Never pay full price.

Steam is in the midst of a summer sale, and this is what I wait for. I can't remember ever paying full price for a PC game, except for the occasional retail bargain, like a boxed Painkiller trilogy or Half-Life 1 compilation. This week I nabbed the Grand Theft Auto IV complete pack for ten bucks, Assassin's Creed II for less than seven, and Bully for three and change. That's three full AAA games plus two expansions for the price of four Arby's value meals. I win.

I've got something like sixty games on Steam now, all but a handful purchased while on sale for a deep discount. Risen, a game I really, really want, is on sale today at 66% off. That still puts it at a little over ten dollars, so I passed. Discipline is the name of the game with Steam.

In other news, the lovely Jenny got a job with my company today, and she starts tomorrow. This is awesome. We'll be on the same sleep schedule now, and can carpool, saving tons of money on gas I won't spend on my 19-year old Explorer, since we'll take her Accord. And we can eat lunch together every day (double bonus points). Well, every day that I'm not out of town or on a PM, which is most days (minus 50% on double point bonus). Still, it will up our combined income hugely (financial stress level minus 60%). And I won't have to sweat in the heat all day and then drive home in a truck without air conditioning that's been sitting in the sun all day long (endurance level increased 50%).

On the downside, it's critical that we get her Accord serviced ASAP for all the warning lights that have been coming on lately, and I have no idea what repairs they might require. But that should be an affordable expense once she gets settled. Probably.

I'm more online. That's a thing now.

So I'm on Twitter now. I still have absolutely no interest in creating a Facebook account, so I might as well do this Twitter thing. I found myself following multiple people/organizations on Twitter, so I figured it would be easier to just make an account and follow them so I can track everything at once. This is mostly regarding sports, particularly the Memphis Grizzlies and Tigers. But it also allows me to enter Turbine's Twitter LotRO contests, and gives me a link when commenting on Casual Stroll to Mordor articles, so I made my Twitter account LotRO-centric. My name on there is Maladhros, my main character's name.

So, whatever. Follow me at twitter.com/Maladhros. Or don't. I don't have any followers, which is fine. I just want to reply to people and track tweets. I hate that I just wrote that, but really, you kinda have to these days. I have a basic (meaning slow) data plan for my cell phone now, and that's where Twitter really shines when I'm trying to keep up with what's going on, particularly when I'm at work.

In other me-centric news, I went the whole weekend without logging into LotRO. I wanted a break from the complexity of all those characters with all that stuff to do with all those people in my new kinship, so I re-downloaded Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Steam and spent my spare weekend time shootin' at crap instead of swingin' axes at crap. Really felt a need to get back to my FPS roots. And I was busy this weekend. Mowed the front yard, did an epic amount of laundry, went shopping like three times. Watched The Matrix. So it was easier to just jump into an FPS and kill dudes for a few minutes. LotRO is fantastic, but you have to set aside more than just a couple minutes here and there to play it.

That's really one of my only major criticisms... Well done, Turbine.

I'm in pain.

Like the title says, I'm in pain. My teeth hurt, and I can't do anything about it. It's actually pretty bad. Painkillers are running through my system, as are about eight beers, so I can only imagine how bad the pain really is. It's a combination of wisdom teeth that should have been pulled ten years ago and just plain old broken, rotting teeth. It happens to all of us, but most of us, these days, have either extra income or dental insurance to take care of this kind of thing. I don't. In Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut asked, "What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery"?

It's a good question. Our mouths just don't work properly, do they? Even with all our knowledge of tooth care and modern dentistry, orthodontics, periodontics, and other -dontics that I'm not aware of, we all end up toothless, eventually. Our teeth are evolutionary casualties of all the other stuff we upright bipedal primates got right. We have binocular vision, we have opposable thumbs, we can walk upright for, well, our whole lives, we can reason and empathize and invent civilization (and, eventually, Civilization, the digital simulation of civilization). But we're stuck with teeth that fall, inevitably, inexorably, into a painful fucking mouthful of rotting crockery.

I only read Galapagos once, when I was on a Vonnegut bender a few years ago, and I barely remember the book. But that one phrase, "rotting crockery," lodged itself into my head. It's just the perfect description, isn't it? It floats back into my consciousness whenever my teeth start hurting again, which is fairly often.

Look, I'm no martyr. I want to get 'em fixed, but I don't have the means. The extra money we just don't have, we're paycheck-to-paycheck around here. We have insurance at work, but it's a group plan. We needed one more person for it, for at least a little coverage. $1,000 per year for something like $20 per 90 days. But my retard roommate Richard (who I work with and is in fact the way I found out about the job in the first place two years ago and I don't know to this day if I should be grateful or burn him in effigy for putting me at that place) didn't want to pay it, because he gets his own dental work done at a local fucking dental college for a bargain. And then he wants to gripe -- endlessly and repeatedly -- about how awful they are and how long it takes.

This is my life.

So I'm sitting here unable to sleep on Thanksgiving night because my teeth feel like they're trying to wrench themselves free of my skull to do, I don't know what, put on a musical production about making me miserable and unable to enjoy my turkey (had no problem with dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, or green bean casserole) or something equally fucking stupid.

I'm going to watch another episode of Dexter and try to ignore the pain for another hour. Then I'll watch another one. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Please give thanks for all your loved ones and whatnot, and be thankful your rotting crockery has a professional looking after it. I wish mine did.

I still remember my Blogger password. Neat!

It's Father's Day, but I'm broke so I called my dad to tell him I'll take him out for dinner next weekend when I'll have a small amount of disposable income. But he didn't hear the phone ring, so I left a message saying, basically, gimme a shout. He did a few hours later, and I'm going to pick him up after work next Sunday to go get some awesome Italian at Garibaldi's. It's basically a neighborhood joint near the U of M, but it's friggin' sweet. He loves it, I love it, I took The Lovely Jenny there a couple weekends ago and she loves it, it's just all-around a very cool place to get a pizza or a nice plate of ravioli while watching the Tigers on TV. Can't wait for next weekend.

What else. It's been hot here, like Africa hot (Biloxi Blues reference FTW). Well over 90 degrees every damned day for weeks. The only break I've had from it at work has been driving out of town, and those jobs have been scarce. Last Wednesday I drove out to a prison a stone's throw west of Reelfoot Lake with Richard to install a new forklift battery and bring back the old, scrap battery. That was a decent day of air-conditioned truck cab, brief, beautiful views of a soon-to-be-gone lake, and random talk of our addictive MMO's (LotRO in my case, WoW in Richard's).

Tomorrow I may be sent to another prison in something called Able, TN, which is apparently a town a little ways past the Tennessee River, to do the same job. That's going to be an all-day trip, and as easy as that will be for me, I don't want to do it. Driving east on I-40 is like hypnosis for me. It's two lanes, straight as an arrow, for hours. The most boring drive on earth. Nothing to look at but lines of identical trees on both sides of the road, for mile after mile after soul-sucking mile. No curves, no hills, no nothing. Hopefully, I won't have to go alone. I could do the job alone easily. But I tried to convince my boss that another person is necessary, so I don't have to drive all the way out there and back as well. I'd rather ride back, so I can read a book and not fall asleep and plow off the road into a fucking tree.

Picture time: work edition

Here are some random pictures I've taken on the job over the last few months. So. Yeah.

Titans win; I'm right again.

It's a heavy burden, being right so often*. I'm not trying to show anyone up, I'm just constantly vindicated in the long run. I can't help it. At work, for example, whenever we're trying to figure something out down in the shop, Dale's always wrong. He just is. Not just in the shop, but out in the field as well, on a PM or a maintenance call. Whatever he decides is wrong, which is why I usually override him. Because I'm right.

In this case, I was right about the Titans benching Kerry Collins and starting Vince Young. Of course, everyone else in the United States of America was right about this as well. They were oh-fer almost half way through the season, there was just no reason at all not to throw Young in there to see what he could do. Two losses later, they finally did, and what happens? Two straight wins.

Young showed his comeback is legitimate, outplaying fellow first-round draft pick Alex Smith down the stretch. Young has been clutch twice in as many weeks, getting the Titans (2-6) in the end zone when it mattered.

So yeah, I'm right again. You're welcome, head coach Jeff Fisher. I know you read this blog.

Anyway. We cooked out on the grill this afternoon, and I stuffed myself way, way beyond any reasonable level of... um, eatingness. I still feel like I'll never have to eat again. I put eight pork chops, five cheddar-stuffed kielbasas, and a monstrous smoked sausage on the grill and burned them over fire until they tasted good. Haley and Jenny roasted some potatoes in the oven, and cooked some sweet corn in, well, in the microwave. We cheated a bit on that.

But it was all unbelievable. One of the best meals I've had in a long, long time. Jenny tweaked the grilled pork chop recipe we made up last weekend, and she absolutely nailed it. Pork perfection. The potatoes, as well, were fantastic. I love red potatoes to begin with, but they cut, seasoned, and cooked them to a state I'd characterize as perfection had I not just used that word to describe the pork chops. We ate outside on the back porch by the grill as I cooked up some extra meat for leftovers and Richard burned the shit out of some beer brats. Topped it all off with a dessert recipe of Haley's: baked bananas with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter, served with ice cream. Addictive would be a good word for it.

We fed five tonight and still have plenty of leftovers. Best of all, we bought most of the ingredients at the local Aldi for a song. After two trips there, I'm definitely an Aldi convert. Even better, I noticed that they use industrial batteries in their pallet jacks, talked to a couple managers, and I think we can get some work there. So it was a win-win-win weekend. Because I was right. Don't doubt it, just believe it.

*My egotism in this post is generally fictional; Jenny is so smart that she routinely makes me feel like an imbecile, consistently reminding me that whatever I think I'm at expert at, someone else knows more. Except about football. And my job. And Quake.

Wish I was home.

So I'm at my mom's house, watching the NBA finals while watching the dogs. My mom's in Birmingham helping out with my granddad, who had a brain tumor removed a couple weeks ago. He's doing really well, but his kids are keeping an eye on him until he fully recovers. They're taking it in turns, and unfortunately my mom's turn came up when one of her dogs, Lucy, is really sick. I don't know what's wrong with her, but just checking in on them and letting them out and feeding them and whatever has turned into a full-on dogsitting gig. I'm spending my second night here, and apparently my dog YaYa isn't taking it so well. I knew she liked me, but I didn't think she'd, you know, miss me. I love that dog.

Anyway, Lucy here has been sick for a while, but with my granddad ill and with my step-grandfather dying last week, my mom hasn't done anything about it, and now Lucy's getting worse by the day. In a sense, I don't blame my mom, but in another, more accurate sense, I really do. But there's no point in assigning blame, it's just important that she's coming back a day early (tomorrow) to take her to the vet.


Meanwhile, I'm finding it hard to sleep. I miss Jenny terribly, and I'm not used to sleeping on that little twin bed in the guest room. I slept on it last night, and all afternoon at work today my spine felt like it was going to wrench itself out of my body and strangle me for making it bend down so I could acid-adjust forklift batteries all goddamn day. So I'm wide awake at 10:30 and I think I'm going to be late to work tomorrow. If I work the full 8 hours I'm pushing overtime anyway, and god knows they don't want that to happen. Anyway the manager isn't going to be there tomorrow, so fuck it. All I have to do is make a few trips out to West Memphis to pick up some batteries.


Anyhow. I gotta try to feed Lucy again and take them out once more before I sack out. If you're reading this, Jenny, love you! See you tomorrow afternoon.

Gaming/blogging before a long day.

So tomorrow my job is sending me on an all-day PM (preventative maintenance) to the Winchester plant outside Oxford, MS. They have eleven forklift batteries we'll have to clean and/or repair, plus maintenance on probably half a dozen chargers. I'll have to go in an hour early and I'll probably get back an hour late, and since this is my second PM this week, I'll probably end up with some overtime for the first time since I started this god forsaken job a few months ago. So tonight I'm taking it easy. Playing HL2: Episode Two, GTA San Andreas (roaming around at random in one of my 100% saves), and maybe some Call of Duty 4 later. I'm also watching the Griz, currently down three in the third against the Wolves.

I've got a backlog of games to get to now, thanks to a small amount of disposable cash and a huge sale on Steam. At last count, I now have 55 games installed on my PC, counting expansions (two each for Quake, Quake 2, and Ghost Recon) plus nine games I've uninstalled recently because I'm running out of room on my 200GB and 100GB hard drives. The number of games I have that I haven't yet beaten has grown from five or six a few months ago to something like two dozen. And I now own three games that I can't even run effectively on my rig, at least until I upgrade, including one I can't run at all (Lost Planet, a Christmas gift from Mike that I really wish I could run).

Moving on. I managed to get Jenny's camera working, so we've been taking pictures of just about anything again. For example, here's a picture of me pretending to be Gordon Freeman at work:


Either there's a healthpack in one of those crates, or I'm about to get fired for carrying around a crowbar for no discernible reason.


This is a late-seventies International Harvester Scout II that's been parked on McLean in north Midtown for at least a year and a half. The first car I ever owned was a black '76 Scout II, and every time I see this truck I have a little flashback to 1995.


Maggie says: "I'M SO HAPPY OMG!!!1!"


My girls. This is actually an old photo, which explains the Photoshopping I had to do to get it bright enough to appreciate. I'm pretty sure Yaya was thinking, "You're using me as a photo-op, aren't you?"