The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

So I’ve discovered in the past year or so that what I really, really want in life is simply to be entertained, fulfilled, and having fun on a daily basis.  Not to say that I don’t still have lofty goals… that falls under the “fulfilled” section, I believe.  But really, what I most need to do to improve my life is to simply do what makes me happy.  Whether that’s buying useless things, “wasting” some time doing some random activity just because I feel like it, or whatever else… within reason, of course.  I’m not going to go out and blow all my money on an Aston Martin right now, for example.  But I spend a great deal of time agonizing over the most meaningful way to spend my time, when really, I should just be spending it doing something I like, and not worrying so much about the results or the tradeoffs.

I’m sitting on the couch at Alice’s parents’ house, watching Lucy play Animal Crossing on her new Gamecube.  I have a headache and a phlegm-filled sore throat, and my feet are cold.  I think I’ve decidedly shifted over to being a summer person.  Or maybe just a not-winter person.  It’s too cold for convertible driving or comfortable riding, things and people are closed for the holidays, and everything is just gloomier.  I guess I can’t appreciate that as much anymore now that I personally am not quite so gloomy.

I got a pretty good haul for Christmas, though, so that was nice.  Alice and I splurged on each other, so she ended up getting me Blankets, The Name of the Rose, Casino Royale, and the first season of House.  The rest of her family got me a couple of Bill Bryson books, a radioactive reindeer (don’t ask), a giant stuffed penguin, and a 1:18 Peugeot 307 WRC model.  Woo!

We’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 around here.  Alice and I suddenly have become able to play GH3 on Hard, though we’re currently stuck on the tier of songs containing Queens of the Stone Age’s 3s and 7s and Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.  It’s still a pretty big improvement over the last time we touched the game.  Magical!  Rock Band is even better, though.  Ryan, Sean and I took out a 12-song set the other night, which left us feeling pretty awesome, but left my throat feeling a bit raw.  Then last night, Ryan, Alice and I beat the Hall of Fame set, effectively beating the game… although there is still the 58-song Endless Set to unlock and beat.  Jebus.

This damnable cough is never going to go away.  I’ve had this thing for damn near a month now.  Balls!  (That one was for you, Trish.  :D)

It’s vaguely fun to dig into the data files for Puzzle Quest and make a character that completely and utterly rapes the AI, in order to get revenge for my first time through the game.  It’s great when you come up against a boss that took you about twenty tries to beat legitimately, and then pull out your custom Uber Spell of Doom.  Take that, Dugog!

I feel bad about vehicle neglect.  I haven’t really taken the bikes out at all for weeks, except a very short blast on April to run an errand, and Faye hasn’t been used for anything but commuting for a long time.  I need to wash all three of them, too, except that I don’t really have a good place to do it in the apartment complex.  I think it’s just about time for a shotgun car-washing….

Alice and I had our 16th monthiversary this past week, and it was pretty glorious, though low-key.  I love you, babe!   I’m looking forward to our 600th monthiversary. 

What a bust of a day.  Alice and I spent an hour and a half or so early this evening just lying in bed and talking, which was totally awesome, and afterwards we had a cowboy dinner of rice, sausages and BBQ baked beans.  But after that, it was all laundry and sucking hardcore at Guitar Hero 3, which is ridiculously, stupidly hard.  That, on top of discovering that the Rock Band guitar won’t work with GH3… what are the dumbfucks at Neversoft thinking?  Rock Band just won the battle.  At least, it would be the default winner if it weren’t for having to calibrate the audio/video coordination, something I seem to be completely unable to do correctly.  Suck!  And now it’s already time for me to go to bed and get not enough sleep before getting up for another 9 hour day at school.  Balls!  You guys should give me awesomeness (of any kind) to make me feel better.  I’m counting on you!

That’s right, we’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band around here lately. Ryan was awesome enough to help us acquire a copy, with quite the substantial discount, and we’ve been rocking out quite heavily. We even had a Rock Band party the other night, where our rock band consisted of–count ‘em–thirteen people.

I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Heavenly Sword, although I’m right on the cusp. I can’t help feeling like maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with the game, and that if I put in more replays of various levels and put more effort into getting better at the combat system before I wrapped it up (I’m currently a Button Masher Supreme), I would come away with a more rewarding experience. I doubt I’ll actually get to doing it, though… too many other things to do. I got a new-to-me hard drive (thanks again to Ryan), so I have disk space again after a very long time. This means that I can get crackin’ on The Witcher, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and others. This in addition to Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, and more and more. Argle. Give me more hours in a day!

I’m almost over my illness, I think… I’m still coughing fairly often, and I still wake up with a sore throat every day, but it goes away pretty quickly and just subsides into itchiness and the aforementioned coughing. Alice, however, seems to have just begun the cycle, having caught it on the tail end of my contagion. She spent the day with a very bad sore throat, as well as some nausea. Here’s hoping she doesn’t have it as bad as I did!

I am very sick. 

I don’t know why I keep having these thoughts.  They’re completely unfounded, and all they do is depress me and think about worst-case scenarios all the time.  It’s really stupid.  I have absolutely no reason not to trust her… it’s just my mind screwing around with me.  It’s times like this that I wish I didn’t fall so easily… not having anything to do with her, but that way I wouldn’t have gotten involved with all those various girls who’ve hurt me so badly in the past, and maybe now I wouldn’t be so goddamned paranoid.

I was pretty overdue for an angsty post there, wasn’t I?

Alice and I went to the gym today.  I did:

• 3 x 12 x 35lbs dumbbell press
• 3 x 10 x 25lbs dumbbell curl
• (2 x 10) + (1 x 4) dumbbell lift (what are these actually called?)
• 1 x 10 x 40lbs shrugs
• 3 x 10 x 20lbs leg extensions
• 2 x 20 decline situps
• 1 x 10 x 25lbs weighted decline situps

and then I ran half a mile.  Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

Wyotech has continued its trend of being boring, but informative.  We’re currently learning about practical electrical testing and diagnosis with breadboards and DMMs and the like.  I’ve always been afraid of electricity, since I never really understood it, so this is really good for me.

Riding April around for the past couple of days has felt completely awesome.

I’m horny.

Neither April nor Faye are fixed yet.  It’s been back to the boring classroom for the past couple of days at school.  And even with something like 2/3 of my day dedicated to “doing something”, I’m still restless for something real to do.  I itch.  I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m itching for.

On the upside, I’m on expensive meds at the moment that might cure two slight health problems I’ve had for about a year… I’m on proton pump inhibitor to reduce gastric acid production, which hopefully will stop my chronic heartburn and allow the flappy thing in my throat to heal, thus making it so that I don’t feel like something’s stuck in my throat for hours after every meal.  I’m also on some strong-as-hell anti-fungal foot lotion, to try and get rid of a mystery skin-peeling thing that’s afflicted only my left foot.  Also, Alice has garnered me some gym-buddies!  So between those two facts, perhaps my health can improve.  Not that it’s bad or anything.

This sucks… there are a bunch of games out now (Orange Box, Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, World in Conflict, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion, Odin Sphere (though that one’s not that recent), etc.) or that are coming out in the near future (Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Hellgate: London, the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, etc.) that I really want to play.  This is, of course, in addition to unfinished games I already have, and older games I want to acquire and play.  But even if I could afford all of these, I really shouldn’t… and even if I did, I don’t really have time to play them much.  I’m already sleepy as hell from stretching myself too thin every day.  5-6 hours of sleep isn’t catastrophically low, but it leaves me lethargic for the entire day, pretty much every day.  But if I sleep more, then I wouldn’t have time after Wyotech to cook, clean, hang out with Alice (sexually), watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and Heroes, play a bit of video games, and generally have a life.

Speaking of Wyotech, though, our second day of shop time today went pretty nicely.  I added a GM 5.7L V8 (not an LS1… LT1?  My partners thought it came out of a truck) and a 13B rotary to the list of engines I’ve cracked open and reassembled, although the 13B struggled mightily against the “reassembled” half of that process.  I thought those things were supposed to be simple!

The status of my own vehicles, of course, continues to fluctuate.  Faye has been having issues… a fluctuating idle that I thought was intake-related.  This morning, however, she completely died upon attempted startup, with all lights and gauges vanishing into the darkness.  She started up after a couple more tries, again with the wobbly idle, so now I think it’s a loose electrical connection somewhere.  Because THAT won’t be hard to track down.  In good news, however, Mister Awesome Man Dirty Dan has apparently successfully fixed April… if this is truly the case, then I can start riding the shit out of her all over the place.  Yay!