journal for 2003-11-24
not dead yet
I’m enjoying my vacation, which is basically a period of time during which I’m doing almost nothing. Unfortunately, that nothing has included not doing some things I should be doing, like working on my nano or writing in here. Oh well!
I picked up a few games over the past few weeks, all of which have proven great. MarioKart is as good as I expected, I think, and has been fun for multiplayer at least for me and Gloria. Prince of Persia was fantastic, and I finished it in about two days. Mario and Luigi is still in progress, but is a lot of fun; I’m a little tired of Really Long RPG Battles, but the game itself is fun.
A Waffle House opened up in Allentown, and we ate breakfast there twice this weekend. It ruled, despite the wait to be seated. I liked having pecans in my waffle, to my mild surprise. None of the staff called us “hon” or “sugar,” which did not surprise us. Maybe if we’d had one of the southern-seeming waitresses. I think they’re there to show the locals the ropes.
Gloria’s company is having a Christmas party at the Hotel Bethlehem next month, and she went looking for something to wear. I helped a bit, and got to see her pick out a totally boss dress, and then a few little things to go with it. She will look faboo, and I need to make sure I get at least a shirt to wear. I don’t think I have any shirts up to the task. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get a new blazer or some khaki slacks, either.
Of those people for whom I’m sure we’ll be buying Christmas presents, we’re about half done. I haven’t done much work on my wishlist software since I got it up and running for the family. I wanted to, during this vacation, but I’m glad I’ve been relaxing instead. I should at least get a few of my next-step features in, especially to deal with people who keep listing fives things in one item.
I rented some movies this weekend. Bartleby, a modernization of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivner” was pretty awful and pointless. Junk, a Japanese zombie movie was pretty awful and boring. Tomorrow I’ll watch “It’s Alive,” for which I actually had the least hope. Let’s hope I was very, very wrong. Otherwise, I may not watch the whole thing. At least I’ll be able to read or type through it; Junk was subtitled.
Junk’s real problem was that it did nothing new. There are roughly a whole lot of zombie movies out there. A new zombie movie needs to be either good or novel, or possibly both. Junk was neither. Also, it had several scenes in English, which lacked (for clear reasons) any subtitles. Unfortunately, the Japanese actor who spoke English spoke it through an incredibly thick accent, at times. I guess they figured that the Japanese audience would just read the Kanji subtitles. Ugh!
I’m too tired to think of anything else interesting that’s happened, so I’ll just stop now.