Vacay
My vacation is winding down to its end. I return to work on Wednesday, so only two more days of carefree laziness remain. During the first half of my vacation I had my brother Dylan over. He spent the night for about 5 days and much gaming was had. Primarily Borderlands 2. Had a little Monopoly Streets, Dead or Alive 5 and Minecraft thrown in as well, but it was seemingly all about shooting things the last few days.
We took him home yesterday afternoon and the wife and I went out for a nice dinner and have spent today mostly lazying on the couch snuggled up with our dogs.
We enjoyed my brother's copy of Monopoly Streets so much we decided to go grab our own copy. When we did we spoke to Chris, the store's manager and found out that Andrew was permanently moved to the Rufe Snow location. I can't recall if I posted on here before but Andrew was the manager of the store directly in front of the PetSmart I worked at that I loved. Great location, low volume, relaxed store and Andrew and his crew were always great. We found out earlier this year when we saw him totally bald and without his usual facial hair that he has a rare form of stage 4 cancer. I can't recall the particular name of it, it's been so long. But we like to touch base with him every so often and see how he's doing.
His store was shut down some time ago. The lease was expiring and the company decided that it was too low volume of a store to renew and keep opening. So his crew moved to different locations or took severance packages, and Andrew helped out around other stores, enjoying a lite workload while he was going through his treatments.
We drove out to his store today to see him (not only that, but his was the only nearby store that had a particular game I wanted) and he's doing a lot better. His hair has grown back, he looks healthy and he seemed to be his usual happy self. He told us that while he can now look forward to a lifetime of periodic scans and tests that as of right now the cancer is remissive and he's eating a healthy diet and doing workouts. Pretty much everything he can to be as healthy as possible for a person with stage 4 cancer. It was good to see him. Now that we know he's there we'll probably be going to that store more often, even though it's probably twice the distance if not more from our usual store.
While we were there we pulled in quite a gaming haul. We scored Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, Project Gotham Racing 3 and 4, and Sega Superstars Tennis all for under $15. Then my wife started talking to me about old games.
"Are you going to get the new Hitman when it comes out? You played the old ones right?"
"No, I wasn't planning on it. Why?"
"One of the guys I work with is really excited about it and wondered if you were." I was like, "oh, no, hadn't planned on it."
Then she asked the same thing about the new Max Payne.
I said yeah, I played the first two on the original Xbox and they were great games. Especially the second one, with I believe Steve agrees with me on. I told her the newest one had been out for some time. Since like, May. Then I walked over to the new games section and pointed it out to her where I found they had the Collector's Edition, new, for $59.99. Then I looked at its contents:
Game, bullet keychain, 11" statue, soundtrack, 6 still life pictures, and in-game DLC. I picked it up almost immediately. Strictly because of the fact that it was a collector's edition with a load of bonus stuff that at that price point was essentially free. So, yeah. I also have Max Payne 3 now. But I probably won't start in on it until I'm done with Borderlands 2 for a bit.