Just for You, Honey

This morning The Spouse woke me up and said, "Time to get up, honey. You need to go blog about your game".

Why he thinks the rest of you would give a mole rat about my game is beyond me but he so rarely asks me to blog about anything specific that I feel I must. So here's the thing: I'm addicted to a new game.

My gaming experience is limited. I'm pretty much either an arcade game sorta gal (Tetris, Bubbleshooter, Pathwords...like that) or I'm into things like "Sims", which for me is just about decorating houses I've built, hooking people up so I can throw them weddings and getting them to have babies while achieving enough cooking points that they can dine on Lobster Thermidor every night if they want. And I haven't even done that in months and months because my laptop doesn't really support the game.

When we got an Xbox at Christmas I regarded it as a present for The Spouse and generally that was true. Then he taught me how to play "Left 4 Dead", a game where you slay zombies. That was satisfying. But the game only has 4 maps and after a while it was pretty much the same game every time. Then he showed me how to play "Fallout 3".

O my yord.

It's all over now.

"Fallout 3" takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. It's a first person shooter game; you create a character and escape "The Vault" only to find a bleak landscape through which you must travel to find safe havens. On the way you accept various quests, which lead you out to discover more of a huge map. There are good guys and bad guys. Your choices influence your karma. Your karma begins to dictate your experience (certain bad guys start to chase you, other characters befriend you (or not) because of your goodness (or badness, I suppose, but I'm going for the good karma). On your travels you pick up weapons and schtuff (that you can use yourself or sell for bottle caps - the coin of the realm, as it were). If you disarm a bomb in one town they reward you with a house which you can then decorate with certain themes (mine is pre-war...very retro). You collect bobbleheads. It is, in short, just about as dense a game as anything I've ever played. There's no set path you have to travel so each gamer's experience is going to be a little different from everyone else's.

It is thoroughly addicting. Hours pass before you realize it. Saturday morning I thought I'd play for an hour before going out to run my errands. 5 hours and still in my jammies later I had to force myself to stop, only to get back on the box as soon as I got home. Conservatively I'd say I've spent 24 hours playing this game and I'm only on level 7. I don't even know how many levels there are.

I have a couple of big challenges (besides just turning off the demmed console). One is that I'm not a very good shot and some creatures are really hard to take down. I prefer to go out into the Wasteland with a flame thrower...that seems to take care of everything from mad Brahmin cows to Mirelurks but I never have enough fuel to just flame through the world. The other challenge is that every structure, cave or tunnel I find is a freaking warren and I get veryvery lost (even though I have a Pipboy which, among myriad other things, contains maps). Inevitably I have to ask The Spouse to come guide me and then am blown away by his memory..."turn left, schooch around that ruined train car, hop up there, turn right"....his memory of that game map is encyclopedic, let me tell you.

Anymutant, it's just about much fun as a person can have with her clothes on and despite the fact that I sometimes have a fleeting thought along the lines of "Geez, if you have this much spare time maybe you could finally crack open that copy of War and Peace and do something useful with yourself" I expect I'll keep playing until I have discovered the whole map, finished every quest and earned a million bottle caps. I also want to collect all the bobbleheads. They're cute.

My iPod

Is full of music from the 80s. There's some other stuff. But mostly, it's music from the 80s. Like, if I could make a podcast of everything JP and I ever played on our "Here's the 80s" blog only without most (but not all) of the metal...that would be my iPod.

Also, my iPod is super cute and I love it. I call it "Poodle".

A Few Things I Forgot to Mention

I'm going to be a great aunt. ("Or not so great," says The Spouse). My eldest niece, who's been married for a couple of years now, is popping out the 4th generation this fall. At her birth she was the first grandbaby on either side and now she's about to repeat the trick. Isn't that something?

Needless to say, we are all very excited.

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I joined Facebook. Generally speaking, blogging is about all the "social networking" I need. I never use my Myspace account, especially since one of the 2 nieces for whom I joined in the first place deleted her account. (She's all graduated now and doing her student teaching. Some of her kids found her Myspace page and she decided to dump it. Not that there was anything remotely incriminating on it but still). A friend from church invited me to "be her friend" and I thought "what the hey hey" and then, of course, it turns out that there are a bunch of blog buddies who have Facebook accounts and then I found my college room-mate and then some other friends from church found me and then I forced The Neighbor to join and, well, you can imagine the mayhem. I like Facebook better than Myspace because it's way more straightforward, plus it has all sorts of fun and random groups (like "Jamie Bamber is the Hottest Actor You Don't Know" and "I Flip My Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side" and "No, I Don't Care If I Die at 12AM, I Refuse to Pass on Your Chain Letter" and "I Love Mr. Darcy enough to make Jane Austen Uncomfortable"...groups that speak to my heart and deepest held values. Sfoofie encouraged me to find the most random groups I could and we all do well to heed Sfoofie's advice).

My favorite thing about Facebook, though, is the Superpoke option. There are all these crazy little things you can do to your "friends", like send them beers or bake them a cake or pinch them. On Tuesday and Wednesday we were all throwing Obama and donkeys at each other. It's fun.

Who said "get a life"? Trouble maker.

"Why did you get a Facebook page?" asked The Child.

"Because your mom is a 14 year old," sneered The Spouse. This from a man who has a Myspace page. Pft to him and again I say "pft". If Facebook is cool enough for John Iwanski, Dan Winter and Miss Healthypants, it's cool enough for me.

Anybuddies, if your on Facebook go find me. I'll totally be your friend. And then I'll throw the Stanley Cup at you.

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Yesterday was the baccalaureate Mass for The Child's graduating class. The Spouse and I don't much enjoy liturgies at St. G's. We're pretty much high church people and not giant fans of guitar masses with songs we've never heard of that all sound the same. Plus, the priest there has a tendency to go on and on, being one of those folks who never says anything once if he can say it 6 different ways. Double plus, they crammed all sorts of stuff into the service...renewal of vows for a couple who'd been married 40 years (God bless 'em) and a tribute to the teachers who are moving on, not to mention that when it came time for announcements Father pretty much read out every blessed thing in the bulletin. Hi, that's why you have a bulletin, so you don't have to do that. Then when he was done with that he was asking who was celebrating an anniversary, a birthday AND who was visiting for the first time. I half expected him to ask, "Now let's see a show of hands...who had oatmeal for breakfast this morning?" It was a bit much.

But all that aside, it was a moment for us and The Child. I got varklempt when they processed in, wearing their gowns. The Spouse got all choked up when she went up for Eucharist. And we were both very proud during the Liturgy of the Word, because she'd been asked to do the Prayers of the Faithful. She wrote them herself. Would you like to know what her prayers were? 'Course you would:

For Archbishop Brunett and Auxiliary bishops Esabio and Tyson, that they may lead the church responsibly.

For the victims of the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar, that they will be able to recover and rebuild.

For the conflicts in our world, especially in Iraq, that there will be peace and our troops can come home safely.

For the teachers of our school, those leaving, those staying and those coming in, that they will be blessed and have a great experience.

For the graduating class of 2008, that they will know God's love and care as they move on to bigger and better things.

How adorable are those? How adorable is she? (Even though, at the moment, she thinks I'm more irritating than she's possibly ever thought I was before).

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It's totally raining and nasty here today, pretty much like it's been most of the month so far. Somehow I must capitalize on the random sun breaks to turn my garden beds and install the tomato and basil plants I bought this weekend. It doesn't look like this is going to be a good summer for tomatoes but hope springs eternal.