lazy days gone by

weeks are long and hard and the last thing i really want is a long and painful weekend. the long part is ok, but nothing worse than waking up on a saturday morning only to discover that you have a laundry list of shit to do all weekend long. so i created lazy day on saturday morning, tossed my list out and spent the weekend being a vegetable. my wife failed miserably on saturday, so we had to try lazy day again yesterday and she did much better, but i think her motherly instincts to accomplish something kicked in and kept lazy day from being all it could be on saturday.

there's not been much to discuss around here lately. summers tend to put you into a rut of reruns. not just on tv, but in your life. kids are out swimming and riding bikes and the harsh reality of adulthood is a good beatdown to put your life into perspective. i'm still loving my new life. that's changed my life forever, in a positive way, but i never realized how mundane summers really are. nothing good on tv to watch, with the exception of food tv. even discovery is in reruns. summer movies (as i discover in my adulthood) is a hit and miss. in younger years, no one cared whether the films sucked or were geniunely good, it was a movie. sitting in a big theater with your friends munching on popcorn and tall cold drinks was all that was needed. nowadays, i pretty much go for the popcorn first and the movie second. and aside from batman, the pickin's have been slim. the epics of each summer season all look alike from year to year. maybe michael bay should release a winter epic instead, next year. and then to hear news like this makes me want to cry.

but lazy day weekend was a complete success with me, even if my other half didn't abide by the rules. we've been struggling ever since we got married to find a game for her that didn't make her want to ralph. and i'm not talking Kramden, i'm talking leftover beanie weenies. she can't play a game that has any kind of camera movement, so that rules out just about everything that i play. our goal here was to find a game we could play together. she's a gamer just like i am and i'm thrilled, but we're keeping Gamestop in business with duplicate purchases trying to find something that she can play and keep her cookies down. we were successful with Diablo II and loved it, but you can only play so much of that game until you've had enough pixelated goodness and then you need a break. she's a big fighting game fan (Tekken, Mortal Kombat) because the camera never moves from the side by side display and you still get to whoop some guys ass. so after a half dozen attempts at games, we finally found Warcraft III. i'd previously played this game, but had forgotten about it when something else came along and it got pushed by the wayside. i'd also forgotten how insanely addictive the single player campaign is. so we picked up the Treasure Chest (the first game and expansion pack) last week and played some 1v1 and 2v2 on our lan. then i made the mistake of firing up the campaign on saturday morning. i'm now into the 3rd chapter and there are only four chapters in the single player campaign. i made the most of lazy day. both times. i've also started back with World of Warcraft after finally completing HalfLife 2 and Chronicles of Riddick (i can't say enough good things about both of these games) and have a lvl 22 hunter named Elysian and a lvl 12 rogue named Persephone. it's a good thing that summer tv sucks so much.

and speaking of world of warcraft, we had an interesting and exciting experience this weekend. WoW is the first MMO that i've ever really enjoyed. i've played plenty of others and after about a month into it, i just couldn't do it any longer. boredom set in, the grind was to much and i just had a bad taste in my mouth about MMOs in general. so WoW comes along and changes my perception about the genre and i actually really enjoy it. i've joined a guild and see lots of friends online playing most of the time. when you join a guild, you accept others, whom you don't know at all, into a family of sorts. you aid each other, you help out, you chat and become a family. that's fine and dandy when it's online, because you aren't really meeting them. you know their alias, especially with a role playing game. and there are some fanatics out there (see: anyone who ever played Everquest). that's cool with me, but i'm just not a fanatic. i love playing games, but i'm not sure i'm considered a fanatic. so this weekend, my wife and i meet my guild leader and his wife out for drinks. this is strange for me (even though i've been chatting with these two people for months, in-game and out), because i have that stereotypical perception of what "online friends" are. maybe i've watched to many movies or to many news articles or whatever, but i had a belief that internet friends should stay that way. but i broke my rule and i couldn't be happier. maybe luck was on my side, but Phurion (his alias) and his wife are wonderful people. and they're normal. this is what i was most concerned about and i consider this a healthy concern. and it wasn't over P and his wife themselves, but the kind of people i had in my mind that they could have been. the weirdos online, encumbered in a game who took themselves and their characters way to seriously. but they aren't and my wife and i are thrilled. it's exciting to find another couple our age who are like us. similar interests, similar likes and dislikes... So P, thanks for not showing up with a mohawk and studs thru the bridge of your nose. :)

oh, and Indy ate an entire tub of butter on saturday morning. we're waiting for the backlash...