time goes by

Sunday, we went over to mygrane's place. Originally the plan was early afternoon, then a bunch of people got sidetracked by a raid, so it ended up being late afternoon, and then dinnertime. The Steelers kickoff was at 3:30 local time, but Mike's cable isn't in the same place as the TV these days. So, rather than move a TV around, we ended up wiring the living room for cable, ghetto-style, the same way we originally wired the Shady House for internet way back when I lived there -- we ran cable through the heating ducts. Wheeeeeeee.

Watched the first half of the Steelers game, and yes, I still have a Terrible Towel. Apparently we saw the "good" half of the game (but we didn't see Charlie on TV). Went over to Christine's during halftime.

The plan at Christine's was to eat pizza and pasta and play Rock Band, originally with 5 people, but then we added 4 more into it for the dinner equation. And yeah, sure, Rock Band can support 3 people singing, but imagine what it's like for me -- I've been out of the country for 4 years or so and even before that I haven't really been into English-language pop/rock for something like 10 years now. And largely, the songs in Rock Band are male vocals to begin with. So, awkward. I sat there playing Kanji Kentei DS instead. Although when we lost a few people to either going home or going over to their laptop to play games, then it was down to 4-5 of us and that worked out well and I got to try out the keyboards (verdict: sorry, it's nowhere as cool as Keyboardmania, although I have to admit that the ability to play the guitar part on the keyboards is nice. On another GF/DM/KBM note, I found it really funny when I'm on the drums like "Why is there no auto-bass?" and everyone's like "WTF is that?"). I think that basically, my take on Rock Band is that I'll play with friends, and it's not that much better or worse than Session in Ye Olde Illusionz Days, but I really seriously just don't enjoy singing karaoke in English.

But later on was good, we adjourned to the big gaming table in the kitchen and played some Super Set (and I actually beat Christine, but she was dealing so I'm not sure it counts) and then a few hands of Rook. Can't remember the last time I played... either way, so, the latter half of the evening was good and made up for the first half sucking.

Also, the Steelers won, though it was a close game. We followed the second half over the internet while eating dinner.

Hmm.

I can't sleep very well here. It's making me grumpy. I haven't been able to sleep for more than 2-3 hours at a time at all since coming back, and I'm fairly sure this isn't jet lag anymore.

Today, I ended up going to lunch with Mike at Crossroads, since I figured the food court would be a good place that I could get some Asian food and he could get something else. We walk in and yay, there's a thai place! I order pad see ew, which is what I really really wanted... and she takes my order, takes my money, etc, and comes back two minutes later like "We have no wide noodles. Um. I dunno if we can make it with pad thai noodles. You want something else?" and I end up changing my order to swimming angel, which was good for about 3 bites and then was just way too greasy. Bleh. So I still want thai food! I'm craving some Japanese food too, but I know that 99% of the stuff available here is going to make me sad. An Uwajimaya run for agesembei and kakipea may be necessary one of these days though.

Then I drove Mike to the MS campus and I went around on my own, including driving to ACME Bowl, where I found out there is no Pop'n, which sucks. I played one game of DDR because I'd come all the way there, and then decided to go hunt down the Kent K-Mart -- they seem to be the only place I can get Hanes crew socks. I know that sounds stupid, but there are very few K-Marts in the Seattle area, and yes, really, I'm picky about socks to some extent because of my foot problems. (And it's actually cheaper to get them in the store, they were $5 per bag of 6 pairs there, I don't see anyone beating that price online once you add in shipping.)

The funny part is, the K-Mart is way down in Kent, I'd looked it up on the map beforehand but not carefully, so I had a vague idea but I don't know Kent that well. I'd decided a certain street was where I was going to turn around if I didn't find it -- and sure enough, that's where the K-Mart was. Yay. When I typed K-mart into Mike's car navi thing, it came up with one in Puyallup. Yikes.

Then came home. Worked on stuff (I dug up writing samples from past jobs, among other things).

Picked up Mike from MS and we went to Safeway to procure stuff to make dinner, and I made meatloaf! Yeah, it's not exciting, but I did say I wanted to try cooking stuff at home sometimes, so I did that, and that was good.

Not much to say about the rest of the evening though. I find that I'm working on like 2-3 things and keep context switching, which means I make forward progress but don't feel like I'm finishing anything, which is a little frustrating. On the other hand, I have been writing Perl again and getting my brain back into a programming mindset, so that much is good, I guess.