Starry Wisdom

I’ve posted the transcription of the journal I wrote while in Italy, via back dated posts. I suggest starting at the bottom and working up, here

Here is a highlight of my Seattle photos:

And also, the entire gallery.

I went to Seattle this weekend to visit my friend Steve and his family. Last time I was there, in september, his daughter Holly was 16 months old and barely talking. Now she has a pretty good vocabular but not much in the grammar departmen :). She really is an adorable kid, though, even if she is a bit ADD – yeah I guess little ones tend to be that way but Steve and Jum both say she’s a bit more so than her peers.

The famous Seattle weather was in full form so we didn’t get to do as many outside things as last time. But we did go take pictures at the Japanese garden, which was the place for holly to look at ducks, and validated taking the SLR along on the trip. I also got to hang out with just Steve a fair bit – we saw the Cinematic Titanic Live show Saturday night (I laughed so hard I hurt) and saw Watchmen yesterday afternoon during naptime. I liked the movie ok, and I think it was just about as good of an adaptation of the source material as possible, but that still only makes an above average movie.

I’m writing this on my phone at the airport, so I am unable to add any pics – they are still on my camera – but I’ll post again later to highlight some.

I, like many guys around my age, spent countless hours as a youth in front of the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES). On the NES there are three games that strike me as iconic:

1. Super Mario Bros
2. The Legend of Zelda
3. Castlevania

I owned all three of these, and of them, I finished the first multiple times (but I admit I was more amused by the turtle trick than actually finishing the game)

Zelda was a fairly easy game to finish, in that you had save games, and infinite continues to accomplish it. I will admit the first play through probably took me a couple of weeks, but mostly because of time spent trying to figure out puzzles, not dying randomly.

The final of the three, Castlevania, that was the tricky one. I never personally finished the game, and it was a good game where I made it to the penultimate boss, the Grim Reaper. I don’t think I ever made it past him, or if I did it was only a single time. I saw a friend of mine cower before and die to the mighty Count Dracula on a single occasion, but that was it as far as the end of the game goes.

Now, imagine my surprise when I find this pair of videos this morning:

Not only is the game finishable within 15 minutes, but the damn Grim Reaper is as easy as any of the rest of the bosses, thanks to the mighty holy water secondary weapon. If only i had known this then…

The past week has proved to me without a doubt the old saying “time is an illusion.” With the jet lag coming back from Italy (which pretty much took me a literal week to get over) and the return to daylight savings time this weekend, I have come to realize that we really should abandon walltime, and just proceed on our lives as the sun tells us to.

I slept the wrong 6 hours last night. Basically from 7:30pm until 1:30am. I watched some tv until 3, then tried to sleep again, and at 4:45 decided it wasn’t going to happen, so I showered and went in to the office. An hour or so late, I’ve finished going through my email from the past week, and I am ready to start doing work. Stupid Jetlag!