1. Vacation.  There probably isn’t a need to elaborate further on that, but let me just call out that it is the holiday break, my projects are done, and I am in full-on not-thinking-about-work mode.

2. Skiing.  Elizabeth and I have decided that we need to take up a hobby.  We’ve been looking for something we can do together, that’s active, and that we both enjoy.  Skiing (of the downhill variety) fits the bill, and has the added bonus that it’s frigid cold and offers an unparalleled opportunity to wrap ourselves around trees at high velocity.

3. Lasagna.  Diggory got a great recipe from his mother for the stuff, and it makes for a fantastic meal.  Plus, it’s one of the very few dishes that actually tastes better as leftovers.

photo credit: gregor_y

1.  Farmville.  Diggory introduced me to this goofy little Facebook app, which has since been sucking my time away like a Shop-Vac in a box of Cheerios.  Perhaps it’s because it connects with my fond memories of growing up on a farm.  Perhaps it’s the bright colours and pleasant looking fruits and vegetables it sends prancing about my screen.  Perhaps it’s because it is free and yet of comparable quality to a farming sim game I remember paying good money for about 10 years ago (Don’t ask.  Please, don’t ask).  Whatever the case, it’s one of those simple, simple games that I find myself almost unwillingly wandering back to from time to frequent time.

2.  Trail mix.  Elizabeth took it upon herself to make our own last week, after doing some quick math and realizing that she could manufacture trail mix at roughly one-third the cost of what the grocery store would charge for the pre-mixed stuff.  To her great irritation, Diggory and I then proceeded to scarf the whole gallon of it down in the space of a day and a half.  Elizabeth has threatened to visit all manner of horrors upon me if I do not ease up on my trail mix consumption.

3.  Mint.  We’ve been using this site to track our finances and attempt to uncover the black hole that seems to absorb a startling amount of our disposable income each month.  The black hole may or may not be chocolate; the jury is still out on this one.  Still, the site has proven a handy way for us to keep tabs on things and track where the money’s coming in and going out each cycle.  The good news is that it’s free; the bad news is that it isn’t available in Canada yet.

photo credit: kevindooley

There’s an advantage to this; with all three of us participating, it creates a circle of shame.  If one of us so much as mentions going to the gym, the other two assume that person actually intends to go, and are thus guilted into tagging along.  So now, rather than individually going when the mood strikes us, we end up going when the thought even crosses the mind of anyone else in the house.

Given that exercise leaves me in considerable discomfort afterwards, the gym tends to be on my mind quite a bit these days — usually preceded by an unflattering adjective or two — and so we end up talking about said gym and, by extension, returning more and more frequently.  I expect us to hit critical mass soon, where we will simply drag sleeping bags and the microwave down to this gaping maw of fitness and spend our every waking and sleeping moment there.

At the very least, our foray into exercise has proven to be more enduring than our detox attempt.

photo credit: adria.richards

Now, I love Discovery.  They have some great shows on how things are made, how big things are made, how big things are used, and blowing stuff up.  There are shows about sharks, and shows about penguins, and shows about ants.  Between this, and the History channel, there are a lot of really, really interesting programs, and so we parked ourselves in front of the TV and prepared to be immersed in knowledge-building media.

In amongst these informative ones, though, there is an emerging trend of shows that talk — at great length — about one particular means of employment or another.  Fishing.  Truck driving.  Logging.  Actually, there are two shows about logging.

It goes on.

Now, these are interesting professions, and I could certainly be convinced to sit down for a half hour or so to learn more about what goes on in these industries.  But a series?  That goes on for years?  And years?  I struggle with that.

Diggory, however, raised a good point.  In this content-starved environment, we can most likely launch our own show.  We could call it “Extreme Consulting” or “Deadliest Working-at-Home” or “The Incredible Mid-Morning Coffee Making”.  The show would follow all our adventures as we engage in the aforementioned tasks.

Honestly, would it be any worse than watching a guy drive a truck for an hour straight?

photo credit: didbygraham

1. Exercise.  It’s not so much that I like the exercise itself (at all), but I do like the general sense of well-being and smug self-satisfaction that one gets after one has returned from exercise.

At least, I get the aforementioned smugness and satisfaction.

Elizabeth and I were quite active this weekend, relatively speaking, though the relativity there should not be underestimated.  We even went to the gym, which is somewhat remarkable given my previous forays into dedicated fitness facilities.

2.  The Hip.  I know, I know, I need to shut up about the Hip already.  Bear with me.  I’m still buzzing (and my ears are still ringing) from the concert, and I just recently picked up two of their albums which I didn’t have before.  They are playing through my PC’s fair-to-middling speakers as I type, and are making me feel very soulful.

3.  Good sp0rtsmanship.  It allows me to remain friends with Diggory, even as he hands me the ass-whupping of a lifetime in our folding stats.

photo credit: kevindooley

In an effort to similarly simply things when talking about “my sister” and “my brother-in-law”, I will henceforth simply call them Lynnita and Brad.

“My brother-in-law” is what tore it.  It takes me about ten minutes to type that out, what with the hyphens and all, and if I refer to him twice in one paragraph I pretty much need to book a vacation day when I’m done.

It’s gripping stuff, I know, but I’ll try to keep the suspense to a reasonable level and get more or less to the point.  Actually, come to think of it, I don’t really have a point, apart from bleating from the rooftops that we bought bar stools.

We got them used, from someone in Elizabeth’s company who was moving and had determined that they were at a stage in their life where bar stools had ceased to be important, but were not yet at a stage where they became important again.  So the price was right, even if the journey into Manhattan to pick them up was a hellacious descent into taxicab-infested chaos.

On returning, we set them up by our counter-slash-bar, and Diggory and I sat down to raise a Corona and test them out.  So far, so good; they were a proper height, the seats were comfortable, and it was noticably better then hunching broodily over said counter.  The cushions were pink, but in the evening light that didn’t bother me so much.  At best, I’d just get used to it; at worst, we’d replace them with something a little less My Little Pony.

This morning, however, my opinion began to form a little more strongly along a particular line.  I was groggily ambling down the stairs, having just crawled out of bed to escape the braying of the DJ on our alarm clock radio, when I rounded the corner and was confronted with the full view of our living room and kitchen.

I had forgotten that we had bar stools now, and most certainly forgotten that they were pink, and in the quickening morning light those pink cushions were a whole lot more vibrant than I recalled from the previous night.  It felt like someone had leapt up and punched me in the eyeball with a lipstick-smeared fist.  This was not good for my constitution at that particular time of day, in that particular state of mind.

We will likely need to call a house meeting tonight, to discuss the concept of getting new cushions for these chairs, and the urgency with which they should be procured.

photo credit: tomsaint11

Yes, text chat.  A feature that stopped being cutting edge fifteen years ago — and at least fifteen years ago we were using full keyboards, rather than the screen-based abortive hack of an interface that passes for an input means on the PS3.  In spite of this, we PlayStation faithful downloaded this used band-aid of a software update like so many piglets at the proverbial teat, and nobly installed it.  We knew that we could never return to the glory days of yore when we didn’t have the ability to awkwardly shuffle text messages to each other, but then why would one ever want to look back?

I have now an answer to that question.

I was willing to overlook the half-baked lameness of this update.  I was puzzled, but not bothered, by the rabid nature of the comments on Sony’s blog that heralded this as the greatest technological progression since we first trod on the moon.  I accepted this update as progress, even if it was progress that afforded me absolutely no benefit.  I was okay with all of this — until I learned that this update actually completely broke the media streaming functionality of our PS3.

You see, shortly after installing said patch, Elizabeth, Diggory and I decided to watch a movie.  We fired up the PS3, connected to Diggory’s PC-cum-server over our home network, and called forth a movie from the depths of the archives there.

The movie did not come forth willingly.  It was jittery, it was pixelated, it was slow, and it was a big, blocky mess.  Trying to fast-forward or rewind brought the system buckling to its knees.  “This is not ideal,” I commented mildly, shortly before giving up entirely on the film and moving on to the next.  When other movies yielded the same result, though, I began to suspect that something was up.

It says something that the PS3 was the one device in all of this that I did not suspect.  Perhaps it was the ethernet cable we ran to Diggory’s room, I ventured.  Perhaps one of our routers was glitched.  Perhaps Diggory’s PC has become so intensely focused on folding that it can no longer be bothered to share with us the movies it holds in the shadowy recesses of its memory.  Perhaps everyone just needs a quick reboot and some time to think, and all will be well.  I laid out a five-stage plan to tear down the home network, piece by piece, and test it at each and every point to find out what was standing between me and my consumption of video entertainment.

Diggory suggested, almost in passing, that maybe he could bring his PS3 upstairs and we could see if it experienced the same issues.  A quick test, we figured, which involved minimal unplugging of cables and locomotion of hardware, so we might as well try it out.  Up came Diggory’s system, still sweating from its day of folding proteins.  Thirty seconds later, it was connected to the network and streaming video like a champ.

I’ll skip over much of our troubleshooting and discussion, with its corresponding commentary on the state of technology and cultural development, and get to the point where we realized that the only difference between my PS3 and Diggory’s was that he had not yet installed the aforementioned update.  A quick search on Google confirmed our fears: update 2.70 trashed the media streaming capabilities.

At this point, the facts of the situation presented themselves to me like a hammer formed of concentrated light lodging itself in my cranium.  I had accepted an update that provided to me a meaningless feature I will never, ever use, and in return I had traded away the primary function for which our PS3 resides in our house.  What type of Mephistophelian exchange was this, I cried to the shiny black brick inhabiting the space beside our TV.  The echoing silence told me all I needed to know.

My point (if I have one) is to Sony, and it is threefold.  First, if you are going to foist software on a trusting and cash-bearing public, kindly test it before you do so.  Second, if you are going to compell us to install updates, might I ask you to make them worth our while?  And third (assuming you ignore one and two, which I’m fairly certain you will), if you do continue ramming pointless updates down our throats, at least for the love of all that’s holy do not break the very functionality that keeps our wives from just selling the damn thing on eBay.

photo credit: shagy6six6

1. Cherry berries on a cloud.  Elizabeth made this dessert for me this weekend.  It is, essentially, whipped fat and sugar with a fruit topping, and It. Is. Awesome.

2. Bourbon.  Diggory presented me with a bottle of Knob Creek on Sunday, and we shared a nip that evening.  It’s very similar to scotch, though it has its own distinct richness and flavour — interesting, given that it’s made from corn rather than grain.  Plus, it has the advantage of sounding really cool when pronounced in a low baritone.

As an aside, since it’s made from corn does it count as a serving of vegetables?

3. Salad.  Diggory made supper last night, which included lasagna, garlic bread, and tossed salad.  I was especially glad for the salad, because after the cherry berries, bourbon, lasagna, and big fat aftermath of my birthday, my body was in need of some veggies.

photo credit: Kyle May

That said, the people around me were eager to celebrate, and for that I’m grateful.  I can’t say that I’m particularly averse to having my wishes take a higher priority than usual.

You can expect to read about the fallout from said birthday for a while, between the concert Elizabeth is taking me to, the album that my sister and brother-in-law got me, the vacation indulgences that my parents helped sponsor, and my first bourbon from Diggory.

And I haven’t even mentioned the sudden onslaught of Facebook well-wishings that went down yesterday.  Truly staggering, that.

photo credit: *spud*