Multi-post of what was and will be!
Ah, the smells of spring... I really notice the lack of smells in the winter - it seems that diesel fumes and clothes dryer exhaust are all that survive in dry cold weather. Now there's a whole world of them out there: Flowers, fresh cut grass, soil, smoke, wood, asphalt, (smoking tires, hehe >:D) fresh paint, rain, cooking food, rivers and streams... after a long winter it's like having a whole new sense again! :D
Anyway, I typed a lot for this one so I'm sticking it behind the cut!
On the 6th, I went to my old high school to check out an anime convention I'd heard they were hosting, and to catch up with some old friends who were going. It was pretty impressive for a high school event - they had a few viewing rooms, a DDR contest room, a general gaming room, and even a dealers room with some Alberta dealers at it, and a performance by the 404s! I tracked down my Japanese teacher and we chatted a bit in both languages... going by people I know personally, it must be really rare that she meets a former student who remembers any Japanese... :/ I know I've forgotten a few hundred kanji, but my listening/speaking has gone way up from back then.
They've sure come a long way since I was there! My friends and I started the first "Japanese club" when our request for an anime club was turned down. We sometimes watched anime in the classroom over lunch hours, or went to Chinese restaurants because there weren't any Japanese ones in town then, haha... ^^; We'd also hang out and do other vaguely Japanese-y stuff like play kendama or Daruma otoshi but due to lack of real "Japanese club stuff" to do it was kinda an anime club with 8-10 people in it, lol. Now they have a whole mini convention open to the public! Way to go guys! *cheers and veers away from the tangent*
The power went out at work on the 11th when one of the distribution boxes on campus blew up. Some of the emergency generators failed to start up - one may have started at the wrong time and fried another distribution box... a comedy of errors! We stood around in the darkness of the hallways chatting at first. This was around 12:30; by 2:30 or 3:00 we had lights again, but much of the network was still down because there was no guarantee the servers would be safe since the power was still flaky. So we basically sat around all afternoon wondering if someone was going to tell us to go home, lol. Eventually we got out about a half hour early! Heh, this is snap decision making by their standards.
I ordered a few watches in the last month. I'm getting into "skeleton" style mechanical watches: they have an open design that lets you see the mechanical workings of the movement, and another crystal on the back to see into them on the other side. Mechanical watches still aren't as accurate as cheap digital ones, but there's something fascinating about an actual machine that can operate regularly enough to tell time... Typically several seconds off per day is acceptable error. A couple of them were pretty cheap and one would gain about 3 minutes per day (!) so I'm in the process of tuning it up. It's about 10 seconds give or take now. I'd actually hoped I'd have to do this for at least one of them. It's been interesting learning about the mechanics of how watches work, and I'd always kind of wondered how they run at the same rate whether they're fully or partly wound up. (A weighted wheel twists back and forth like a pendulum, driving the part that lets it tick forward a bit, so it doesn't much matter how tight the spring is...) It's good to have a fresh supply of new geekdoms to dig into, hehe. One should even compliment a costume idea I have, but I won't elaborate now because coordinating it in time is making my head spin, so I don't want to talk it up too much! @_@;
E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo just ran, and I'm still sifting through the reports. I check out the info from it every year because I'm still kind of a big gaming nerd, even if I don't dual-wield DS and PSP anymore ^^; So far I'm really excited about Scribblenauts, a DS game that seemingly lets you solve puzzles by summoning... anything you can name! Yes, really. No trademarks, nothing dirty, but otherwise they've been trying to stump it at the show. It's known to work with at least stanchion, kraken, stegosaurus, god,
Einstein, longcat, keyboard cat, mech, AND mecha. The other title I'm looking forward to is The Last Guardian, formerly Project Trico - it's the new title from the team that did ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. What's amazing is the sheer virtuosity these guys have in presentation and storytelling - all they've shown so far is a short promo video, but so many people have commented already about how excited they are and how moving they're sure it's going to be, and I have to agree. These guys really have that artistic gift of conveying emotions in their work. I'm usually fairly skeptical about upcoming games, but I just know this one will be great - sadly no idea when it's going to be done though.
Finally and most recently, I'm getting a car as fast as I can! I actually have the cash saved up far enough that I could walk into a dealership and buy it without financing (weird, but I hate going into debt for anything when I can help it...) I just took a morning off work to do a road test, and failed for going with the flow of traffic - don't know what I was thinking. Force of habit I guess! :p Next time I'll just have to do it all strictly by the book and it should be easy. I just hope I won't have to wait for the car dealership to order the car in and have it shipped to them too! I've gone without 4 wheels for long enough! (hmm, maybe I could fix some training wheels to my Ninja... that would be 4 wheels... XD) (ok, now I want to do the whole nine yards with handlebar streamers, little flag, training wheels, bell, etc! Wahaha! >:3 I could have the unmanliest sportbike on the road!)