Summer Salute and Early Fall

Lately I've been thinking that the golden age of the blog has long since come and gone. Some of my readers have simply become too busy with their own lives to bother with anything more than Facebook news feeds, but that's only part of it. It's mainly my own negligence that has allowed the decline of the blog. Well, these days I don't get to spend as much time as I'd like catching up on things at a coffee shop, and I don't have wifi at my apartment, so I end up only able to blog at work, which is not easy. I prefer to post 1-2 times a week, but I haven't maintained that consistency in a long time. At any rate, I should probably do some "catching up" now. No deep musings, nor any well-crafted witticisms. Just a straight journal entry.

I'm still going through the motions of my full-time job at the retirement community, still working night shift security. I have racked up 100 hours of paid time off that I still can't take because no one can cover my shifts. In fact, I've been getting overtime lately. In fact, my supervisor might need me to work every night of the week, starting next week, until we hire a replacement for an employee who's leaving. But if I don't take my days off, all of it will be reset to zero on January 1. All of it will be lost. Not even reimbursed in the form of a paycheck. I've earned over two weeks of paid vacation that I can't yet take.

On that note, Herr Vogler will be visiting in late October. For that, I will take several days off so I can adjust my sleep schedule to normal human daylight hours and actually get to go on great adventures with him. It will be glorrrrioussss...

And the Minneapolis people visited recently, which I hate to do them injustice by reducing their visit to a mere blurb, but I don't have any particularly deep revelations to report from it. It was a nice break of pace to hang out with BGSU friends, but I also barely got to see them as I was working overtime.

My girlfriend got another puppy. A German-Aussie shepherd mix, named Xavier. I still sometimes have idle thoughts of getting my own dog, but it's better to get 'em young, so you can train them yourself. Growing up, we always had bigger dogs, but I think I have beagle envy. I have tried to kidnap Jack, my brother's beagle, several times in the past, but maybe I should just get my own. Of course, that effectively makes three dogs to the pack, and that's just too many for maintaining a workable hierarchy. I can't afford the fees for a dog anyway, and working night shift is not conducive to pet ownership. I don't need a bored, whiny, wet nose sticking in my face at noon while I'm trying to sleep.

So I shall improve my "quality of life" in other ways. For example, I think I might jump-start fall the day after Labor Day. Every year, with both the fall season and the Christmas season, I tell myself, "Maybe next year..."

Yeah, well, I think this is finally the year. It's the first time I have my own place and a reliable source of income. In fall '06, I had my own place but I got laid off in December. So this year, dang it, I'm going to carve a bunch of pumpkins and get a Christmas tree and stuff like that. Basically, the polar opposite of the anti-materialistic philosophy I claim to embrace. What would Tyler Durden say about such frivolities? Well, I think it will be okay to make my apartment an ambient sanctuary. Like I said in an earlier post, I think I'll enjoy some of the finer things in life. So I've spent a fair amount of loose change at Hobby Lobby on autumn garlands and even a grapevine pumpkin light. So what? My apartment is going to finally be cozy this fall. And I'm looking forward to that artificial tree I've had my eye on for the past five years. Also, amber is a great color for a novelty light bulb.

But I'm not quite finished with my salute to summer. There's a game I have, MVP Baseball 2004 for PS2, which I rarely ever play because I never quite got the hang of batting. But recently I discovered that you can set both teams to CPU and just sit it out. Yes, sometimes when I'm feeling withdrawal from not having cable and not being able to watch the game at a bar, I just turn on the video game, go to Scenario Editor and customize the exact game I want to watch, set the view settings to "Broadcast View," remove the extraneous video game cursor aids, and set the controller to CPU on both teams, and it's like watching a low-def broadcast with the commercials taken out. Obviously it's not as good as the real thing, but it's still oddly fun to watch a computer-run game, not having any control over the outcome. While PS2 graphics are not exactly life-like, the audio is. So it's good background noise, if nothing else.

Yes, I am more than ready to indulge in the change of seasons. This fall is going to be great because I am going to make it great. But first, this is the summer send-off listening list I've been working on while driving over the past couple weeks:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Klaus Badelt)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Hans Zimmer)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Hans Zimmer)
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Hans Zimmer)
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (John Williams)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (John Williams)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (John Williams)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (John Williams)
Tears of the Sun (Hans Zimmer and Steve Jablonsky)
Black Hawk Down (Hans Zimmer)
Final Fantasy VIII (Nobuo Uematsu)
Halo: Reach (Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori)