February 3, 2009: Hanging with Guybrush Threepwood

I was pretty tired this morning and slept in pretty late.  There was no sunshine this morning so Oreo was not itching to get up either.  Instead of sun today we had a day of pretty steady snowfall.  It snowed all day long.

Dominica and Liesl ended up sleeping in until early in the afternoon.  I guess that they were really worn out.  My guess is that they were up quite a bit during the night and did not get very much sleep.

Work today was unbelievably slow.  I have no idea what happened but just about no one needed me to do anything today.  It was great.

Andy called in the middle of the morning and we spoke for several hours.  The day just flew by.

Dominica and I ended up not even starting to eat lunch until after two thirty in the afternoon.  Talk about getting a late jump on things.

This afternoon, while Liesl napped, Dominica was finally able to complete playing Paper Mario from the Nintendo 64 on the Wii Virtual Console.  She had to take a couple of runs at Bowser, the final boss in the game, before she was able to complete it.  When it was all said and done she was pretty happy with the game.  It took her between thirty-four and thirty-five hours of game time to complete the adventure.

Today was my email cleaning day.  I cleaned hundreds of emails knocking my inbox and sub-folders down to about half of their previous contents.  I also moved all of the attachments out of the mail and into local folders on my computer so that I am not using the email system as file storage.  Email systems are not meant for that type of use and are not efficient for it at all.

Katie was supposed to come over tonight for a late dinner but she got stuck at work late tonight and it was going to be incredibly late by the time that she would have made it up to Peekskill so we all decided that it would be better to reschedule for Thursday night instead.

After work we ate dinner and watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a movie that is available from Netflix On Demand.  FF7:AC is the direct sequel to the video game Final Fantasy VII from 1997.  I own(ed) Final Fantasy VII for the Sony Playstation back in 1997 or 1998 and played it while living in Greece with Josh.  It has been a really long time since I watched or played anything involving the FF7 plot.  Dominica has never played FF7 and was not familiar with the game very much.  So the movie was completely nonsensical to her.

After watching the movie we had to go back to Wikipedia and read the plot summaries from FF7 and FF7:AC to try to figure out what happened and who was who.  The FF7 storyline is so convoluted and bizarre that it is nearly impossible to keep track of what is going on.

After watching the movie I hooked up the Playstation 2 in the living room so that Dominica could play some of the games from our extensive PS2 collection which she has been wanting to play for a long time.  She popped in and started playing Escape from Monkey Island which she picked up just recently from Game Stop for just five dollars.  Dominica and I have both played Escape from Monkey Island on the PC before but it has been a long time and I know that I, for one, did not ever finish the game and I don’t think that Dominica ever did either.  We own the Monkey Island collection for the PC (Escape from Monkey Island is Monkey Island 4) but playing a game like this on the PS2 is so much more convenient and enjoyable that it makes sense to have it on the PS2.

Escape from Monkey Island plays a lot like a movie with full screen rendered video and fully voice-acted dialogue so it is absolutely perfect for one of us to play while the other one watches.  For me it is just like watching a movie.  Very entertaining.  Even though the game is quite old and we are playing it on a video game console that is almost a decade old it still looks good and is a ton of fun.  It is too bad that the original three games in the series aren’t available for any modern console.  They would have been perfect if ported to the original Playstation.  On the Secret of Monkey Island (MI1) was ever ported to any console and that was the SegaCD way back when.

Dad is thinking about coming down to Peekskill this weekend to see Liesl.  He hasn’t seen her in several weeks.  I’m sure that he will also be bringing a large load of additional stuff for the house with him as well.  That will give us several weeks of unpacking work to do.  Every load from dad’s house is full of unanticipated discoveries as we find all kinds of things that we have completely forgotten that we own.

Tomorrow morning I am working the early shift at the office so I have to be up very early in the morning.  So I am going to do my best to turn in before midnight tonight or else I will be very tired tomorrow.  Although what are the chances that I will really get to bed that early?  That never really happens.  Especially not when I am having an enjoyable time sitting on the loveseat with Oreo writing SGL and watching Dominica play her game.

I am very excited that we have the PS2 hooked back up and working now.  We have so many exciting games for the PS1 and PS2 that I am very much looking forward to playing.  We have quite the stack of classic PS2 titles that have been getting dusty and those two Final Fantasy games for the Playstation (PSX) that arrived yesterday too.  Far more exciting things for the PS2 than we have for the XBOX, PS3, Wii and 360 combined.

Since I was up late anyway I did some drive maintenance on one of my servers. I didn’t get a lot done but every little bit helps in the long run.  You got to keep working on this stuff every day.  My window for getting any amount of projects done has shrunk to nearly nothing these days so I have to take every opportunity that I get.

Dominica got really sleepy and decided to give up on her game a few minutes after midnight.  Even after getting up really late she is really tired today.  Hopefully she will be able to get some real sleep tonight.

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