Video Games

Small talk.

Most resort to the weather, particularly when they know that you work primarily outdoors. If they are out there with you, though, suddenly that lone card is off of the table and what remains can be nothing at all but silence. When I do my job I have many periods where I will be walking next to a person and nothing is said for minutes at a time. It becomes something of an aural staring match in my estimation, or at least makes me wonder about what I could do differently, ...

What if I were fired today.

A good question most anyone should ask themselves now and then, just to see where their priorities are and what type of contingency plan is mentally set in place. Long story short, I had a situation at work today where if I bothered to speak my mind truthfully, I likely would have faced discipline if not termination. Given the specific job and what it pays, things wouldn't change for me incredibly drastically; but one thing I would have to give up immediately ...

At retail work, the only guy scheduled to start in the morning called off, so I was by myself. Otherwise, same ol' song about busted equipment and pain and whining and bleah. I was only there as a write-in for half of a shift because today is the day that my cousin decided to hold a party for her high school graduation. The location is a restaurant which is a two hour drive from where I live. With my wife having work early in the morning to consider, and the rest of my immediate family otherwise ...

A few days ago, what looked to just be slightly raw or discolored skin on the side opposite of my palms developed into full rashes which bore visible red soreness. At first, I supposed that the culprit was the duct tape wrapped around the gloves which, when combined with the heat, reacted somehow with the glove material and my skin to cause the issue. It didn't come about in the winter time. However, to prepare for working with wet carts today, I put on a pair of dishwashing gloves underneath (as ...

Rain for the majority of the day while I'm not at work is enough to make me happy. As long as tomorrow's weather is not-rain, I'll be even happier. I've finished up Form 1120S Schedule M3, which means that I move on to Test Scenario 7 of Publication 4164, which is for a fully foreign corporation (as opposed to a US based corporation with a foreign affiliate or the like). This means that I have several more forms to do from the ground up, yet again. At least this is the last major series I'll have ...

I'm not quite sure if the deterioration was consistent over time, but it came to the point today where I had to throw out the mouse I was using on this machine and go back to the MS optical mouse I used earlier. I switched it with a Logitech X3 whatever-the-hell so that I could use the MS one on another machine, and never switched back because the pointer moved faster with it. Over time, the right button simply wouldn't respond without being clicked ten or twenty times. Adobe Reader decided it wanted ...

Woops! Looks like I forgot to put this in before going about the rest of my night.

Today's Day Off Errand consisted of getting new vehicle stickers, which I came to find out required me passing a new emissions test. It did print that requirement on the sticker renewal paper, but I hoped it wasn't a specific message and referred to just having a recent passed test in order to be allowed to renew. No such luck on that, and I had to go a few miles over to another city to do the test ...

I thought that the Monday of a holiday weekend was hangover day, right? Didn't seem so at the store today. I dare say it was busier today than it was yesterday - and that's just how it felt outside; apparently things were worse inside because there wasn't as many people scheduled or in proper attendance than compared to yesterday as well (which would make sense for any other Monday). My uncle called me today to ask about W4 withholding, which is odd because he's smart enough to know that his suspicions ...

In respect of the retail job, today's theme has been Unrealized Hype. Yesterday was more humid than today, so despite the thermometers indicating otherwise, I didn't feel like it was significantly warmer outside. Also, the Sunday crowd had a definite regression towards the late afternoon to the point where the parking lot shown the crowd to be distinctly light, at least for a Sunday. Once I returned from lunch and made a run of the lot, there were no further issues in keeping cart stock. Yay. One ...

Typical retail Saturday combined with holiday weekend and decent outdoor heat all adds up to another exhausting day. Nothing new to report from that. However, this is the weekend that my sister decided that she wanted to have a line of small evergreen plants at the rear of her property. This required a rectangular strip of eight by twenty feet to be dug up so that there would be no grass in the area which would inhibit the growth of the new trees. She called while I was at work, so I wasn't able ...

One of the two-way radios which I purchased for work use decided to pick up static for the last hour of my work shift today, and I'm not sure how to make it refrain from doing so. I don't think this is a mere ambient interference issue, because changing the security channel on it to something non-standard still causes a bit of the empty air to be received, though at least not for the entire time as compared to the standard station. Regardless, it's enough of an issue to make me concerned for the ...

Finally gave myself some time to get back into tax form development, and it felt good to do it. Completed 1120S Schedule D without a hitch. My wife has started a hardcore character in Diablo 3, basically just to try it out and see about getting some cheevos, but I find the concept as implemented by the game flawed. For being in that mode, particularly since elements aren't shared among your characters as they are in the normal game (shared stash, shared gold, &c.), there should be better and ...

A round of three shakes from an ice cream place is like $15. A few Blizzards from Dairy Queen is roughly the same. But a pie from Baker's Square costs $12 and gives at least a minimum of six pieces, which for us is two days worth of dessert. I never really thought I'd see Baker's Square as providing economical food, but that's the truth of the matter. And honestly, what seems more special - a shake or a nice piece of French Silk? Today I grilled steak and used up half of a bottle of offensively ...

A restful day so far. My pace over the weekend left me little time to sleep, so my body took the chance to catch up on it today. At least I did do something of import by taking the time to pull out all of the new growth which was sprouting by the perimeter of the house, which threatened to dig its roots into the foundation. In the front of the house there was one stump in particular which had a few feet of length on it and took considerable effort to remove, even after digging around and chopping ...

Games. My copy of Akai Katana has come in, and I've clocked some sixteen hours into Diablo 3 since last Wednesday, which is abnormal for what I usually have done for the last year or two. It's definitely an unsustainable lifestyle for me at this point. Often times I find myself believing that I was born exactly at the right moment in the grand arc of American history, or global history, as I overall am young enough to not be intimidated by technology but old enough to recall how life was without ...