back to life as usual

Mixed feelings as the holiday vacation-ish run draws to a close.

On one hand, no more long public holidays for me until Memorial day. I do not think that my current employer chooses to recognize president's day. That's kind of a long stretch.

On the other hand, return to a "normal" routine will be welcome. It's been hard to get really into the flow of work and also the flow of vacation when the schedule keeps flip-flopping from free day to work day as it has been doing the past week or so.

Time off is a good opportunity to reflect on how I'm living and how I'd like to do things differently in the future in order to improve things.

For some reason, patience has been wearing thin. I guess that if something super exciting is to happen in my life, it's up to me to make that happen...have been waiting long enough for something to spontaneously come up; I guess that's kind of played out.

new year's video?

2 very different games

My brother was kind enough to send me "Cooking Mama" for Wii. Got to play through it a bit. Had tried the Nintendo DS version of the game before so I knew what to expect. But certainly more fun on the Wii with the Wii-mote. Gimicky; novelty will probably wear off.

But Marsha thinks it's cute and I'm ostensibly learning something about cooking.

I also picked up a game for myself. Steam is still offering Left 4 Dead for 25% off, which seems a reasonable deal as the game is still fairly new. The deal only lasts until January 2, 2009.

Played through the first level of the single-player game. Pretty fun...I'm looking forward to trying the online play. We'll see if it holds my attention as long as Team Fortress 2 has (and still does, on the few times that I can really give to online gaming).

Not that I intend on spending that much time playing video games this year...but resolutions and whatnot will be a different blog post.

Dad's Birfday

Went well; I think he was happy.

Another lazy-ish morning; left-overs for lunch, trip to the art museum during the afternoon.

Picked up Pizza ingredients at Cosetta's; then went and had Italian food in Wisconsin for dinner. Spotted Cow beer is awesome.

Dad was happy; we came home & then looked through quite a few of the old slide carousels he had - interesting seeing the shots of my parents college days in the 70s & their wedding...I don't think I had seen all of them before.

Stayed up later than I thought we would doing this, but mostly pleasant.