It's been a long and comfortable weekend. Got lots of homework done, and spent lots of time hanging out with friends. Friday ended with events that I have already enumerated in friday's blog entry. Suffice to say, everything was good and Sophie stole our cheese before we could finish it ourselves, and our arteries are, in a way, thankful.

Saturday was spent lazily, chatting and falling asleep, in the middle of chat, on the floor even, only to be awoken by Mike. We were going to Ikea to look at furniture for offices etc. It was an enjoyable way to spend the afternoon; however, I was forced to leave hastily. Near the exit of Ikea was a hot dog stand which was surounded by a haven of swedish condement delights, the likes of which appaled Mike. He did rather well when I showed him the Pickled Cucumbers, and the frozen crawfish tails, and even did fairly well despite the many varieties of salmon, until we, or rather I, stumbled on Salmon Patte in a Tube. Looking very much like a toothpaste tube, this two or three dollar condiment allows the common man to take his salmon patte wherever he likes, despite the restrictions that mother nature herself, deliberately, imposed on the transportation of such powerful food stuffs.

My discovery was followed immediately by Mike bellowing the words, "We're leaving! Now! "

From there we went on toward the movie theater where we met Jackson and Marcia and George to watch the movie Racing Stripes. It was an amazingly cute movie, though a bit thin and poorly acted at points by the main characters. The horses had some of the worst dialog in the movie. But all the same, the movie was cute. After that we ate dinner at Benigan's. That was a really good day.

After that Jackson, Marcia, and I went back to my house and I said good night to Pattie, who I had fallen asleep on earlier, and then the three of us watched The Corruptor, and fell asleep during it. It has Chow Yun Fat in it, who is my favorite asian actor, he's awesome, and totally cool in every respect. That's one of his really good movies, though he's also been in many others.

Well, last night was very cool, rading facility after facility. Then, this morning I woke up feeling cheerful, and I ended up going to work, in a good mood, only to get there and have a whole day full of very unpleasant work ahead of me. There were only four cars worth of samples, but they were Mesa, so there was 2 a piece. And of course they were bad. They were cut with gasoline. The gasoline fumed into the whole building and made it impossible to breathe, midway through the day I started wearing a gasmask to help breathe during the day.

By mid-day I actually got almost all of the smell out and even got the place nice and polished. After that though I found out I had to run more tests... unpleasant tests, tests that followed murphy's law. spill happened, overflows, and lots and lots of smell. Gas mask back on. It wasnt even cleaned out by the time i left for the weekend. I left the vent fan running all weekend long.

I had to take constant breaks throughout the day to talk on the phone and get a breather outside and chat with some friends. By the end of the day I met Jake at specs where we discussed cooking flavors and bought some liquers and some cheese and crackers and then back to my place to sample and evaluate the flavors and aromas of the various liquers we had discovered. THe clear loser.. me who spent 15 on a bottle of "Apple Jack" which tasted nothing like apple and everything like cheap whiskey and didnt even mix well with the cinnamon schnapps we picked up. The winner... orange cognac which mixed well with everything and added a complexity and dry distintive taste to apple kamikazes.

The cheese and crakers were delicious till we left them alone long enough for sophie to knock the cheese to the floor and clean the dish totally of all its contents. Chuck cooked a chicken, and then we watched the DvD of his comedy act for a local church. He does some great impersonations of celebrities as bible characters.

Well, I finally decided to start playing Planetside, and George is going with me. We're going to play as members of the New Conglomerate in the ultimate war zone. When I first started talking about it with George it was just because I missed the game. He had never heard of it. It had slipped my mind that it was the perfect game for George, but by the time I remembered this afternoon, it was already too late.

Last night George and I made a mad dash for the mall, skipping Specs and other shopping to get there before it closed, but they only had one copy left. There was some debate as to whether he should get it or I should, or whether we should get it at all, since there was only one. If I took it, he had a guarantee that I would get it. If he got it, he could learn to play it before I got in, since I'd played it before when it first came out a few years ago. He ended up getting it.

On the way home I stopped at H.E.B. and picked up more of the awesome pasta that I'd been making all week for less than half the price that I had bought it at kroger. When I got home I did my reading for school today and I made pasta for dinner, creamy garlic and spirals with extra oregano, chives, ginger, a dash of crushed peppers, and a splash of white wine with bread crumb toping and chicken. It was amazing. I loved it. I love eating at home, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's just delicious.

I went to bed at midnight and had a restless sleep till 6:30, got up and got ready for school, headed off for class. I am really liking my english class, it was a lot of fun, and now I'm going to start doing journals for it online in the same area that my microcomputer applications class takes place.

After class I went to H.E.B. and walked around, doing some comparison shopping, pricing shrimp and other seafood and pasta, and other things for future cooking experiments. Then I bought an orange and ate it outside before going into EB Games, where, despite not being listed on their website, they were selling Planetside and the expansions. I bought it, chatted for thirty minutes with the guy running it for the day, and then headed home to install it and set up my account.

Later after I got to work, Mike called me. While I was telling him how George and I had trouble with buying the game last night, after deciding to get the game, Mike said to me, you just know that's Geoge's perfect game. I was like, "What? ". Mike said, " You know that all you do in that game is endlessly blow stuff up, and kill people without it ever ending, that's all George likes about the games he likes. "

And I was like, whoops.

I knew what I was gonna hear when I called George.

Sniffling and sleep deprived voice as he answered the phone. "Dammit!" He said. He told me that I did a bad bad thing. That I should never have let him buy and install that game on a school night. That he had played till six am right before he had to go to school, and that he had only gotten an hour sleep, and that I had woken him up. By waking him up, I asked him some questions that caused him to log back onto the game and then we got off the phone so he could pay attention to it. I may never see him again.

In retrospect, I really should have known.

Got to go now, got homework to do. Still waiting for my new phone to get to me.

Well, got my paycheck today, and I have school tomorrow. Got all my reading for it done, but I need to start reading Huckleberry Finn. It's a good book, I wonder if the one I read so long ago was an abridged version. If it was, all the more fun it's going to be reading the new one.

Tonight George and I tried to buy Planetside, but they only had one, so George got it, I'll be buying it at another location tomorrow. We're going to join the New Conglomerate, and I'm going to be a pilot again. The game is really wicked badass, and can only be better now that my computer is better. I loved the game back when I first played it and it's right up George's alley. Plus, it's only 20 bucks to hop in, so that's cool.

It's easily the most fun MMO I've ever played and I can't wait to hop back into it. Last time I played with Chris.

OTher than that, not much has happened. Had more chicken pasta for dinner, loved it.

I miss Chris.

Well, I started school today. English 1302, and it was good. I enjoyed what I had of it, and next time I will remember to bring paper and pen of my own. Afterward I spent 128 on books, which will set me back quite a bit, but will be reimbursed by my dad later on. Huckleberry Fin, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Discovering Computers 2005, Office 2003 Introductory Concepts and Techniques, and some software that lets me test and study my online class.

When I logged on to my online class for the first time it said I had 12 late assignments all due on December 8th. Which, as you can imagine is quite an unrealistic date for a class that starts on January 18th of the next year. So that should be sorted out soon, all the same. All the right software is installed and working at work and now just needs to be installed at home later tonight.

Once I got here, Verizon Wireless called me back, and told me they could send me a brand new phone. So I'm getting a picture phone. That will be nice, a new phone, color display(colors that are supposed to be there if you remember how my last phone broke before this one), and I'll be able to send pictures of places from anywhere. This may seem like an insignificant upgrade, but think about it.

I can be sitting on the bridge across lake houston, dangling my feet above the dark abyss below at the darkening of sunset, and suddenly feel that someone I love might want to see the beautiful sunset that I'm seeing. Click, tap tap tap, send.. no preplaning. It's a beautiful thing. I plan on taking advantage of it.

Other than that, the day is pretty full, full of reading and studying and tons of work and chatting online.

Well, this weekend was nice. I can't remember what I did friday evening, I think that's the day I went home and did absolutely nothing. In retrospect, that was nice, but not particularly memorable. Stayed up playing on the computer and reading. It was nice; which I said. It was not memorable; which I also said.

On saturday I went to the book store with Mike, and George. We drove around, we had dinner, and then, instead of meeting Zac for a movie we went to blockbuster and rented a movie and he went to his house with Emily. So we watched Dodgeball, and a new movie called Employee of the Month, which I was really liking till the very end where I suddenly hated all the characters. For most of the movie I thought most everyone to be good guys, then in the last moments of the movie everyone was bad, and it was disgusting. It was only rewarding because they all died. They weren't even likeable bad guys.

Then on sunday, I cleaned my room. Deep clean. Dug into every corner of the room and the closet, emptied and refilled boxes, folded clothes, and filled trashbags with junk. It was really quite beautiful. Things got much much much messier before they got any better at all. Anyway, my room feels a lot more spacious now.

Spent last night hanging out with Jake, and then with George and Mike too at IHOP, and then Marcia and her mom, and another friend of hers, and we were all talking and chatting until it was time to bail. We talked about web pages, and Mike's school and people being stupid from tech supports point of view. Marcia's mom had a lot of stories about people being weird about ordering tickets with Continental, it was really cool. IHOP started charging for bowls of lemons. Probably because of me.

Already more than a fourth of the way into Peter and the Starcatchers, it's a good childrens story, but bits lack depth here and there. It's better than it could have been, but still not great. A blast to read, I'd read it to my kids if I had some. I should steal some, I know where I can find a whole bunch.

Anyway, it's getting late and I should be on my way home, I need to get food to eat, I'll probably be cooking pasta when I get home. Ciao.

Mere days before school starts. Vacation starts on the 26th, I'm going to take the week off and, well, do nothing.

I spent a lot of today still playing demise, lots of Mario 64, and reading...

Peter and the Starcatchers, a Peter Pan prequel written by Dave Barry. Believe it or not, it's well written, but whether or not it's any good remains to be seen. I'm still expecting a train wreck to some extent, but less so.

I miss Chris.

Last night was relaxing. Didn't do anything but eat fajitas and play on the computer with the new version of Hikarunix. I actually wrote yesterday's post from Hikarunix 0.2, and talked on it till way later than I should have since I had to be at work at seven today. But I love talking, and hate going to sleep, I feel bad cause for them it was an hour later and they had to be up about as early as I did.

I finished Rogue Warrior today, and it had a very surprising ending. I wont spoil it, but it's a very good novel by Richard Marcinko.

On top of that, everything is really peachy. Already missing Chris, but I may start hanging out with his brother, Steve. We'll have to try to get him to eat a habanero. Still have to get George to eat one. Later tonight George should be bringing 3D studio MAX over, didn't last night but no reason not to, tonight. Gonna feed him leftover fajitas.

Well, last night was awesome. We got to spend many of Chris' last hours here with him. I grilled fajitas. A LOT of fajitas. We had a 5.5 Lb package and George was all like, that's not enough... so he threw in another pack... and we ended up making 10 Lbs of fajitas. Let that sink in for a minute... that's 10 Lbs of meet for maybe 5 people, plus that's without the onions and peppers. We dented the fajitas, but I'll be eating them tomorrow and maybe the day after tomorrow.

We talked and we hung around, and watched TV. I finally got talk to Chris about some things that were on my mind, and I gave him a hug goodbye. He's family now. I'm kindof like the mafia the way I put together family. And theyre starting to spread across the country, so the world goes.

Today was slow, but comfortable. I did some reading and some thinking and some talking to friends online. During all that I downloaded the new version of Hikarunix and burned it and am using it right now. They finally have support for my onboard NIC card chipset, but they still dont have the widely accessable drivers for my soundcard. It really is beautiful. And I have a lot of fun with it. The new version can be installed to a thumbdrive, so I'm seriously considering picking up a 256mb or a 512mb thumbdrive to use instead of a cd rom. A bootable thumbdrive. I know it may seem perfectly natural for some people reading this, but, to me, it's pretty novel.

Anyway, I'll say hi tomorrow, probably pretty early, Larry has jury duty and so I'm working all day long. 7am - 7pm. After work I'll probably have George come by and bring 3d Studio MAX 7 with him, now that we have it.

Well, it's been a long weekend of goodbyes. This is pretty much it. Chris is leaving tomorrow at 4:30 am. One backpack, the clothes on his back, then on the plane and in the air to get his hair shaved, his butt spanked and then thrown out to get broken into shape. Go Chris.

Seriously though, he is one of my oldest friends, and I'm going to miss him a lot. If he doesn't write me I will hunt him down and kill him, army or no army.

The party was a ton of fun and lasted all day on saturday. Football, hackey sack, tons of pizza, drinks, music, and afterwards we went to see White Noise. On Friday, I know this is out of order, we went to see Beyond the Sea. On sunday we hung out some more, eating ice cream, talking and watching The Legend of King Arthur. They made some really interesting changes to the characters from the original story by the end of the movie, for instance, Sir Lancelot's character was too dead for Guenivere to cheat on Arthur with.

After that we called it a night. I'm going to try to hang out with him this evening too. I'll do it in my blue uniform if I have to, Chris is family for me, and I love him like a brother. I hope he goes awesome places with his new career.

There are wars going on of which we are all aware, and then there are wars going on that few of us may ever know about. Raging struggles of pride and predjudice under the surface, struggling in the shadows as vile beasts try to keep down the uprising, though they are losing ground. Maybe that's a melodramatic way of interpreting it, but that's just who I am.

In other news, I love hot dogs and fish sticks, but not together. Did some grocery shopping that I may end up living off of for a while, large numbers of fish sticks for sandwiches and hot dogs for purposes of making... well.. hot dogs. Need to find some ramen noodles somewhere to help cut down my eating expenses. As it is, I do have some fairly cheap pasta that I'll be cooking tonight, me thinks.

Last night I spent some time with my mom and we hung out and watched ghost hunters till I started to fall asleep, so I went home.

After that it was nothing but tv and computer and reading before bed.

Going away party for Chris tomorrow. Feel bad about him going away. A fond adieu, nothing but I love you all, and goodbye. Probably wont even see him the night he leaves. At least before he left the army taught him to wait outside when he knows we're coming to pick him up instead of making the pick up a half an hour ordeal. All the same, what good is that if he's going away?

That's my day... on monday I'll tell you about my weekend.

Whoopsie, forgot to write in my blog at all yesterday. My apologies, I spent so much of the day chatting and playing games and hanging out with friends I just let it slip my mind.

It's been such an awesome holiday season and it's really over now. Everyone is back from vacation, traffic is annoying again, people are nice in traffic again, the stores are moving slow. The holidays have their ups and their downs, it's a change from the rest of the year, and for the portions of it that you spend in the right mood, they're a really great time to be with family and wonder what to say to them. I don't have anything in common with any of my family, and so I always feel a little awkward around them. It's like I love 'em and I like being around them, but when I'm around them, the time feels a little empty.

I have some common ground now with my stepdad... cooking. That was great for this season. Maybe thanksgiving is long gone, but I'm thankful that my family is sort of whole again. In a way that's upside down from the past five or six years, but it's so upside down that it's really right side up.

Chris is going away on tuesday. He's one of my oldest and closest friends and I'm gonna miss him a ton. We've been friends ever since the bus and computer science class in junior year of high school. I can't remember how old I was but I remember so many other things. Like how he used to call me Dave. how his family sometimes still calls me Dave. I've never been comfortable being called Dave, all my closest friends have called me David.

God willing, he wont just fade out of my life as a friend. I still have a really strong friendship with Jason and he lives in New York. So I know it's possible.

So far the book Jake loaned me, "Rogue Warrior" is very awesome. I've been going through it pretty slowly... so many games to play that have been dragging me down, but I'm getting through it and loving it. It's the best action novel I've ever read. It would make a lousy movie though, being an autobiography in all.

Tonight, for dinner I will have either hot dogs or fish schtick sandwich. And apple pie ice cream for desert.

Well, it's a beautiful day outside, all damp and generally cloudy, that sort of hazy shade of gray that mutes the world and makes everything seem lifeless. Lifeless is the wrong word... lifeless is depressing... this is worse than that, it doesnt give anything any feeling at all, it makes everything void of any feeling. The day passes on, and when you drive other cars splatter just enough mud on your windsheild to make you use your wipers and make them squeak the whole time.

I really do like these days in an interesting sort of way. In a lot of ways there isnt anything wrong with them. In a certain light, there's almost something beautiful about them. It really is amazing how from time to time the entire sky will seem to be a perfect flat gray almost without any texture. And I love the smell of rain in the air.

Last week ended with me picking up a Nintendo DS. Didn't buy any games for it of course, but it was very fun to play Metroid Prime: Hunters. It really was the very next best thing to a mouse and keyboard and it was a joy to play, I loved it. But of course there wasnt enough actually gameplay to hold my attention for very long. This story to be continued later as this is where it paused on friday afternoon before I was out of work.

Friday evening. Awesome party at Justin's house. The burgers were good, but a little overcooked for my taste, and everyone was happy and having fun. Almost, I saw a couple of people with frowny faces when the countdown was over and everyoen threw up their arms and shouted happy new year. I tried out the recipe for stuffed shrim that Alan taught me on Christmas, and everyone loved it. One or two of them thought they were just a little bit too spicy, but the large majority of them really enjoyed them. We downloaded music, mixed drinks, and George, who had planned on driving, left Justin's house to go to his cousin Krista's house at 12:30 because he wanted to get hammered and was mad that we had all stayed at the party and he had stayed sober so that he could drive.

I dont know WHY he went to krista's house, as there was nothing wrong with getting hammered at Justin's, but for some reason they did. Around about 2am I was the only one left awake at Justin's house, so I started jogging to Krista's and knocked on the door very quietly so that only George and Krista would hear me. As it turns out they hadn't done ANY drinking at all and were just hanging around watching a lesbian Showtime television series. Funny. We had some M&Ms and we hung out as we were the only ones left awake and then around 4 am George took me home and went back to his house and I played games and goofed around and went to bed around 6 am.

The next day was spent mostly in solitude. New Year's day, most people were too busy doing nothing to do anything at all. I spent it watching TV and that's about it. Later in the evening, the novelty of the demo for Metroid Prime Hunters having worn off after only a day, I was determined to buy Mario 64. I tried 3 stores on the way to dinner(didnt actually eat anything, only hung out while Jackson, Marcia, and Mike did) at Zio's and all three of them were closed because of the holiday. After that, we picked up Kevin on the way back and we worked late into the night on project plans.

Then, I stayed up till about 4 or 5am.

First thing the next day, around about noon, Mike calls me up, we meet Kevin at EB games who is sold out of Mario 64 and drive to Fry's... who DOES have it, and finally I get to play the game that everyone is telling me is so cool. I play it all the way to P.F. Chang's where we go for dinner, and we are told an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes to wait for a table. Hey, that's cool with us, we take our little buzzer and we go off to the book store across the street and look at all kinds of books and have a grand old time, and lo and behold, we get buzzed in 20 minutes and are seated almost an hour early.

That was nice.

Takes a while for our food to actually get to us, it's pretty decent though for the price, and then, all full, we begin to head home. That pretty much sums up sunday, stayed up till 3 or 4am talking online. Monday, slept in, woke up, chatted online most of the day, then hung out with Mike and Chris, we went and ate pizza at Pizza Hut. After that we only hung out for an hour and watched an episode or two of Venture Brothers.

That was the weekend. Nice and busy, I like em like that, cept when I have to write about them when I get back to work. I am kidding of course, I really like having this journal.

Anyway, I plan on hanging out with Mike and Chris later tonight, so I'll see what happens then.

Ciao.