Christmas "Break"

The end of the year holidays were a welcome break from my day job. I had two weeks off and managed to squeeze quite a bit in. I got lots of Daddy/Devon time (so Mary Lou got lots of mamma time :-). I finished everything but the stain on the doors and drawers in the master bath - yay - pictures soon I promise. Had a nice 3 day visit from Grandpa Hart - Devon loved seeing grandpa. Beat 3 video games (Half Life 2, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and nearly Heavenly Sword), and read 2 books (Twilight and New Moon).

That's right, I bought a PS3. I suppose I should dedicate a blog entry to that.... nah. It's a great device as are many of Sony's products - it also suffers from some intentional limitations for the sake of the big media conglomerates - also like most of sony's products. My one biggest complaint: no IR port and the remote is BlueTooth, so I can't use my custom home theater remote with it - come on Sony, be a sport! Back to two remotes - that seems a bigger step backwards than having to use IR (an admitedly old and rather lame technology). The games are beautiful, gotta give them that. They are also short, and so far fairly easy. In general they also seem to have sacrificed gameplay for graphics - maybe creating all those beautiful environments just took longer than the developers planned on. I suspect the next couple years will bring the gameplay back up to the best of the current PS2 games. The internet integration for game demos and movie trailers is very cool, and it found my MythTV uPnP server all by itself - I did nothing! That was a welcome surprise. It can't schedule, delete, or search music by artist, but it plays back recordings just fine. Oh yeah, trying to find nick to register with the playstation network was an excercise in futility, I gave and just button bashed something like "ksdjfhksdlfhlis", so that will be me if I ever happen to try and match all the 16 year olds out there playing online games.... yeah.... not very likely.

So the books - yeah - the sappy-vampire-teenage-girl-romance books. Everyone (all girls admitedly) tells me they were great, but their explanations were all.... lacking. The very premise along with all the anecdotes they would share sounded utterly ridiculous to me - but they all swear the books are a great read. Well, they were. I really enjoyed them. The author does a very good job digging up those obsessive-high-school-romance feelings as well as the dark bleak fog that a profound loss at that age can leave some of us in. She of course has her own spin on the monsters, which is pretty enjoyable for the most part - but I think she struggles with units of measure. Our favorite vampire supposedly rips off a two-foot-thick "branch" off a tree as a demonstration of strength. So while the feat would be quite impressive (and whose to say how strong a vampire is) where does one go to find two-foot-thick branches within arm's reach of the ground one wonders? She also intermixes units like "100 yards, a quarter mile, and a dozen meters" all withing a few pages of eachother. Since the book is a sort of autobiographical of the young teenage girl... perhaps I should chalk it up to the characters sub-par spatial reasoning skills? :-) I lost two night's sleep over these first two books, and I guess there are two to go.

So now it's back to work and trying to scrape a few minutes out of each day to try and whittle away at the various house projects. Happy New Year everyone.