of Old Testament stories--with some Greek and/or Roman mythology thrown in (Trojan Horse, anyone?).

On Saturday, there was a DCI-sanctioned Magic draft. I played and got some new cards. I had made three decks the night before with the cards I had, but forgot that I should wait until after the draft, since I was going to get more cards anyway. I'll re-make the decks tonight, hopefully better.

Not Much Going On

The past couple weeks have been pretty routine, with a couple exceptions.Gabe has the entire Discworld series by Terry Pratchett on audio, and let me copy them onto my iPod--or rather, let me copy the first three so far. I've been listening to them as I work, so I haven't caught all of the events in the books, but I've caught enough to be able to get the general gist of the plots. I'm in the middle of The Light Fantastic right now.

In order to catch everything, I went to the library on Saturday and borrowed The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic in novel format. I just finished the first quarter of the first book last night. They didn't have Equal Rites at my local branch, and I didn't feel like going to Thurmont to get it either.

Also on Saturday, I picked up Jason's birthday present at the Haven. The original plan was for him to come with me, so that we could play Warhammer with his new Dragonmage of Caledor (that was the present). I'd bought the model a couple weeks ago, then did the gluing, the filling of the cracks with greenstuff, and the priming myself, but I needed someone else to paint it for me, since I'd never done any model painting before and didn't want it to be awful. Elliot painted it for me, and finished before Saturday. He did a good job, and Jason likes the dragon.

I got him the dragon, because he likes to play High Elves using the Haven's store army, and they don't have a dragon there for store use. So he'd have to proxy in a different model. Now, he doesn't have to.

I went house-hunting a week ago yesterday with Kayla, Anna and Tim. We didn't find any houses that we really liked--the ones we saw that weren't awful were only acceptable. For some reason, we'd only been looking in the Discovery development, so Anna told our realtor that it's okay to be looking in other places.

Yesterday, Anna, Kayla and I got all caught up on Dollhouse. There were seven episodes on the TiVo, and for some reason, it didn't record the March 20th episode, so we watched that one online, for a total of eight episodes in a single day. It was long, but the show is great.