My parents got home from their trip this afternoon, so now I guess I’m officially “unabandoned”. As far as my day went, it probably would have been the same either way. I watched most of the Cowboys game, played some Tabula Rasa and WoW, did some homework, looked over stuff for a test tomorrow that I don’t really feel like I need to study for, and then finally played some Super Paper Mario.
Tomorrow will probably be more of the same (minus the football game and studying for the test, replaced with school and taking the test). Starting this week, once Wednesday rolls around my week kinda goes into super fast hyperdrive mode. Wednesday and Thursday mornings I have my Plano school stuff, and Thursday and Friday afternoons/evenings I have HP football. Well, with the exception of next week where the football games are actually on Wednesday and Thursday meaning that once Friday gets here, I’m going to need the break just to regain my sanity. Realize that that’s going to be close to two full days with my only free time being that of sleeping. Oh yeah, really looking forward to that.
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Told you I would call it this. :)
I did go see a movie today, Sydney White, and it was entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon when I had nothing else to do. It’s not going to be a DVD collection worthy movie, but maybe a rent or a download (you know, if I did that kind of thing…). I heard someone say after it was over that it was a “typical Amanda Bynes movie”.I can’t really say that that’s an incorrect assessment, as it really was.
I’ve played Tabula Rasa and WoW so far today to cover the game part. I think that if this computer was a little more powerful many of my problems with Tabula Rasa would be solved, so I can’t decide if I want to go ahead an try it on my desktop out at UTD but have to suffer through a multi-GB download over cable. Fiber really has spoiled me as far as download times go. I’ll purposefully wait to download something until I get home just so that I can do it super, super fast.
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Cutting it close enough for ya? We won 31-0 (slightly off from my pregame prediction of 42-0, but I did have the shutout part right), so we move to 4-0 for the season and 1-0 in district. I say that this was a calculated risk since I chose to not make a post before we left hoping that we would get back in time. Well, it’s more along the lines of I forgot before I left my house and then just never got a chance over at the stadium. As long as it gets made in time though, who cares? I shoot, I score!!!
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Before you go off on how absolutely insane that sounds, just hear me out. I too believed the idea to be insanely stupid until I was informed of its purpose. Basically, they “water” the turf in the morning to cool it down in hopes that by the time the team comes out in the afternoon, the turf won’t be as hot. Unfortunately the system doesn’t work quite as well as one would hope since it gets so hot, so early that any benefit the water gives is almost gone. There’s an example, however, of how something that sounds so completely stupid can actually have a purpose.
Tomorrow we have to play at the field from the place down under (not Australia, the other “down under”). It’s grass, the sidelines are way too small, there’s very little seating, and the mosquitoes are killer. We’re taking at least two full cans of Off just for that last reason. This is, of course, talking about Terrell, so I may be making a post pretty early tomorrow rather than risk getting home too late.
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My parents are abandoning me while they take a trip to Austin over the weekend, so from Friday until Sunday morning-afternoon, I’ll be required to find ways to entertain myself. I’m contemplating going to a movie on Saturday afternoon, but I wouldn’t be going with my grandparents since they’re abandoning me also by driving up to Arkansas to visit with my other set of grandparents. I forsee lots of Metroid Prime 2, Super Paper Mario, and possibly a little WoW or Tabula Rasa thrown in for good measure. I’ll call it, “The Weekend of Video Games with a Possible Movie”.
I finally got my schedule for having to go to a Plano school and “observe” (which ends up being tutoring a kid and helping in 6th and 8th grade math classrooms) for my education class requirement, so beginning next week I’ll be doing that for about 2 hours every Wednesday and Thursday morning until I get 20 hours done. Most of the other people in my class have had their schedules for at least 1 week, some 2. I’m not saying that I had anything to do with us getting our schedules when we did, but I went to the Teacher Development Center on Monday afternoon and left a message for the lady there who is in charge of this program. Tuesday morning, my schedule is in my inbox. Coincidence? You decide.
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Halo 3 was released at midnight tonight. No, I haven’t played it yet (I could have gone over to someone’s house, shut up), and no, I don’t feel the urgent need to go do so. If I was going to make my 360 purchasing plans right now, I’d say it would be either right before or right after Thanksgiving. It’ll have been 2 years, and I think that’s long enough to wait.
Next week is probably the one week out of the remaining part of the I’m looking forward to the most until our trip to Vegas. Why? The release of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is why. If I really need to explain to you why I’m looking forward to this release so much, you don’t know me very well at all. Forget about Bioshock (which I didn’t play any today), WoW, Tabula Rasa, and any other games I might be playing. Come next Tuesday afternoon, virtually every single free moment I have is going to be spent with this game.
Finally, in two weeks the trio of new Valve games finally hits in HL2: The Orange Box. It comes with the original HL2 (which I already have) and Episode 1 (which I don’t) in addition to the three new games, making it a bountiful box of Half-Life goodness. Team Fortress 2 will probably be fun, Episode 2 will hopefully be fun, but the one that I know is going to be fun is Portal. If it’s not, then something is wrong with me, not the game.
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In about an hour there’s going to be a bunch of places open at midnight selling this game that a bunch of people want. I think it’s about these aliens and weird space rings. Oh yeah, and there’s a dude in green armor also. Angel? No, that’s not it, but it has something to do with angels… Oh yeah, it’s called Halo. Halo 3, actually. I know, a game about space rings has sold enough to spawn two sequels. Shows what kind of taste the gaming community has.
While all those people will be playing with their space ring game tomorrow, I’ll most likely be playing Bioshock. Playing that, class, and a meeting with Dr. Linehan are my high points of the day before I go home tomorrow afternoon. When the throngs of mad people have hopefully had a chance to clear out of the mall, I’ll go pick up my own copy of the space ring game even though I can’t play it on anything. Does that make me even madder than they are? On second thought, don’t answer that.
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Very soon in my programming languages classes we are going to have to begin to program in languages that I’d venture to guess most of us are not familiar with. The first of these is Scheme, and we have a link in our syllabus to an online book for us to read so that we can begin to get a grasp on the language. While Scheme isn’t exactly on my list of languages that I’d like to become familiar with, it’s one more I can put on my resume saying that I know.
I actually didn’t get in any Tabula Rasa time this weekend, but my goal is to play it some when I come home on Tuesday in order to go pick up a game that happens to come out that day. At the moment I have very little homework left to work on, so my game playing time is presently planned to be on the high end of the spectrum. Something is bound to come up, however, so the question is more of how much that time is going to drop rather than if.
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Today was my mom’s birthday so for the second Saturday in a row (last week was celebrating my dad’s) we went out to a nice steakhouse to eat dinner. I always almost get the same thing: an order of calamari (unless I know from previous experience that I hate it) and a filet mignon cooked medium-well with fries. Not exactly a cheap meal, but it tastes so, so good.
While we were going to be out eating dinner, Holes was going to be on Disney Channel. That’s one of the few movies in the category of ones that I contemplated seeing when it was in theaters but never did, and I haven’t ever seen it since it came out on DVD or started airing on TV so I recorded it and started watching when we got home. It’s a movie based on a book by I believe the same author as Hoot, but it’s a stranger movie than Hoot was. There’s a lot of time jumping for flashbacks which can make it a little hard to follow. Probably not a movie I’d have added to my collection if I had seen it initially (just as Hoot isn’t either), but I enjoyed watching it.
One of the topics that came up at dinner was the fact that my dad is leaving tomorrow for Rome. This led to a discussion of how my mom would like to go there, and then I chimed in with the comment that if we ever did take a family vacation there, I’d want to go on a Mediterranean cruise. We’re doing Australia next summer, but my dad said that we could do that as a graduation trip the following summer. We then continued onto how it would be cool to do an African safari, and that semi-jokingly got penciled in for the next summer (2010). It appears that my research is in order for the next few years worth of family vacations.
Finally, during the credits of Holes, I saw that Sigourney Weaver was one of the main characters. I had no clue that she was that character, but it reminded me of Galaxyquest. Therefore, I’m going to go watch that movie seeing as how it’s one of my absolute favorites in my collection.
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I went ahead and started Super Paper Mario today (mainly just because I could). This is my first encounter with the Mario RPG world outside of the Mario & Luigi games for the GBA/DS. The handheld games are much more RPGs than platformers, but this one is basically a platformer with more advanced health, items, and a story behind it. Supposedly this is much more platform and less RPG focused than the two other games in the Paper Mario series, but I guess I’ll find that out once I get around to playing Thousand Year Door and the N64 one which is available through the Virtual Console.
No games yesterday or today was slightly weird, but I should be back to (at least) Friday night games next week and then Thursday and Friday games until the end of the regular season. After that, of course, the schedule goes crazy with playoffs (both days and length). Probably no Thanksgiving trip planned for this year, but less than a month later I’ll be in Vegas for my birthday. I think I’ll be good.
Oh, and for those interested, I went to the registrar’s office, and they just printed out and handed a transcript to me on the spot. At least the part I forgot about turned out to be the easiest.
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