Conclusion of Variety

Well, it looks like I am going to be paying off some debt this weekend. On average I wasn’t getting bed until 1:30-2:00am. For some this is no big deal but I normally go to bed around 11:30-12:00am.

It started this Monday with my roommate Jorma. We would go to bar in PB (Pacific Beach) on occasion but hadn’t done so in a while. I ended up having a long day at work staying at extra 3 hours trying to set up our network. Once I got back Jorma and I decided to make up for lost time. I planned on one, maybe two beers but Jorma was buying and he had just broken up with his girlfriend. Four beers later (I know, I’m a light weight) we are wobbling home. Of course we are excited and trying to start a party in the courtyard, the ones I that keep me up. This fails but I end up lending a movie to the girls across the way who humoured us for about 15 minutes. The rest of the night consisted of sobering up and playing video games until 1am.

The next evening I decided to take it easy but the same girls did not. A huge party broke out and I was in no mood for it so I tried to ignore the party. I didn’t want to call the cops because those girls had my movie and for some reason I thought I wouldn’t get it back. I ended up taking NyQuil, stuffing my ears with cotten and eventually falling asleep around 1:30.

The next evening was a gaming night which didn’t go well. After the game we decided to discuss the game and after that one player and myself stayed up for another hour and I got to bed around 2:00.

Thursday evening was my Vampire: The Requium game which was a lot of fun but it went to 11:30 and I didn’t get back until 12:30. The second I closed the door another party broke out keeping up till 1:30.

This morning I woke up exhausted with a sinus headache (maybe a mild migrain). I know I’ll be cashing in and sleeping in this weekend.

Here are some pics from Disneyland. I’ll post more later.

Young Japanese Girls

Stephanie and Chris

Stephanie and Chris on the California Sreamin

For the past 3 or 4 months I have been subscribed to Netflix. I must say I love Netflix. For those of you who don’t know Netflix is an online video rental service where you pay $20 a month and get to check out 3 movies at a time. As soon as you mail back one of your movies they send out another one. You can hold onto the movie as long as you want as you won’t get a new movie until you send the one your holding back.

A lot of rental places like Blockbuster have jumped on the monthly payment in order to compete but Netflix has one big advantage, selection. Blockbuster will have to stock new releases for all its stores and has a limited amount of space with the same movies in each space. This limits the selection of movies. Since Netflix is just a giant warehouse the do not have this problem allowing me to rent harder to find stuff like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

The site is a lot of fun, too. It allows you to rate their movies and then finds recommendations based on your rating. You can then create “friends” on Netflix which allows you to recommend movies and see what everyone else is watching so you know what fools they are for liking movies like “Dodgeball” and “Zoolander.”

Since I don’t watch TV (with the exception of the Daily Show once or twice a week) I find it works great. So, if you like to rent movies or anything really I highly recommend it. You can see my queue over in the right. I am also looking for more Netflix friends so if you have it or get shoot me an email through Netflix or normally.

Well, it looks like the first bit of news about Eric has turned up after his big disappearance. Nothing definate but there has been word that he appeared on the rpg-sandiego message boards at 1am in the morning. And the manage from Game Town said he called and that he was alright, living up North. He was also wondering if Mongoose Games (a gaming company) had sent him any product which I doubt because they sent a package to the apartment, and it required a signiture. Since Eric’s couldn’t be provided it was sent back and I contacted Mongoose with the information so they wouldn’t send anymore stuff.

If the claims are true then it is good to know that he is getting back on his feet. I have mixed feeling about him disappearing and now resurfacing. Of course I’m made that he just disappeared with my DVDs but I also realize he had problems as he did leave everything behind. I sure he must have contacted his family as I know they didn’t know anything (having received the calls from his family on the answering machine).

I’ll take the news as it comes and not go snooping. Though I am curious to find out what happened to him I don’t want to get involved with his life. I hope where ever Eric is he is doing better than he was here.

Or at least not relatively. Last night I attended the San Diego Scifi meetup. For those not familier with meetup.com it is a site dedicated to organizing events where people with similar interests can meet. I had already accidentally happened upon an rpg meetup and Marc and I attended a D&D meetup as a spur of the moment thing.

Out of the three meetups the Scifi one had the most attendance and best support. However, it was directed toward literary scifi. I think, “no biggy,” I read plenty of it in my time. However the books I read was tiny in comparison. This Scifi meetup everyone brought all the their old paperbacks and we lined them up so any book you wanted you just grabbed. I brought 5 or 6 books and walked out with one which I’m pretty sure I’ll never read.

Most people had stacks of 5 to 12 books of stuff I never heard of. I realized that many of these people planned on grinding through all these books in a couple months. This blew me away as I average about 6 books a year. Considering that my reading interest has been leaning toward modern fiction and that the last few scifi books I’ve read havn’t been that good I was overwhelmed.

I ended up sitting at a small table of 4 woman and 2 other guys. I just couldn’t get into the conversation as most of the women seemed to be fantasy fans (and I really don’t like fantasy). One guy took me aback by telling me he has been working 14 years on his bachelors. When talking about a book he said it is taking him a long time to read because it sucks. I couldn’t figure it out because if a book sucks I stop reading. As a matter of fact most of the people at the table kept complaining about sucky books they had read, plus the sequals of said books. Now, I realize that 90% of everything is complete crap and when it comes to novels I only want to read that top 10%. As a result I had trouble understanding these peoples’ desires to not only read bad fiction but bad fiction they didn’t like. It was like they had to get their fix, good or bad they must pump their souls full of scifi. And this is where I couldn’t relate. So, I like scifi, love some of it but I don’t need it.

I did get to meet Alison Longsdale who was the organizer of the event and very nice and charismatic. I had originally saw her at the wierd Geek Concert in which she talked a little about the scifi meetup and gave me the idea to attend. What is even stranger is that apparently her x-boyfriend has decided to create another scifi meetup at the exact same time in spite of her. I then found out that I knew the x-boyfriend who was a guy a gamed with when I first moved to San Diego and belonged to a group I referred to “The Vampire Gaming Cult” due to how they operated.

I also got to see an old co-worker who worked with me at “Skytech Mortgage.” A mortgage company that I worked at for 6 months when I first moved here.

So, now I have a serious delimma. I really have no interest in returning but I did get a gift certificate at Giovannis (the restaurant it is held at) because they took so long making my salad. And so are the complexities of life.

I said before that I don’t have health insurance but that might change soon. I remember a few months there being talk about getting company health insurance but it fell in the background. It occured to me that it wasn’t that we didn’t want company health insurance but the bosses just didn’t have the time as they were busy. So, I talked to the boss man on Friday and decided to take do the research and get the health insurance. The boss man agreed (also said to look into dental) so if anyone who reads this has any suggestions don’t be afraid to email me or post a comment.

Also, here is a picture from new years.

Well, our rain has made national news and LA has declared National Disaster. Supposedly, we are going to be getting record rain fall. It is suppose to clear out today but more is predicted for next week. We’ve had more rain than Seattle and the surfers have been stinky. This, of course is all to make up for our record days without rain over the summer which also made the surfers stinky.

So really, we got to make up our mind if we want to be wet or dry. I think we should mix it up a little. Either way it is annoyance but also neat in its own way. I don’t hate rain, I like it and it didn’t rain enough in NM so I’m soaking it all in… and that is butter on toast.

At my apartment when it poors I like to pop open the door a watch it come down and take in the smells and sounds. And like Captain John Sheridan of Babylon 5 [me geek] I think it helps me sleep at night.

So, besides the stinky surfers and slight inconveniences I’ve been enjoying the rain but I’m ready for it to end because I think we should save some for the summer to piss off tourists.

This weekend Stephanie and I saw “The Picnic” which was written by William Inge. I had actually read this play and it was fun seeing a production of it. I asked for some classic Americana and got it with this but once again have mixed feelings on the themes and concepts presented.

“The Picnic” was shown at the Coronado Playhouse which is on the East side of the Island and shows off a beautiful view of downtown San Diego. I got the impression that the playhouse was a temperary structure as the head of the playhouse mentioned something about moving back to their original location. It did have caberet style seating which was nice. Also, the hot actor in this one was Jeff Lippold who played Hal so Stephanie got the eye candie for this one. It didn’t help that he spent most of the play with his shirt off.

A classic 50’s Romance

The play takes place on Labor day Weekend in the joint back yards of two middle-aged widows. The one house belongs to Flo Owens, who lives there with her two maturing daughters, Madge and Millie, and a boarder who is a spinster school teacher. The other house belongs to Helen Potts, who lives with her elderly and invalid mother. Into this female atmosphere comes a young man named Hal Carter, whose animal vitality seriously upsets the entire group. Hal is a most interesting character, a child of parents who ignored him, self-conscious of his failings and his position behind the eight ball. Flo is sensitively wary of temptations for her daughters. Madge, bored with being only a beauty, sacrifices her chances for a wealthy marriage for the excitement Hal promises. Her sister, Millie, finds her balance for the first time through the stranger’s brief attention. And the spinster is stirred to make an issue out of the dangling courtship that has brightened her life in a dreary, minor way.

Once again problems with the them. “Burn This” was almost a modern version of “The Picnic.” Both plays were both about passion and passion seems to triumph. Both plays had a bad boy and a nice girl and the nice girl always resists the badboy until the very end and they run off together. Of course these plays seem to conveniently end with the two getting together, they never show the part where the two drive each other crazy.

Besides the overall theme of the play it was overall fun but not great. The acting was good and the actors had the characters down. One strange thing was Ben Morales, who plays Alan kept getting red in the face like he was really mad.

So overall a good time at an average play. Still having a blast though and love going to all these interesting playhouses.

Who is ready to rock out? I am. Just got a new pioneer car stereo. My old stereo had been broken for about a year. The volume button would suddenly have an urge to skyrocket and freak me out. I decided to go all out and got an auxillery attachment so I can plug in my ipod. Works great. So now, I’m just that much more money. Now, I just need to fix that stupid oil leak and I’m good to go. Perhaps a trip to vegas with toons and oil. Vegas baby, Vegas.

Stephanie and I went to see “The Picnic” a play by William Inge on Saturday which was fun. Sunday kicked much ass though as Glen came over, we got some breakfast at the a coffee place on Cass. Then a few hours of Halo, which I determined we suck at. However, I see this as a good thing because it keeps the game fun. Whenver I master a video game I loose interest in it and I’ve been playing Halo for about 3 years and I still suck.

We then went and saw “Constantine” with the Champions group which included: Nathan, Glen, Jonathan, and Jonathan’s wife Michelle also came along. Movie kicked much ass and so far it is my favorite genre movie this year (it only being February). Of course I really like “Underworld” and “Hellboy” plus I had read a few graphic novels of “Hellblazer” the comic that the movie “Constantine” was based off of. The movie stayed true to the books and was tons of fun. Keanu Reeves didn’t distract from the movie and I plan on getting it on DVD.

After the movie we went to get Chinease food and Stephanie joined up with us (as she didn’t want to see the movie, even though she is reconsidering because she found out that it has Gavin, lead singer to the Band “Bush”, was in it). After that Stephanie, Glen, and I went to the bar in PB and got some beers.

Now, I’m stuck at work on President’s day while all my friends have the day of. But it is raining so HA. I am victorious once again!!!