did you feel the earthquake? where’s the epicenter? oh, MY BACKYARD! it felt HUGE. a 5.6 is nothing to scoff at, but i swear, it felt HUGE!

everything was shaking and moving around, but we’re all just fine.

phones were out for a brief while, i couldn’t get a call out. i think it’s from everyone using the phone to call everyone they knew to make sure that they were all ok.

so i got guitar hero iii last night. it’s tons of fun. the easy mode is actually pretty easy and starts to drag a little towards the end because all throughout the easy level, i don’t feel like it gets progressively difficult. but when you hit the medium level, it gets HARD fast.

at least, that’s how i felt about it.

the in-game story is entertaining, though the tutorials move a little too slow for my tastes. having the wireless guitar with the wii is very cool and the use of the wii controller’s internal speaker was well done.

the only gripe i have about this game is that only bundles are sold for the wii. this means that if you want to have two guitars, you’re going to have to buy two bundles. this makes me very, very upset and is probably the most disappointing thing about the game. two bundles at the cost of around $90 each is not very friendly on the wallet. i’ve only opened one guitar so far, though i’ve bought two. i am debating whether or not i should wait for either a third party accessory to come out or to see if red octane will do the right thing and start to sell extra guitars as accessories. my money is on me opening the second guitar before that happens, unfortunately. it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but i’m sure i can battle out my aggressions in the game.

you know, i never really had much of an opinion about trees before. sure, they’re nice when they provide shade. they are even nice to look at. but as a semi-new homeowner, i’ve now discovered that trees are the bane of my existence.

you see, trees have leaves. this, by itself, may not seem like quite the revelation. but consider this: leaves fall. that’s right, they fall. on the ground. in my yard. in the way. they make a huge mess. and, suffice it to say that when i come home and see a ton of leaves all over the place, it is not cool. it also looks like the garbage/yard waste people don’t pick up big piles of leaves. so that means that i need to mash them up into smaller piles that don’t blow away!

i think i’m going to run my lawnmower over the leaves to tear them up and then make piles. but man, all this work for some stupid leaves. yup, i hate trees.

this weekend was a productive weekend. i fixed christi’s mountain bike so that she could go mountain biking on sunday. i actually fixed my own bike too, but decided not to go on sunday and instead worked on some things that i had been putting off around the house.

and by putting off, i really mean trying really hard to ignore. but man, the house was really starting to become a real mess. it had been bothering me for a while, but i have been getting good at averting my eyes at all of the piles of junk that have been around the house.

it has been a struggle. the day started with recaulking the shower in the main bathroom. the contractors did a crappy job when they caulked it, not bothering to remove the existing caulk. the seal had been broken and mold was growing instead the caulk. it had been bothering me for a long while, so i finally sat down and fixed it.

the house has been a mess lately. i had long wanted to at least clean up the common areas that we spend most of our time in and i finally was able to clean it all up. that took the better part of the day.

and then the backyard garden. man. it is a mess. i don’t know how i am going to control the weeds there, but i pulled out a garbage bag worth of weeds and there’s still so much there. oh well, i pruned our rose bushes. i am not sure if they will bud anymore, i think the rose season is winding down. it’ll be time to give them a heavy pruning soon as they have been completely overgrown when we got into the house.

so yeah, it was a productive weekend. volleyball was crappy on sunday too, so i’m hoping that i’ll play better tonight!

this week my team has a bye, but i will be videotaping some volleyball games. greg had mentioned that it would be a helpful tool to see how the team plays so that each person knows which ball they should have gotten. it’s hard to tell when you are playing on the court, but when you have VIDEO proof, it’s easy to see what you are doing and improve.

i remember that there were a few times when my team was videotaped a long time ago. it was good because it really did help us out. the big question now is: what kind of commentary will i add to their game?

i have read about various ways to cut acrylic and it looked like for the thickness i was going for, power tools were necessary. this brings me more joy than you can believe.

it is only recently that i’ve been reintroduced to the joys of woodworking. since then, do it yourself projects have really intrigued me. the problem is that i don’t own many power tools. i told myself that i would only buy what i would really need. and it seems pretty obvious that i wouldn’t need a lot of power tools. in fact, i opted not to buy some power tools for the garden work because our yard is just too small to merit the purchase of big tools.

but, i have borrowed a circular saw and a jig saw from my parents.

anyway, this weekend, i will be diving in the channel islands. yes, that’s right, the freezing waters of the channel islands. so anyway, before i dive, i had bought some parts to make my own strobe mount for my underwater housing. i borrowed a friend’s underwater strobe and just started to learn how to use it. the problem is that his strobe costs somewhere in the order of $600…for a flash…underwater. so i thought that i might be able to make my own.

we’ll see how it works this weekend!

this weekend was supposed to be a dive weekend. we went to the channel islands and had geared up to dive. the first dive that i went on, the FREEZING water, a flooding mask, and inability to descend was enough for me to abort the first dive. it was the first time that i had panicked in the water since i started to dive.

i got more weight and was geared up for the second dive. i was able to descend but as i was going down, my leg completely froze up. i had cramped bad and moving my leg hurt like no other. i surfaced and swam back to the boat with just my arms. it was the most excruciatingly painful swim i had ever done.

after that i was done for the day. this cold water diving with miserable visibility was not for me. i could barely see about 10 feet ahead of me when i was in the water. havnig visibility that bad was not pleasant. and so i’ve decided that i am not going to do any more non-tropical diving. it just isn’t worth it anymore!

i’ve been playing the nintendo ds a little and now i’m looking for some games to play. anybody have any suggestions?

this post is dedicated to cindy who BEGGED that i post something so that she wouldn’t be bored.

once upon a time there was a little girl in a little land. this little girl in the little land had little dreams that one day, she might not be bored. but much to her chagrin, in this little land of little dreams ruled a not so little tyrant. the not so little tyrant found that the best way to keep peace in his little land was to subject the subjects to little bouts of boredom. so he cast a not so little spell across his little land so that his subjects will all suffer from little bouts of boredom.

the little girl was bored. so bored that she reached out to her little friends to help her break the curse of little bouts of boredom that the not so little tyrant had cast upon his still fair, but bored land. not so surprisingly, the friends of the little girl had little to say as they, too, were bored.

so the little girl set out on the grandest adventure she had ever been on in her little life. she set out to overthrow the not so little tyrant and rid the land of his spell of boredom. she began by picking out her outfit. the little girl didn’t want to be normal, no, she knew that to overthrow the tyrant she would have to step out of her shell and pick an outfit that would befit her quest. and so the little girl looked into her little closet to see what she could do.

after what was not so little of a time, the little girl found the perfect outfit. she dressed as a little ninja. it was, she thought, very much unlike her and she was tickled at the notion that her dressing up as a ninja might strike terror in the hearts of those whose path she’d cross. she had devised a wonderfully devious plan on how to outwit her foes and after she was confident that the plan was without holes against her foes, she set off to defeat the tyrant in her ninja outfit.

the little girl reached the castle of the not so little tyrant and, in true ninja fashion, she scaled the castle walls in the quiet of night. she crept into the tyrant’s balcony and stealthily, slowly did she sneak silently beside the sleeping tyrant. it was at this moment that the little girl realized that she was so excited at the prospect of overthrowing the tyrant that she never really thought about how it is that she was going to do it. she had planned methodically what she was going to wear, how she was going to sneak in the night to the castle, how she was going to scale the walls, and how to get to the tyrant. the plan was meticulously planned. it had succeeded successfully so far, yet now that she was there beside the tyrant who had cast this awful spell of boredom across the land, she realized that she had not planned what to do here.

it was only this moment of hesitation that was needed before she realized that this entire evening was not boring at all! in fact, she was not bored the moment that she set foot into her closet to decide what outfit to wear. the little girl realized that she did not have to kill the tyrant to rid herself of boredom, all she needed to do was to plan how to kill the tyrant. the spell had been broken! she was not bored!

the little girl quickly retreated back to the comfort and safety of her home and vowed that, tomorrow, she would do the same thing so that she would never be bored again. it was, she thought, the perfect solution to her boredom.

and so the little girl lived happily ever after…until she got bored again.

the end.