So Neo (The One)

I wrapped up my official first year of teaching this past weekend. It was a year. Let's just move on. To be a little more verbose about it, my first year was pretty typical I think. It was a lot of fumbling around, trying to gain some understanding of just what the heck works and what doesn't while trying to keep the avalanche of paperwork at bay. I had some successes, some failures, a lot of minor headaches, one major headache, and some fun also.

So far, being off for the summer has only allowed me the time to try to recover from my severe allergic reactions to whatever is in the air out here. If I just got the sniffles and sneezed once in a while, I wouldn't mind, but I get full on cold/flu symptoms that knock me on back every time. In my last post, I was sick. I'm sick now too. Last year, I wasn't really sure what was going on because I was under a lot of stress and that depletes your immune system. But I'm really thinking this is some allergy and not a bug or mental issue. I mean, I've experienced the same symptoms so many times in the past ten months it's approaching ludicrous.

On a better note, I think we found our house. I went out looking with our agent again yesterday and had "that feeling". Almost everything about the place is exactly what we've been waiting for. It's a three bedroom ranch with a mostly finished, walkout basement and a great view over some rolling grassland. It also happens to be very close to Nick's new daycare facility, which will be a huge plus if we end up buying. We're going to do everything we can during the contract process to try to make this happen. I'm not necessarily looking forward to moving again in a month, but if it happens, this should be the last one for a while.

Oh and it's my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

Buzz Bombs

I was sick all weekend. It started on Thursday night and I felt ok to go to work on Friday, but by the end of the day, I felt terrible. A sore throat was the primary symptom, not a scratchy one but swollen. It is still making it a chore to eat food. I was also experiencing a slight fever and fatigue, but the fatigue was gone by Saturday evening and the fever left earlier. All that's really left is the fever.

The really bad part is that I think Nicholas has it. He's been cutting a few teeth this week so he's been a pretty fussy guy, but today he got really fussy. He was fussy to the point of not being comforted by anything we did. We're taking him to the doctor tomorrow morning. For any family reading, I do not think that this is the current pandemic going around in us right now. It's just unlikely because I hadn't been exposed to anyone with the flu to the best of my knowledge.

In the meantime, while I was trying to focus on other things to avoid swallowing, I rediscovered Jeskola Buzz and have begun working on a new song based upon my frustrations with Puzzle Quest Galactrix constantly crashing to my desktop. I realize its appeal to a very niche audience, but trust me when I say I'm not writing anything for mass consumption here.

Back to the Blog

I haven't written much lately mostly due to my own preoccupations with a couple of new games and Facebook not to mention being pretty busy wrapping up the end of the spring semester. Facebook is OK for quick communication but I miss taking some time now and again to gather my thoughts, reflect, and write something a little less erratic.

I got pretty addicted to the Facebook application Bejeweled Blitz for a while there. It was fun to beat high scores and have a little healthy competition from some good friends, but one thing always bothered me about the game: the luck factor. You could play fantastically, finding lots of good matches in quick succession and only score in the 30K range and then have an equally good game the next round, scoring well into the 100K range simply based on the random gem drops. After climbing to the top of the heap twice, I simply can't bear to play it that much anymore.

I've also been playing Bioshock. It has some great atmosphere and I can definitely see the framework of the System Shock series operating under some of the basic mechanics of the game. But honestly, I'm feeling so very done with these kinds of games. There's really nothing new there. Shoot scary zombie-esque creatures and uncover a mystery, the pieces of which are parceled out in a very scripted and linear way.

Anyway, now that summer is almost upon me, I hope to be able to spend a bit more time in reflective journaling than I have in recent weeks. Hold on, though, I have to twitter... (I don't twitter.)