Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it... okay, enough already!

In past winters, we’ve come out pretty lucky. I can recall snowfalls that gave us 6-8 inches, and just when we were barely done clearing our driveways and walkways from that one, another one blew in and dumped another foot on our heads. Never around Christmas though – sure, we had that one year when we spent Christmas in Maine, and woke up to find 19″ on the ground, but lately if we’re going to get any decent snowfall it happens in February. Mostly though, we would get maybe 2-3 inches, and then it would promptly melt, and then a week or so later we’d get another inch or two. Nothing too inconvenient, truthfully.

So far this year, we’ve had two decent snowfalls, both requiring the use of a snowblower first thing in the morning. Today’s is the most so far, with about 8-10 inches on the ground and more on the way. Naturally Paula decided she wanted to go to church anyway, so guess who got elected to go out and freeze his still-half-asleep ass off pushing around a snowblower with a broken clutch? I don’t see the point, myself – days like this were created to stay in bed, not go out at 9 am and wake the neighbors (who, around this time of year, could easily be sleeping off last night’s festivities.) Unless her church practices ritual dance to somehow affect the weather patterns over New England, I vote for turning the bed warmer back on and grabbing hold of the nearest warm puppy. But, it’s church, and it’s generally agreed that I know nothing at all about what goes on in those large buildings (other than bingo for seniors, but apparently that doesn’t count.)

In other news…

I finally have a date for my foot surgery. You have no idea how hard it is to find someone willing to go with you when there is a guarantee of no dancing and the food is going to be horrible… (coff) January 25th I go in to have the plantar fascia (the tendon in the bottom of my foot) cut away from a rather large bone spur in my left heel. Probably 2-3 weeks in a boot cast, and then light walking. I’ve gotten rather good at avoiding movement, so this should be easy.

I’m taking a bit of a break from World of Warcraft for a while. It’s too easy to forget that the people you’re playing with are just that – people. They make mistakes, they sometimes do dumb things, but still, they are (in some cases) your friends, and occasionally you just have to take a step back and clear your head. So instead, I’ve been catching up on those Gamefly discs that have been gathering dust – I finished Lego Star Wars, and then tackled Saints Row. What a mistake that was – it’s as if it was saying “Hey, we made a gritty sandbox game with gangster violence and car jacking, and guns and hookers and firetrucks, but it’s not a blatant rip-off of that other gang war game. Nope, this is a completely original idea.” At least it was just a rental – I save so much money on games that way. The past three or four rentals were so bad they barely spent 3 hours outside the mailing envelope. Pop the game in, try it, decide it sucks, give it one more try, decide it still sucks, stick it back in the mailer. I remember playing Lost Planet, determined to give it a chance, only to have it lock up on me. When I went back into it, it had absolutely no idea that I had ever played it. No saved profile, nothing. That one went back fast. Vampire Rain was another one that I should have read the reviews first – to say it sucked would be a clever pun that the game doesn’t deserve. The first mission was basically an hour of cut scene with a couple seconds of gameplay tossed in at the last minute, eventually leading to your death when it finally removed the training wheels. Two Worlds was rather heavily hyped, only to go back the day after I got it – awful graphics, terrible controls, and voice acting that sounds like it was done by a second grade drama class. Bleah. And of course I am playing Oblivion again. I’ve been playing it so long on the same character that it’s no longer even challenging (the Shivering Isles addon gives you a really powerful sword that just ruins the game by making everything die with one swat.) So I started a new character, this time focusing on ranged combat with a bow and summoning creatures. I guess it’s sort of like rolling a hunter in World of Warcraft, only a bit more realistic. (Whether or not your arrow or spell hits depends on your aim, not some random roll of the dice.) You can also collect and reuse arrows – something I wish WoW allowed.

Speaking of bows and arrows, I had some time to kill the other day while driving from one appointment to another, so I stopped into a sporting goods store. I haven’t handled a bow since I was maybe 13 years old (and even that wasn’t for too long – stand in line for 15 minutes, take three shots, come nowhere near the target because I have never done this before, okay that’s it, time to let someone else take a turn! Wow, that’s it? It’s like waiting in line for 2 hours at Disneyland for a ride that lasts maybe 10 seconds. Wheee.) but I have been kicking around the idea of maybe getting into target shooting. (There’s a pipe dream of going bow hunting some day… yeah that’ll happen. It’s far more likely that the deer will wet themselves laughing, and then give themselves up out of pity.) So I go to the section with the bows and arrows, realize that I have no idea what I am even looking at (is this a bow or a Bat-erang?) and cautiously pick one up. Now, the new-fangled bows have wheels and pullies and… well, it looks like if you drop it it will drive away and hide. I pulled back on the bowstring (at least I think that’s what it was) and it comes back way too easy. That’s the pullies in action, but at the time I thought I broke it, so I let go. Oops. String snaps back and smacks my finger, breaking a blood vessel at the first joint. I promptly put the bow back and left the store before anyone could ask me if I needed any help. I just did not feel like explaining that I was way beyond help and did not belong there.

I also finally managed to get Connect360 working. Windows systems have a Media Center type thing so you can stream movies and music from your PC to your XBOX 360, but naturally it wouldn’t be in Microsoft’s business plan to support Mac OS X. A company called Nullriver came up with a great program called Connect360, which makes your Mac system appear as if it’s a Windows PC running the XBOX extender software. Install this little program, go to your XBOX 360, browse for a system, and boink – movies and iTunes music, as well as the ability to show any photos you have taken. Previously I was unable to get it working; at first I assumed it was because all my movies were in a format the XBOX didn’t support. I also couldn’t get it to update playlists on iTunes – it kept showing the old versions of stuff and didn’t show updates I had made. However, with the last XBOX Dashboard update adding support for DivX video format movies, I was determined to get this to work. Redownloaded the program, reset the XBOX, and it connected without any trouble at all. Listed my movies, and wow, there they were. Right now most of what I have on my laptop is anime stuff (Galaxy Railways and season 2 of Yamato, as well as Ghost in the Shell seasons 1 and 2.) Some of them wouldn’t play because they were using some odd codec, but I have the converter program to turn them to DivX (every year the DivX folks offer the Pro version for free, and this year I managed to get it before the offer expired! w00t!) The ones that did play, wow, how cool it is to be able to watch it on a widescreen instead of a laptop screen. 😀 I also imported all my photos, so now I can look at the bunnies and the squirrels downstairs on the television. (Don’t laugh – it’s really cool.)

I’ve been trying to keep up with the cooking whenever possible. Last weekend I made Berry Blast ice cream and a fudge chocolate cake with cherries in it. It was supposed to be cherry ice cream, but I realized that I didn’t have enough cherries for a whole batch, but I did have a bag of mixed berries in the freezer. Didn’t want the cherries to go to waste, so I found a fudge cake recipe and surprisingly I had the ingredients for it (including a can of frosting I bought a month or so back when I thought I would be ambitious enough to make cupcakes.) The cake actually came out good – our oven is weird so I expected it to be like most of the brownies I make – dry on the outside and mush in the center. Okay so the cherries fall out when you slice it, but it still tastes good.