As usual...

Well as usual it has been a really long time since our last post.

I woke up at around 5 AM this morning to a couple of rambunctious cats. Not remembering whether I had fed them last night, and still in kind of a haze I stumbled down the hall and pored some of their diet food into their bowl.

Suddenly I knew I was up, and as usual there was no way I was getting back to sleep. If I even tried I would more than likely just toss and turn and keep Shannon awake. So I checked my email. Glancing at my chat section I noticed the following people showing as online: Rob Heaton, Susan Mack and Richard Lagrand. Hmmmm, I wonder which side of the family my early morning genes come from...

So at any rate, I got up and worked some more on the side yard, trying to get an area cleared out to plant our Orange tree.

Monday was my brother Jeff's birthday and we all went to Lucille's to celebrate. As usual the nephews were very cute. Here's a couple of pictures from a different night at a restaurant:

Life has really been pretty great recently. So far we have managed to be relatively unaffected by the downturn in the economy. We had feared for a while that Shannon's school might go under and she would be out of work, but she just found out she will be signing her contract for next year on Wednesday which is definitely a relief.

As far as my work goes, I love it. I really enjoy everything about the job from the work I do, to the people I work with. I have a good mix of projects; some fairly mindless like proof reading, and some more exciting that keep me busy all day long.

I've started to lose interest in one of my favorite

games recently, which I am sure my cats and wife will be grateful for. They are making a fundamental change to the game that kind of bugs me, but also I just don't enjoy it as much anymore.

I am sure some people will think, "He's finally grown out of it" which is a mentality that really irks me. I have had two conversations in the past week along those lines. One with my co-worker Sarah, and one with my mother in law.

Sandee (my mother in law) mentioned how she can't understand how someone could sit playing a video game for more than an hour, and how she felt video games were for kids; a mentality that prevails amongst the pre-atari generations. After some chatting she did admit that this was likely a bias because she had not grown up with games, and since she had only ever really seen kids play them, she labels them "childish." Keep in mind 90 year olds still love gathering around a Scrabble board or playing a rousing game of hearts. "But that's different, there is a social aspect to those games" you might cry. If you do, you clearly don't understand modern "video games."

With Sarah the conversation centered more around various forms of recreation. In the end I pointed out that essentially some of the most intelligent people I know use video games as an escape device similar to how many people use books. We talked about how most people would perceive someone who reads books in their spare time--as opposed to playing video games-- would likely be considered intelligent. To me, that conclusion is ridiculous. Reading a grocery store romance novel seems no better an indicator of intelligence than matching gems in bejeweled. But the reality is, most people don't distinguish one video game from another. They are simply all "video games." To me this is like lumping Shakespeare in with Stephenie Meyer. At any rate, it was actually a really good conversation with a lot of good points made on both sides.

Side note: One of the points I made was that if you spend 3 hours fishing and don't catch anything, it is looked upon far more favorably than if you spend 3 hours chatting with 24 people from other parts of the world while playing a video game. Another co-worker mentioned an old saying; "Fishing is the only activity where you can spend hours trying to outsmart the dumbest animal in the world, and consistently lose." And yes, I love fishing too.

So needless to say I will not be done with games any time soon.

Last night we started to really lay out the Haunted House for this year, and as soon as we get the side yard done, I need to get to work on it. It is really going to be something this year, so if you can make it out I really encourage it. We plan on hosting it once again to benefit the Orange County Food Bank by asking visitors to bring canned food.

That's all for now, hopefully not another long stretch before I post again. Happy Fourth of July!