Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

Vacation! More or Less.

I had a loooooong weekend this week. Raytheon not only gives us July 4th off, but this year we got July 5th off as well. It comes off our break at the end of the year, but that’s okay. I had a 5 day weekend!

I didn’t do anything ‘planned’ or ‘scheduled’. My favorite vacations (thus far, at least) generally involve just staying home and doing stuff I already enjoy. That’s how I’ve built my home, I just fill it with stuff I like to do. So when you ask what I did with my weekend, and I say ‘just stayed home,’ and you say, ‘ooh, sounds boring’, you’ve obviously never seen me at home.

Most of my weekend was spent on Star Ocean, and RPG that Chris brought down with him. I’m *totally* addicted to it, I love it when that happens. Sure it’s mindless and silly, but you don’t see me bashing your hobbies, do you? I enjoy this kind of stuff. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. It makes me happy. And happy is what I do on vacation.

I turned in my homework on Friday…okay, that’s a lie. I turned it in early, probably Tuesday…but the point is that I didn’t have any homework to do, and I got my class watched without too much agony. Also, my roommates girlfriend was up, and since my new roommate was here too, I spent a lot of time just sitting around with them and chatting and watching strange Japanese television shows. That was pretty fun, not to mention pretty entertaining. Japanese TV is so *weird*.

There were other notable activities, too. Small ones, though. Picked up Trackmania: Sunrise, which is pretty fun, but can be really challenging. It plays kinda like a toy, though. I can see just playing that for 15 minute stretches from now to eternity. Just for goofing off.

I sold off a bunch of my old/busted games to EBGames. They were all games I didn’t want anymore, and most of them were pretty old. Plus, if I didn’t sell them, they were just trash, so I took whatever they’d give me. I made about 24 bucks off the deal, but a few of the games got me 25 cents credit, which I think was pretty amusing, but considering how old and pretty much incomplete (just the CD) the games were, it’s hardly surprising.

So if I’m judging this right, there’s a bit of a ‘crepe’ thing going on in Japan. Evidently they’ve discovered that crepes are a pretty handy little food-delivery device for everything from meal-like items to sandwhiches to deserts. They don’t serve on a plate, either. They wrap them up like a cross between a burrito and pita bread and just hand you the darn thing. It’s pretty clever, really. There’s a crepe place right down the street from where I live, but I’ve never eaten there, though my roommate has because they serve boba (pearl tea) and he really loves the stuff.

Boba, (pronounced: Boe-bah) for those of you that don’t know, is a class of beverages that is very popular in Asia. They put little tapioca balls of varying sizes (often as large as a hefty blueberry) in your drink, and the drink can be anything from mocha-stuff to late-stuff to fruit-smoothie-stuff. Like I said, monstrously popular in Asian countries and, by extension, pretty darn popular over here, too.

Also did some writing, got about halfway through the next chapter, too. The one thing I didn’t do was play the drums. Guess I just got caught up in Video Games too much. Oh well, it’s not like I missed it because I was doing something I hate. I missed it because I was doing other things that I love. That’s okay.

TKD has a noon class, too, and I normally can’t go to it cause I’m, ‘yknow, working, but since I had Tuesday off, I got to go. Super-great! Now there’s a guy there that I finally got to spar, and for the sake of internet-anonymity, we’ll call him Mr. H. He’s actually only a freshmen in college, but we tend to call people by last names in TKD, so he gets a ‘Mr.’

Mr. H is built like me, which is to say big, but pretty darn quick for his size. Normally when I spar, I have a (really unfortunate) tendency to just absorb kicks because they really don’t phase me. I hate that I do that, and it’s one of the (many, many, many) things I need to work on. And now that I’m in the advanced class, I figured I’d eventually be sparring Mr. H, cause he’s actually a teacher, 2nd degree black belt. Good guy, too. And he kicks *hard*. My suspicion was that I’d eventually spar him and get that nasty habit that I have of absorbing kicks literally beat of out me.

Me: Come on, Mr, H, give me your best shot.

Mr. H: [best shot]

Me: Ow. I better start dodging!

Actually, it didn’t turn out nearly so bad. He didn’t get in any head kicks, which would have really hurt, because I kept my hands UP. If I learned anything from my college-age instructors, it’s to keep up your bloody hands! (I’m talkin’ to you, pandafoot!) So most people don’t manage to get my head. But like I said, he’s built big, and if he had slipped a spinning hook kick through my defense, it would have…ah…stung a little. But he didn’t, so that was good. I even took a few of his kicks, not because I consciously absorbed them, because he’s actually a really good counter-kicker. So I tried throwing some fakes in, which at least managed to keep him from flattening me outright with counters. I’d say he pretty easily got the better of me, but it was definitely a good sparing match, highlighting, once again, weaknesses that I just have to fix before I’ll be good.

Oh, that and I tried to throw a spinning hook kick and just *failed*. That was embarrassing.

June 10th there’s an adoption festival in the park across from where I live. I don’t want to get a cat quite yet, but I’ll bet they’ll have some there for petting! Plus it would be good to know how much, generally, owning a cat costs. Just for budgetary purposes.

Yeah, I’m typing this at work, but the license manager for Matlab is down, and without it, I can’t run Matlab. And without Matlab, I’m useless. So it was either this, or counting ceiling tiles.

-N