IRL – Page 21

You can’t be too careful anymore

Ugh. Sometimes I forget just how wonderful medication can be. I’ve been down with the sickness for the last week (and not changing my routine at all to compensate for it), and today my boss finally forced me to head over to the walk-in medical center. I’m now doped up and… well, not feeling great yet, but that shit really does take the edge off. I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it really wreaks havoc on my physical self. I also finished Christmas shopping for my girlfriend today, which has been a three-month long endeavor, so woot on that.

Excuses, threats, and alibies

I handed in my resignation at work today. I’ve worked at Toys ‘R’ Us for just over three years now, and it was time to call it quits. Fortunately, I do have a new job to go to, so it’s not like every other job I’ve left where I just quit to be an unemployed bum. Also, it’s a really good new job! So no more retail/fast food for ol’ Ryan!

The weird part that even with all the anxiety all the interviewing and waiting and worrying about being able to do this new job, I think I was most nervous about leaving TRU. Not because I especially love it or anything. It’s not a bad job, but after three years, it’s more than worn on me. Anyway, what I believe the butterflies in my tummy were all about was leaving my safe place. Like I said, I’ve been there three years now, and it’s something I can do. I might be so brash as to say that I’m really good at it. It’s not great pay, but it gets me by, and I know they may not say it all the time, but they do value my hard work. And now I’m cutting away that wonderful little safety net, and taking a plunge, hoping that there’s a bigger, comfier one somewhere farther down the gorge. Or wherever that metaphor was going.

I’m sure everything will work out okay, and if somehow I’m just awful at the new job (highly unlikely) I suppose they won’t mind taking me back. At severely reduced pay of course, but at least I’ll have a job. It’s been many, many years since I’ve been this scared, since about the time I got my first job at Tim Horton’s. I’m playing in a whole different league now, and while I’m sure I’m up to the challenge, I’m having a very hard time convincing myself of it.

Oh, and if you’re my new employer and are reading this, disregard that whole lack of self-confidence thing. That’s just for dramatic effect.

Bye-bye Beardy

Yeah, so I’m not dead. Again. Been a while since I did the whole blogging thing, and it so seemed like I was getting back into it last month… oh well. I’ve been SUPER-busy over the last week or so anyway, between trips and work and socials and all that other junk, I’ve barely had any time to play video games, nevermind blog!

Luckily, I did have Wednesday to myself, so I spent a good eight or so hours engrossing myself in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, which is fantastic. Possibly even better than the original M&L, which I intend to play as soon as I’m done with the new one here. I played Partners in Time again a couple moths ago, and I still feel that it lacks something. It just didn’t have the heart of the original.

Also, I’m interviewing for a new awesome possum(bly) job next week, and because I don’t want to look like a ragamuffin, I shaved off my seven-week strong facial hair. I like to think that things could have gone better, but realy, it was an awful beard. The ‘stache didn’t change much from the picture I took at three weeks, maybe just thickened a timy bit. As for the beard, it remained entirely under my face, and grew to about half an inch in length, which effectively looked quite literally like chin pubes. It never grew onto my cheeks, so it was a shabby chinbeard at the very best. And now my face is all smoothie-like.

I even tried just shaving out the middle first, hoping that it would turn into Wolverine chops, but it was really just the same mess without the middle, and hence was not worth taking a picture of.

There’s plenty more to talk about too! But that will have to come in later bloggity posts, because I don’t want to cram everything in all at once! Then there would be an even worse blog deficit. And I most certainly don’t want to end up in the middle of some kind of blog recession. However that would work.

The Beardo Chronicles: Week 3

The beard madness continues! At this point, people have sarted to realize that I’m not just too lazy to shave, and am actually growing facial hair on purpose. Many are asking why, but I never really have an answer. Just because.

I shaved the neckline this morning, and oh lordy, does it look so much better. Now I actually look like I’m growing a beard, as opposed to scruff. Also, my girlfriend is really warming up to the idea, so all is good in beardy town. Except for the fact this it’s starting to slow down in the growth department, so we’ll see if it gets any longer than where it is now. Check back next week for more!

I should also mention that I’m in the midst of writing not one, or even two, but three articles. I’d hoped the first one would be up just less than a week ago, but you know how I procrastinate. In any case, there’s actual content in the works, so stay tuned!

Birdy, erm, Beardy

So completely randomly, about two weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to start growing a beard. Now, while I love the prospect of having a beard, there are three little catches that will more than likely keep me frm achieving my goal:

1. I’ve tried this before. It didn’t work out. As far as I can tell, my face doesn’t have what it takes to grow a proper beard. It grows very unevenly, faouring the left side, and after a couple weeks the growing just stops and it stays at the “long scruff” phase until I shave it off. I’m hoping it’s just because I didn’t wait long enough before, which leads to point two.

2. I’m too impatient. Since my facial hair (and regular hair, after a certain length) grows at a snail’s pace, I’ll most definitely get bored of this long before I have anything resembling a beard. To help imagine how long my hair takes to grow, it takes be approximately three days to grow in a proper five o’ clock shadow.

3. My girlfriend is not a fan. I asked her at the beginning of the relationship how she felt about facial hair (because I shave maybe once a week at most), and she said she wasn’t big on real facial hair, but could deal with the stubble. I did tell her my plan, however, and she seems okay with it, if not even supportive. I was ready to give up after just over a week, but she told me to hang in there a little longer, just to see how it goes.

So that’s what I’m sporting now; Not too wonderful looking, but it’s past the crustache phase and makes me look a little older. You may not be able to tell because that’s the most terrible picture ever taken, but yeah. I dunno. I’m pretty much ready to shave it off, but I’ve made a promise to myself to wait at least one more week before I take the razor to it. Well, I mean, it’s due for a bit of a trim around the neckline, but it’s got seven days to straighen up and fly right before I axe the whole thing.

So why am I doing this? Dunno. Boredom, I guess.

TE Hits the Road: Fargo ’09

Hi all! Yeah, it’s yet another article about the once-again yearly trip I take down to Fargo/Grand Forks. I say once-again because there was a stretch in there for a few years where we didn’t go at all, but for the last three years, it’s been an essential part of summer. The only difference is that now, instead of going down with my family, it’s me and the woman. There are pros and cons for both parties, but I don’t really care who I go with. The Fargo/Grand Forks trip is the only summer staple I still have left, so I’m holding onto it as tight as I can.

That aside, I’ve decided that this year I’m just going to mash up all the pictures I took instead of trying to do anything more inspired with them. No categories, no long-winded stories, no character commentary. Nope. Just going to put them on the page and make some quick notes where I deem necessary.

Also there are tons of pictures,. Enjoy 😉

This is a cake. This is what Stephanie and I ate for breakfast. Actually I had a bowl of Reese Puffs cereal beforehand because she was taking a really long time to get to my house. But yeah, cake for breakfast. Woo!

We struck a deal before we left that she would drive there, and I would drive home. I wasn’t told until we’d arrived at the hotel, but apparently I had been voted to drive everywhere while we were in Fargo.

GPS. Lifesaver.

I bought a huge jawbreaker on a stick at the Duty-Free. It’s been ages since I’d had one of these bad boys, and I felt it was absolutely necessary. My mission was to finish it by the time we got home. I did one better and finished it before we were even back in Canada. The passport is there for scale.

She opted for the jawbreaker’s smaller cousin, the cherry Jelly Belly sucker.

I think I might have had a better chance of getting in here when I used to come down with my family. The girlfriend seems wholly opposed to entering a restaurant so garishly decorated. But we went to TGI Friday’s, so I don’t know. Maybe she’s got a fear of aliens?

I feel it’s important to mention that I used that baby pool to its full extent.

Our facilities. This is the most interesting photo ever.

Aah! Too much sunlight!

“Take one of me on the couch!”

“Now take one of me on the bed!”

See? TGI Friday’s. Hard on the eyes though it my be, no trip to the United States is complete without a stop in either here or Chili’s. I wish Canadian chains or those that extended into Canada knew how to make such wonderful fries.

Dear God! Six years with this camera and still I take blurry pictures! I’m a horribly lazy photographer.

So good.

Also awesome, but far less new to me.

For years, I’ve refused to believe that this DVD exists. Well ,outside Amazon, anyway. But I found it! I really found it! Now I can’t say Hot Topic never did anything for me.

More crap I bought. Teenage Zombies was ten bucks, and the rest I consider to be things absolutely essential for me to own. I was hunting Friday the 13th and American Dad Vol 4, but Ghostbusters Vol 1 came out of nowhere and made me the happiest girl in the world.

Like the trip to Fargo itself, no summer is complete without a small tub of Americone Dream.

TGI Friday’s was having a two-for-one burger day, and I had ordered a burger for dinner, so they gave me this second one to take home. I ate it that night and forcefully regretted eating two giant cheese-slathered burgers in one night. A task a younger me would ahve faced with aplomb.

The main dresser on our first morning. It’s covered in crap we bought and other such things. The Playstation 2 is there because I hate overpaying for movies I don’t really want to watch and every time I bring my DVD player I forget the remote.

Seriously. You’d think I would know how to take a not-blurry picture by now.

I usually grab a jug of Hawaiian puch on my southernly adventures, only this time I picked the “light” version. Trying to watch those calories…

West Acres mall. It’s huge, and wonderful. It’s probably the best mall ever. It’s not a lot better than Winnipeg’s biggest mall, but I only get to go there like once a year and I don’t get bored of it. Also I looooove Mrs. Fields’ cookies.

We went to the Lone Star Texas Grill on our second night. We’d never been there, but were pleasantly surprised. The steak I had was excellent (especially since I hadn’t had a steak for several weeks at that point), and there was a pail of peanuts on the table to keep me busy while we were waiting for the food to come.

That evening we ventured over into downtown Fargo, and on our way back, we ended up accidentally driving through some sort of classic car show-off night. Don’t know for sure what was going down, but we took a bunch of pictures.

I used the Fargo onion to determine that we were going the right way on the way back into the hotel/shopping part of the city.

I guess it’s just out of habit that I keep taking pictures of the Fargo TRU. We didn’t go in this year, but it looked just as sad as ever on the outside.

All packed up! I don’t subscribe to Nintendo Power anymore, but I felt like picking up an issue for old time’s sake. This one was the perfect candidate, because the only things I really want to read about are the new Mario & Luigi game and Wii Sports Resort.

This is how many towels we used over the course of two days.

I’m going to miss that wonderful continental breakfast buffet. It’s really the highlight of all my best hotel stays.

On our way home we stopped in Grand Forks to investigate the Columbia Mall among other shops. It’s just as boring as ever, if not moreso because they don’t even have the cookie place in the food court anymore.

Evidence that she does eat.

There was a completely random mailbox on the side of the road nearl Kohl’s. I felt that I should capture its soul incase it disappears between now and next year.

This makeup is all blurry! Let’s go somewhere else.

I bought these movies at Best Buy. Zombie Strippers is pretty hilarious, Zombie Diaries was disturbing, and Trailer Park of Terror-though I expected the most from it-was merely okay.

No, I did not buy Friady the 13th twice. I don’t know how it got into this picture. On the other hand, Jason X was five bucks and was the last missing piece in my collection, and the Elm Street four-pack was $10 and completed its own collection. Mallrats I couldn’t understand why I didn’t already own.

We hit Rock 30 games on the second night, and I picked these up there. I have no idea why in God’s name I had sold Donkey Kong, as it is one of the greatest original Game Boy games ever, and FF8 I own on PC, but would rather play through my PS2. I will not say how much I paid for either of these items. I will say that one was just a little more expensive than it should have been, and the other was hideously overpriced. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

And that’s pretty much it. Following in the general spirit of this “article”, I really don’t have much more to wrap up with, so I’ll leave it at that.

~FIN

I am the Taco King!

The woman and I took the yearly trip down to Fargo last Wednesday afternoon, and stayed until Friday night. It was a pretty paint-by-numbers expedition, but there were a few highlights. For one, we explored a bit farther than the shopping/hotel part of the city and checked out downtown Fargo a bit. It was actually pretty cool. We saw some interesting shops, a liberry, and we even got stuck in the middle of some kind of classic car show. It was a ton of fun, and of course, there was a ton of shopping to be had.

She’s been absolutely picture-crazy ever since she got a camera for her birthday, and I felt I needed to compete during this trip. I took a big handful of photos over the course of the two-and-a-half days, and my original intent was to take compelling pictures of strange, wonderful, or curious things and make an awesome gallery of intrigue. However, most of them ended up being of all the things I normally take pictures of. And my girlfriend. There are lots of her. Because, you know. Overall, I’d say her gallery wins. If only because it’s a lot bigger (though it should be noted that she wasn’t stuck with a crappy 16MB memory stick).

That gallery, while much more tepid than I’d hoped it would be, will be posted later this week. Today, I want to talk about the single video game I purchased during the trip: Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys. Yeah, it’s one of those Ninjabread Man scenarios where the title and theme seemed so awesome that I couldn’t resist. Fortunately, Teenage Zombies was only half the price of Ninjabread Man. Also, it isn’t horrible.

Developed by InLight Entertainment (who have apparently made a grand total of three games), Teenage Zombies is at first highly reminiscent of Super NES game The Lost Vikings. It’s a platform-puzzler which gives you three characters with unique abilities that will help you conquer your environments. Yeah. To be completely honest, if someone had told me about this game and compared it to The Lost Vikings, but with zombies, I would have ran out and bought it a year ago. The sad truth however, is that this game is not nearly as brilliant as its seventeen-years-older cousin.

I don’t want to be too harsh on TZ though, as it is a pretty fun game, and I expected much, much less for $10. The biggest complaint I have is that unlike its Nordic counterpart, TZ has you hot-swapping between zombies. The Lost Vikings had all three characters on-screen at once, and you’d often have to combine their skills to overcome the trickier puzzles. Hitting L or R to replace zombies when one isn’t doing the trick isn’t as satisfying as teaming them up would be. The levels are still pretty clever, requiring almost constant switching of zombies. The first few chapters will seem like a breeze, but about halfway through the game I found myself dying several times before making it to the next checkpoint. And it never really felt cheap or dull either. The game is constantly giving you new power-ups, but very rarely tells you when, where, or in what order you need to use them.

The biggest problem I have with the game is that it’s a bit light on enemies. There are rats, and brains. A couple different types of brains, but nothing radically different. I suppose it’s more of a boon that combat is simple though, because what is there is a bit rough. Attack animations are slow, and most of the time you can only hit one enemy at a time, regardless of how many are within your range. Sometimes your hits don’t even connect at all. The other thing I have a minor complaint about are the stylus mini-games. They’re boring and (almost) frustrating to control. Fortunately, you’re only forced to play each once, and you can move on regardless of your performance. The one mini-game that is fun is the one where you put a zombie back together by dragging his parts around. It’s really simple, but a neat distraction.

Overall, I’ve got to say that Teenage Zombies was a pretty good buy. For $10 anyway. It’s soaked up a few hours of my life, and I don’t regret spending either the money or the time on it. The gameplay itself is a bit repetitive, but fun enough to keep you going until you get to the end, and that’s really the prize itself. The cutscenes are hilarious, and the banter between the Big Brain and his No. 1 is entertaining enough to give players reason to keep plodding through to the end, even when you have to restart a level five or six times until you hit the right combination of powers. Definitely worth a look.

She’s not in Riverton

You’ve seen the pictures on Facebook, now here’s the video!

This is a short video from our weekend getaway to Hecla Island, a couple hours north of Winnipeg. We stayed at the Radisson Oasis Spa, and here we’re exploring the nearby Hecla Village. It was really the only thing to do out there this time of year. The golf course was still closed, and we could only get so many massages. So we played on the rocks for a while.

Sorry, I’m not home right now

Despite the fact that they were way outside my budget, I went out and bought tickets for No Doubt and Paramore this morning. They’re sorta crappy seats, but they were the cheaper ones and still so much more than I should have spent. But you should have seen the way here eyes lit up when she told me that her two favourite bands were coming to town together. There was no way I couldn’t get the tickets. Oh well…

I’ve never waited in line for concert tickets the day they go on sale before, and I don’t think I got a very good impression of what it’s really like. It could have been the low-profile Ticketmaster location (tucked away in the corner of a drugstore), but there were less than ten people in line. I wasn’t the only male, but it was the first time I’ve been the manliest guy in a crowd. The line me and the guys stood in on Wii day was way more intense than this one. I guess that either nobody cares about No Doubt anymore, or they all just went to different locations. In any case, I’m disappointed. I was expecting at least a little more out of this line.

Oh, and don’t tell her about these! They’re a surprise!

She said “Love? Lord above!”

I’ve got a new predicament these days. It’s a rather sticky one too! See, I’ve grown less and less fond of my job over the last… well, however long it’s been since the last time I said I liked my job. At this point, I really want to go out and find a new one, but not something that’s just as bad as what I’m dealing with right now (keeping in mind that it’s not really that bad at all). I can barely even summon the motivation to send out online applications, nevermind actually go out and hand out resumes to random workplaces. It’s because I know that I’m employed, have guaranteed hours, and don’t really have it too bad. I’m in a decent place, and while it could be better, that decency is keeping my ambition locked away.

That said, there’s a job posting for an assistant manager position that I would love to have. As much as I want to move away from my current workplace, I also want to move up the management ladder, take over the damn place, and rule with an iron fist. The problem is that if I put in for this job and somehow land it (not likely. I’m pretty sure the boss hates me), I’ll have even less motivation to get movin’ on than I do now.

So I’m a bit stumped. Being an assistant manager – even of a crappy toy store – would be a huge achievement for me, because by nature I’m a follower, not a leader. I want it so bad! Primarily for the extra money and great addition to the resume, but also to prove to myself that I’m not worthless. I also kind of feel like it would prove to everyone else that I’m not worthless. Not that even one person has ever said anything of the sort to me, but my low self-esteem causes that whole feeling inadequate thing. I mean, I know I’m capable of accomplishing lots, I just have no ambition. So this would be taking the easy way out; moving up, but not really making any significant change.

I guess I still need some time to think it over, but I think I’m most likely to go for it. And I know this post is a little rambley and a lot disjointed, but it makes me feel a little less confused to have all my thoughts put down on virtual paper. It’s not so much for your reading pleasure as for me to sort out my thoughts. But if you have some insight, don’t be afraid to put in your two cents (just click on my name up there).