9 posts tagged “weekend”

Time for a weekend update post! This weekend started with me in the mood for some relaxation after some events that happened on Friday, but the weekend delivered...at least Saturday did. My friend Wassy has been having some really good results from her site and had been getting a bunch of commission requests. Which is good and bad. Good because her little business is starting to actually go somewhere. Bad because it keeps pushing back a piece that I wanted to have done that's all City of Heroes related.

But because of that for our weekly get-together we ended up just hanging out at their place while I played some City of Heroes with Jay and she did her artwork stuff. I must say, she has a fine system for playing games while laying down on the couch and I must figure out how to do this at my place. It's very comfortable. The evening was capped off by a little wine and some fruit and cheese type snaking which ended up being very good. All nice and relaxing (and productive for her at the same time)

Sunday though I was in the mood for something productive. So I decided that I was going to finish the de-cluttering project that I had started a while agot and totally failed with. I attacked the mess in my bedroom which resulted in 5 bags of garbage for the trash guy to take away this morning, along with a whole lot of cardboard. I've got a ton of computer related items which I'm never going to use. I'm at a premium for space anyway, so I really need to either chuck it or sell it. Most of this stuff is in the "chuck it' area unfortunetly. I manged to get a good way into it and as soon as I get home today I'm going to continue the process. Well, after I exercise. I really need to get rid of some stuff that I NEVER use. Like my old Sega Game Gear, for example.

It's been hot all weekend and it's supposed to be even hotter out today and tomorrow. So it's with a thankful tone that I can report that I finally have air conditioning in my apartment. Last year my friends donated their old AC unit to me because their new place had one built in. I finally got around to asking them if it was all right for me to run something (since utilities are included in my rent, I figured I should ask with something that uses up electricity like that) and their reply "You don't have AC already?" was enough for me. Another reason I wanted to run AC was due to my fish. My betta's tank heats up dangerously (was 84-85F on saturday) without it, so I need something to keep the temperature in the apartment down below 80 degrees if I can.

So my parents came over yesterday to help me install the thing (that sucker's heavy) and I turned it on and it works. Glorious cold air, streaming into my living room! I don't know how I lived without one of these things before! I think the dehumidifier aspects make it even better. Humidity sucks.

Anyway, rounding out my home improvements for the weekend was the installation of a Pur water filter on my sink. I had been using a brita pitcher for a while and liked it, but it was annoying having to fill it up all the time, so I figured a faucet filter would be a better way to go. I ran into a little snag when I tried to put one of the included adapters on my faucet and found out it wasn't the right size. I got halfway to the hardware store before I realized that the size my faucet was and the size it needed to be adapted to where actually the same size. Oops. After that little hangup everything proceeded nicely.

Oh, I also saw a couple of movies over the weekend. First up was Indiana Jones 4, which I thought was pretty good right up until the last 15 minutes or so. But it had everything I'm looking for in an Indiana Jones movie. Some of the witty dialog seemed forced at times, but overall, it was a fun ride and I don't regret seeing it. After that I went back to my friends place (we saw Indy together) and we ended up watching Enchanted which was very good. Disney making fun of itself and taking the whole animated movie thing to ridiculous levels of absurdity was awesome. And the scene where the prince leaps off a bridge and begins singing only to get run over by a bunch of bikers is funny every single time.

Another weekend, another weekend summary post! This weekend was a long time coming after perhaps one of the slowest weeks ever.

Saturday I was a nice, relaxing day of hanging out with my friends. I went out to the local zoo with Wassy (Jay was supposed to come, however events earlier in the day ran long and he wasn't going to be able to make it so we went without him) and had a nice time wandering around, viewing animals and dodging annoying children. Well, viewing some animals...some of them didn't seem to want to have anything to do with me. Like the ducks.

The zoo has a duck pond. Well, more accurately it's an alligator pond that some ducks have moved in on and the zoo put up a sign saying it was a duck pond, with bonus alligators. They have this thing set up where you can feed the ducks. Pretty standard setup, put in your quarter, get some pellets, throw to ducks, they eat the pellets and everyone goes away happy and satisfied. Except for these ducks that is. They weren't having any of this feeding stuff. So it kinda made me look stupid, throwing pellets to ducks who were totally ignoring me. So I just threw the whole handful at them. Take that jerks!

I should also mention we found a free-range peacock just wandering around. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't have been wandering because we saw them get thrown in a cage immediately after. It seems slightly disjointed that I mentioned that fact here, but I wanted to get it out of the way before I mention the human based story.

As we were trying to escape from a gaggle of kids (of the annoying variety) we walked past the place where they sell all the drinks and food and stuff of that nature. There was a family consisting of a boy, probably around 6 or 7 years old and his parents. As they approached the building, his mom said "Ok honey, we're going to have to wait in line..." The kid responded reasonably with a very loud yelling of "F--k!!" that made my head turn. It seems his parents were fine with this as well as they didn't seem totally shocked. I couldn't believe it and it made me want to weep for humanity's future.

After the zoo trip we went back to their apartment to meet up with Jay and begin the general hanging out portion of the day, watching some anime (Full Metal Alchemist) and then Sweeny Todd, a movie which will forever prevent me from going to a barber shop to get a shave. It was good though. Very artfully done and Johnny Depp is incredibly awesome in it.

Sunday was the standard day of work. I had some housework to get done, and some programming type things that needed to be taken care of. Hopefully my weekends where I need to do school work are coming to an end relatively soon here as there's only a couple weeks left in this semester which is hopefully my last.
 

This weekend was a very relaxing one for me, with a side of getting lots of stuff accomplished. Kinda a rarity these days. It seems like everything is either one or the other.

This was supposed to be the weekend I was going to go out to a LAN Party thingy that was going on in the local area with some of the guys I play Team Fortress 2 with because there was a TF2 tournament happening and it would have been fun to play it there. Unfortunately, it's coming down to the end of the school semester so I didn't think that taking myself out of commission for an entire weekend was going to do very much to help me get my schoolwork done, so I skipped it and hung out with Wassy on saturday.

We went out to the gym in the morning and did a little working out and then out for some shopping just to get out because it was supposed to rain yesterday (which it never did). Then we hung out for a bit, listening to music while I did a little bit of my homework and while she was making dinner (roast chicken...mmm). Then we did some more general hanging out stuff, watching some anime and then the MST3K-ed Manos: The Hands Of Fate which is always good for a laugh. I left earlier than I had wanted to because I developed a headache, but overall it was a very, very relaxing day.

Sunday was split between playing Final Fantasy X and working on my various projects. I also spent some time over at my parents playing with their new puppy. I'm not really a dog person, but she's pretty cool as far as dogs go. I have included a picture to prove that I was indeed playing with the puppy and actually allowed it to sit on my lap.

She's a purebred Maltese named Beasley. She ended up falling asleep on my legs because we tired her out while playing around with her. She's very cute, with a lot of personality. Not that I'd ever get a dog of my own (without being forced to), but she's ok in my book. She was sleeping prior to this picture, by the way...but the flash kinda freaked her out a bit.

Better late than never! I totally forgot to write up a report of this weekends activities due to other things happening tonight (which I will detail probably tomorrow. In short, I got myself a new fish tank last night for my betta. Sooon!)

Anyway, Saturday was the day the tickets for the DC show of Progressive Nation 2008 went on tour. I managed to snag two sets, one on the floor, about halfway back on the center aisle. The other set is one of the boxed seats. Now we just need to decide which set we're going to use and which we're going to sell. Both aren't "great" seats but they fit squarely in the "decent" category.

But the real meat of this post is going to be Sunday. Because on sunday I went over to my friends house to hang out and watch some DVD type things. MST3K and some Anime, as well as some Girls Next Door which they somehow sucked me into even though I attempt to avoid most reality TV like the plague.

However, the fun didn't start until after dinner. Wassy had bought this really, really nice wine, a Bully Hill Banty Red. Now I'm not generally big on red wines but this one was right up my alley. Very, very nice. A little on the strong side though as we seem to have discovered. So we were drinking a glass of wine and watching Girls Next Door and they had two shows in a row that referenced cupcakes. Which was very mean because we're all trying to lose weight and the last thing we need is to be tempted by cupcakes.

However, it got to a point where it was simply necessary for us to have some cupcakes. So at 8:45PM on a Sunday night we went on a cupcake run. We quickly came to the realization that this was quite possibly the strangest thing we had ever done. Which brought upon another realization that we're pretty boring people if going on a cupcake run sunday night is up there on the strange meter. The title of this post references our realization that this is quite like something that somebody who was high might do. It was very strange.
 
We struck out at the first store since we were trying to find cupcakes with chocolate frosting but there was another grocery store nearby. Unfortunetly their cupcakes were only availible in packs of 12 or so...which was way too many cupcakes. So instead, we settled on a tiny cake.

Armed with our tiny cake, we returned to the apartment to enjoy a small slice of our hard earned treasure. The cupcake run will live on in epic legend. I should mention that when I took the above picture, there was another person coming towards us in the same aisle, which I didn't notice until after I had taken the picture. They must have thought we were crazy. They weren't too far off the mark.

For many in the US, they're just coming off of a long weekend due to president's day. I'm one of those people. I also didn't really feel like posting running updates, so you're going to get the whole thing right now.

Saturday

This weekend was another one of those weekends where I headed over to my friends house for a lot of general hanging out and doing stuff. I had placed an order for a Gamecube controller for in store pickup at Circuit City because I needed one to play Tales of Symphonia on my Wii (very nice RPG so far). It would also be useful there because we had planned on Smash Brothers Melee and they only had one Gamecube controller. I figured that going the in store pickup route would be faster and I'd just pick it up on my way to my friends.

Well, I was wrong. The guy in front of me in line at Circuit City was trying to return some car speakers. And they wanted to exchange them for a different model, but he wasn't having any of that. This argument took at least 10-15 minutes, so had I not already paid for the controller, I would have taken one off the shelf myself and tackled a salesman so they could ring me out and been out of there faster than if I did the in store pickup. Bah.

I arrived at my friends about a half hour later than I had planned because of the Circuit City incident. Most of the afternoon was spent just watching Slayers (An anime series. A very good anime series) and general hanging-out. After dinner (pizza) we were going to go bowling, but unfortunetly, all of the lanes were booked until 8pm which was a little late for us, so we headed back to their place for some margaritas (with an awful lot of tequila) and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Followed by the now traditional late night game of Trivial Persuit which lasted about..3 hours. But it was a fun 3 hours. After that, Robot Chicken and then I dropped off at about 1am. I really suck at staying up late these days. Must be getting old.

Sunday

The next morning I went off to the gym with Wassy because Jay sleeps in late and doesn't usually get up in time to hit the gym in the morning. I really wish I had a decent gym within a close driving distance to me because it was pretty nice having all that equipment right there. But unfortunetly the only close gym is nearly 20 minutes of driving time away and I'd never go regualrly so it wouldn't be worth it for the membership.

I hung out around their place for a while longer and watched some more Slayers, then headed home. Not too much to talk about Sunday really. Just a lot of relaxing and doing not much of anything.

Monday

Monday was the day where I was supposed to get stuff done. The plan was, do laundry, get the low tire pressure light on my car to go away finally and get some homework done. The first two worked out pretty well. As it turned out, my tires were just slightly low (all 4, so it wasn't a leak or anything) and adding a pound or two fixed the problem.

The homework didn't go so well though, since the site hosted by my school where I had stashed all the work was totally dead, so I didn't really have anything to work on. So that pretty much killed my productivity for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can make it up tonight (if I have the energy to do so that is)

This weekend was spent doing a lot of lounging around and relaxing. I spent a good majority of the time playing Tales of the Abyss, which is a really good RPG for the Playstation 2. I've had it for over a year now and only played about 12 hours of it to start with before something took me away and I'm regretting not finishing it sooner. Very good game. But it wasn't all fun and games this weekend.

I had some fish trouble, nothing major though. I noticed Saturday afternoon that my tank's temperature was inching downwards towards room temp, which is bad if you've got tropical fish and your room temperature isn't 79-80F. Needless to say, I was a little concerned. As it turns out, my heater was broke, so I grabbed my backup heater and threw it in there until I could go out the next day and pick a new one up. Luckily that seemed to work pretty well until Sunday. I also took the opportunity to redo my aeration setup, with new tubes and a valve to control flow so I don't need to use my potato chip bag clip to stop some air from going through. Probably should have gotten a smaller air pump, but...oh well. Everything seems to be working fine now, so I'm hopefully done playing in the water for a while.

Other than that, nothing else of particular note really happened this weekend (that I can remember right now anyway). Just your standard relaxation totally lazy weekend. I was going to do stuff with Wassy and Jay, but she got sick over the weekend and had to cancel. Bah to illness (and not just because I wanted to do stuff either.)

Well after the whole lot of nothing that was last week, this weekend is going to be an awful lot of activity. First up today I'm going over to my friends place to watch some Anime/Mystery Science Theater/Other movie type stuff which will be nice since I haven't really had a chance to relax recently.

Tomorrow though is the big activity day. Guitar Hero III is finally coming out, so obviously, I need to go pick up my pre-ordered copy from Best Buy tomorrow morning. Then back home to rock out before heading out to Albany with my parents to go see the Blue Man Group perform in Albany. October is the month of concerts.

In other news, I'm considering trading in my car for something that doesn't totally suck in the winter. Still thinking on the financial type stuff that's going to be involved in that though so that may or may not happen depending on certain other factors. We shall see. I'm probably going over to a few dealerships next weekend to check things out and get a feel for about how much this is going to run me. I'm almost totally done paying of my current car though, which is part of what brought this about.

This weekend started off with some Final Fantasy 7 and a little bit of City of Heroes because I'm starting to feel the desire to play it again and I had a little bit of time.

My friends and I went out to the local (really local) Zoo and wandered around for an hour and a half. We saw all of the exotic animals. The wolf/dog hybrid...the porcupine... Ok, so it's not a world class zoo, but it was a really, really nice day out and it was a nice walk. One of the best parts about a smaller zoo like that is that you don't have to rush everywhere to make sure you see everything. You can hang out and watch for extended periods of time. Although it would have been a lot better had we not just come back from the National Zoo in Washington DC last month.

It was at the zoo I discovered that the LCD screen for my camera is busted. I'm not sure what happened to it..probably got some pressure put on it at one point. I wanted to take a picture of the dog :( Anyway, the camera still works, just the LCD is busted and I'm not sure how successful trying to get a repair done on it would be. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay for the cost of replacement, but I don't want to buy a new camera. It still works though, so it's not entirely unusable. Sigh. Just another thing on the pile.

After the zoo, Jay had to take off to meet with a project group at his school, so Wassy and myself hung out for a bit. The plan was to meet up later and go to Riggiefest...but I'll get to that later.

We joke a lot that we do "stuff" on the weekends usually. That stuff generally is planned out ahead of time, but someday, we'll get to the mythical place of "stuff", no planning...just..."stuff". And if "Stuff" is attainable, then we certainly got close to it there. We wandered around a bit, attempted to bug my sister at her job while buying some tabs for a binder, browsed through a pet store...

Then we met back up with Jay and off we went. Unfortunately, we missed Riggiefest by a couple hours (who has a festival that last 3 hours anyway??) so instead we went to one of the participating restaurants as the next best thing. Riggies, for those who don't live in upstate new york, are kinda a local favorite. They're basically rigatoni in a marinara sauce with chicken and spices and you get tossed out of the area if you've never had them.

After dinner we rented SSX Blur for the Wii which wasn't quite as fun as anticipated. It's not a real good rental game...it's got a bit of a learning curve. So instead we did other stuff until finally settling Karaoke Revolution Party, which I'd rather not talk too much about...

Sunday was mostly boring chores and homework.