November 24th, 2008
Bob Loblaw
So, I loaded up The Sims 2 last week after installing Mansion & Garden Stuff, and wouldn’t you know I started trying to navigate the screen using those blasted SimCity Societies controls?
You can tell what I’ve been doing in my spare time the past few weeks.
I didn’t play Sims 2 for long. I like the Mansion & Garden Stuff Pack, however I’m just not in a Sims mood lately at all. It seems I can only like either Sims or SimCity at one time. And it’s completely ridiculous that the SimCity Societies navigation controls would get embedded into my brain like that. Why can’t we have some sort of standards as far as zoom, panning, and yawing?
It makes me worry about Sims 3 a little bit. Hopefully they won’t shit it up.
What else… I had something I wanted to write about earlier, but now I forgot what. I hate that. Umm… I saw Twilight on Friday. I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of people critical about it, but I just can’t relate to what they’re saying. I was worried about it being all MTVed-up, stupid, and too different, but it wasn’t. I rather liked the portrayals of Edward and Bella. I think they had great chemistry, and I thought it was actually quite similar to the book in that respect.
There were some moments of the movie that were so much more awesome having read the book. Like Jasper for instance. The second he showed up the first time was quite classic. Hilarious. I didn’t expect to like him so much because I thought the actor looked odd (haha), but oh man, it really worked.
Another funny one was Billy. I think he was more awesome than in the book. I liked Jacob, but am bugged by the fact that the actor will never be a million feet tall like Jacob in the books. And his hair bothered me because it really looked like quite the ridiculous wig.
The theater was packed when I went. I actually wasn’t sure if it would be in my town at the 11:00 showing. I went by myself, haha, and good thing because I don’t know that I would have found two seats next to each other. I ended up sitting in the lone chair with the wheelchair space next to it. Some woman brought her new born to the showing and it was annoying as all hell. I mean really, lady. Your little baby to a packed movie theater at 11:00 at night? REALLY?
Bunch of savages in this town.
In other, completely unrelated news, I decided to try out a meal delivery program. Why? One, I am utterly incapable of making good food choices everyday on my own. Two, I’m even less capable of keeping up the horrendous routine of grocery store, cook, clean day in and day out. I just can’t do it. Cannot. I might could keep it up for a week, get completely burnt out, then eat out the next two consecutive weeks for every meal out of retaliation.
Why I just can’t be normal about one thing in my life, I have no idea. I truly am incapable of functioning as a normal adult. The past 7 years or so of deterioration have proved this. Other people go to the store, cook, clean, exercise, go to work, have families and don’t seem to have any issues with it at all. I can’t even do one of those things without turning completely neurotic. There is truly something wrong with me.
But I’m trying to get better. I started my third Adventure Bootcamp today (I’ve already signed up for a year). I’m so glad I signed up for this back in September. I don’t think I could handle exercising in a gym, and God knows I won’t do it on my own. Now with the meal delivery program, hopefully I can become more functional. I started it last week, and am enjoying the meals so far.
I do well with routines like this that don’t require constant effort. Next I just need to hire us a maid. Not even kidding. I’ve seriously considered it before, though I’m not entirely sure it would work well.
Am I pathetically lazy or what? But fuck it. Really. My problem is that I get upset thinking about how my entire life is filled with these obnoxious tasks that are never ending. NEVER. ENDING. It seems like a giant waste of life, and I have a hard time getting over that fact, which is why I blow it all off so much, and end up not exercising, not cleaning, and eating like a 10 year-old whose parents aren’t home. Which helps nothing in the end, except ensuring an early death. So my compromise is these new routines. Hopefully I can keep it up. It’s looking good so far.
November 6th, 2008
Bob Loblaw
Do you ever have days where you’re just extremely klutzy? I think I just had one of my most ridiculous hours ever.
During lunch I needed to change my infusion set for my insulin pump. (Some background: the infusion set includes the catheter you put in your skin and the tubing that runs from it to the pump. I change it every three days.) First, I take out the old one, which normally is no big occurrence, you just pull the tape off and out comes the tiny little plastic that was in your skin. Well, for whatever reason, I pull this one out and it starts gushing blood. GUSHING. It doesn’t hurt at all, but oh boy is it pouring out. I’m in my work clothes of course, so I really had to scrounge for something to mop up all the blood before it stained them. Luckily I had some napkins left over by the TV tray.
Anyway, I get that cleaned up then go to insert the new infusion set. It’s a pretty simple process: you hook the tubing to a reservoir of insulin and then place that in the pump. You prime your pump (fill the tubing with insulin), then you place the infusion set into a little device that will inject it into your skin. Well, I did all this–except one thing: I forgot to take the tape off the back of the adhesive. So I got it all inserted and even pulled the needle out of the catheter before realizing the tape was still on. Yep, so that was wasted. Had to pull it out and do it over.
Second time around, repeating entire process, I go to inject and made sure I took the tape off this time. However, I forgot to take off the cap around the needle! BRILLIANT. But luckily at least, this didn’t waste anything as it couldn’t go very far with the cap. Haha.
Next time I got it in without any issue. Finally.
Unfortunately, this is not the end of my afternoon escapades. After getting my pump settled, I needed to go check my blood sugar. When I pressed the button to eject a strip however, it gives me an error message. NEVER had that happen before. Tried changing the test strip drum first, didn’t help. Tried changing the batteries, didn’t help. Was ready to eat lunch, so I gave up for the time being and pulled out another meter that came with all my pump stuff that I decided I didn’t want to use. Checked my sugar, everything went fine, but then I dumped the little bottle of strips on the floor and they scattered everywhere.
Next I just ate my lunch, including a Boost shake, which I had opened and set out prior to all this fiasco. Well, it had been a few minutes, so I wanted to shake it up a bit again before drinking. Of course, I didn’t put the cap on very tight, so when I shook it, lots of it went flying everywhere. UGH.
After all that, I decided to figure out the problem with my meter, so I finally just dug through to the very back of my diabetes junk cabinet to get the manual for the meter to look up the error message. Turns out the little area where it reads from the meter was just dirty. I wiped it with a wet cloth and all was fine.
And that concludes the stupidest lunch hour I’ve ever had in my life.
God damn it, fucking shit crap.
November 3rd, 2008
Bob Loblaw, Books
I have not played Sims 2 in some time now. Instead, this weekend I pulled out Sim City again. Started playing Sim City 4 for a bit, but then got pissed because it kept crashing my computer. Sim City 4 is such a cool game, but it runs like complete and utter crap. Maybe part of it is just because it’s on Vista. Regardless, if I don’t save every five minutes, I eventually find myself throwing it across the room and screaming at my monitor.
So after about 3 times of that, I finally pulled out Sim City Societies. I bought this quite a while ago for $10 off Amazon. Reviews for this game were pretty bad, and that fact that it was only $10 a few months after being released is never a good sign. When I first put the game in after buying it all that time ago, I couldn’t get into it. Mostly, I was just in a Sims phase and didn’t feel like it at the time. But also for some bloody reason they decided to make the navigation tools fucked up beyond belief in Societies. I do not understand why they would stray so far from previous Sim Cities in this regard. It’s just awkward. I have to use the arrow keys to pan, which drives me nuts because I’m used to right clicking with the mouse and dragging. And the zoom is ridiculous. You can’t zoom out very far at all. And unless you’re turned a certain way on the map, the edges of your city get hidden. Whoever designed this aspect of the game should be fired.
Anyway, despite all that, I got over it a little bit this weekend and actually tried to play past the tutorial. And it’s actually quite fun! Ridiculously different than any previous version of Sim City, but I knew that going in. I really miss zones. Placing every single house gets a little bit old. But I like placing individual work places and venues. (The combination of this is of course City Life, haha!) The graphics are cute, and the variety of the buildings is entertaining. So far I’m just loving creating areas that produce lots of spirituality. I made a totally cool Amish-like area in my city yesterday. LOL.
If I wasn’t at work procrastinating, I would show a picture. Maybe I’ll add it later.
The other thing I’ve been eating up all my free time with is reading Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter novels. Oh these are so much fun! Haha. They’re a little silly, and I say that mostly because the endings are all over-the-top happily-ever-after for the main characters involved. And they’re all very similar in that regard. But man these things are entertaining to read! I absolutely love the world she’s set up. Vampires and Greek mythology? HOW FUN! I just finished reading Seize the Night. And I’m already super stoked to read Acheron’s book, but I’ve got a few more before that one. So yeah, that’s my guilty pleasure as of late. If I could spend the entire day just reading these books, I’d be happy.
In other news, I still hate work. Maybe it’s the time of year and the fact that I’m preoccupied with other stuff. Maybe I just need a serious career change. Which is scary, because I’ve never had thoughts like that before. I’m just sick to death of what I’m doing right now. It doesn’t interest me anymore. It might also be just that I haven’t had any new and interesting projects fall into my lap in several months. Whatever it is, I’m struggling to make it through the eight hours every day big time. Last week, I didn’t show up until 10am a couple times. I should be grateful I can get away with bullshit like that. Sigh.
Countdown to a 2-week Christmas break starts now. It won’t be long enough, it never is, but it will be something.