The World Is My Wal-Mart

01.09.2006

I've been an advocate of eBay for a while now. It's been a good alternative to going to various stores and hunting down things that they, being local, hillbilly-esque stores, don't have. Mostly I tend to get toys, DVDs, comic book paraphenalia, and gaming what-not through eBay. Back before Christmas, I ordered what turned out to pretty much be all of the components of the last version of Car Wars Since coming out in 2002, the game pretty much bombed and has been sitting on sales shelves waiting for the occasional collector (or rube) to come by and pick it up. Since starting my quest to complete my car wars collection last year, I though that in the interest of completeness, I would go ahead and try to pick up what elements of the 5th edition of Car Wars I could pick up. As luck would have it, I was able to get it all through one seller on eBay: Busy Bee (or Deanna in her emails).

I excitedly went to the post office this morning to find my Parcel from Busy Bee, all the way from Canada. It used to be that if I was lucky I would make a trip to South Huntsville, find a game I was interested in, maybe get 15% off, and then take it back home. The list price for all the Car wars paraphernalia in my order was $81.35 (and that's in 2002 dollars). My total for all of it through the auction, including shipping, was $49.00. So that's close to 40% off, including the shipping! From Canada! And that, my friends, is why I like the interweb. It brings the world to my stoop.

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Resolute

01.02.2006

Today is back to work day for the new year. Like a lot of people, I've got a list of resolutions I'm going to try to stick to. I'm usually pretty good at keeping to my resoultions, I think because I throw in some easy easy ones just to make me feel better.

My big thing this year is going to be trying to get more excercise. I did well with karate last year, and I'm even going to try to go to an extra night class now that I'm up to the intermediate level. The first half of last year I partook in some Yoga, which went well with karate, but the time and gas involved in going 30 miles to where I was taking Yoga got to be a little prohibative, especially when the gas prices went above $3/gallon there for a little while. I'm going to attempt to walk more this year. I remember I used to walk to and from school all the time, before being old enough to drive. Using Google Maps, I found out it was about a 2 mile trip between school and home. So, I may not be walking to school, but I've dug out and set up the treadmill and am now committed to trying to up my amount of walking. I'm going to start out easy, trying to go about 15 minutes per day, but my goal is to get back up to that 2 miles per day (or is it 4?).

I've also got a couple of projects around the house that I've resolved to get done, some of them have been hanging around since last June, so I need a little incentive to finish them up. If I'm not careful, I'm just going to dump everything I need to do under "resolutions".

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Love | Marriage | Work

12.23.2005

I know why all my friends (save one) are married. It makes life easier.

I will probably ever be the single guy in which ever group I'm inhabiting. I tend to like my singleness. I can do what I want, when I want, with social norms and local laws in mind. I chuckle when the guys at work all ask permission and synchronize schedules to go for a boys nite out, while I can just pretty much go whenever.

After being sick last week, and since the official office still isn't completely set up at work, I've been working from home this week. It works nice for me. I've got a list of things to get done for work, none of which need more input from anyone else. While working on my little bullet list on the laptop on the kitchen table, I can do other things that clutter up life: fill up and run the dishwasher, wash clothes, dog-sit for mom. None of these things is a full time job, none takes more than 10 minutes out of an hour - I timed going out with the dog and throwing the ball with him while he worked up "his business"; 8 minutes.

The married clique have someone to share those chores with. Granted, the amount of chores probably doubles since there's more people involved, especially if you start counting kids and adding their input/mess to those chores. I've noticed this more lately since the addition of shopping for the holidays has been added in, mainly becuase all of these spouses are out there shopping and slowing me down even more!

I know it's a phase. After this weekend everyone will get settled into their non-shopping mode again. Soon the office will be ready and I'll have to go back to my non-working-from-home way of doing chores. Maybe I can go back to not bitching as much, too? Or maybe I should get married and pawn off my washing on the missus.

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Back Into The Groove

12.19.2005

Well, I think I'm all better now. I've got another 2 days worth of antibiotics to take, but fever, coughing, and excessive nose blowing all seem to be gone.

Mom is coming by this evening for me to begin a week of dog sitting as she turns into the family taxi for people coming to town (town in this case reaches to Florence) for the holidays. Sam gets a little skittish when he's out of his element and theres a lot going on, so he's going to keep me company here in the quiet of the Boonies until Saturday.

I've got 2 more presents to buy and then I can say I'm done with my christmas shopping. I'm planning on doing said shopping tomorrow, since I have to get out in the world of consumerism to partake in the latest DVD releases. I'm not sure what's coming out, but there's got to be something good this close to christmas.

Work is also keeping me busy. After being sick last week I couldn't concentrate enough once I got in front of the computer to be productive. Today has been better, but I'm still not up to 100%. It took me about 2 hours to fix a silly little problem just because I was manipulating a .NET datagrid. I eventually dug out the .NET book and hacked my way to an answer. Stupid datagrids....

So, in case I don't get back to the blog beforehand, have a Merry X-Mas internet people!

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I Can See Clearly Now!

12.16.2005

After nearly 7 days of being sick, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Wait, that can be taken in a good way and a bad way. Well, I don't think I'm about to die, so I'll just hope everyone is taking it the right way.

My fever broke yesterday, so I'm no longer having weird dreams involving the dog from the old Buster Brown shoe commercials. I'm still taking antibiotics (with another 5 days worth left), so I'm not out of the woods yet. Everything has evolved basically into a sinus cold now, so I'm taking Sudafed and Afrin to make my raspy breathing more enjoyable.

Being in the house for a week, I find that it doesn't really bother me - I tend to not get cabin fever like a lot of people do. Granted, for most of the time I've been awake an hour or two at the time in between naps, but now that I'm starting to feel better I don't have that urge to get out and do something.

It could be because I know those Christmas shoppers and all of their traffic is out there.

The only thing I've really managed to do this week, in between napping, has been to watch the first season of Smallville. I had been putting off watching it, in part because I wanted to get in the mindset of Superman: 90210, plus I knew I would either hate it and never want to see any of the shows, or I would love it and get hooked into it. Well, I think I've gotten hooked. Oddly enough, it's because of Lex Luthor. In the comics he always comes across as evil, pure and simple. In the show, you know how he's going to turn out, but he just has that intangible charisma that makes me want to like him. So now I have another hobby - catching up on 4 (or 5) seasons of Smallville.

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