We all went to Pastel’s at the Beach Shopping Center for a late breakfast (it was after noon.)  It was really busy and we had to wait maybe more than fifteen minutes to get a table.  Having five people and an infant makes it tough to get a seat in a busy restaurant.  This is Liesl’s third time going to a restaurant.  Her second was going to New City Diner last night.  She did better today.  She slept through all of dinner.  Last night she was awake and unhappy and I needed to feed her a bottle during dinner.

After our breakfast/lunch we made a pitstop by GameStop since it is right next door practically.  Very convenient.  Everyone had some video game shopping to do and I even had a GameStop gift card from Christmas to spend so I was looking for some deals.  I hunted around and found some used PS2 games for which I have been looking: Final Fantasy X-2, Dark Cloud (the original) and Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus.  That pretty much wraps up my attempt at the definitively awesome PS2 RPG collection.  There are a few stragglers which I might be interested in someday like Radiata Stories but if I never get another PS2 title then I will still be happy.  Now to just get a chance to play them.  Dominica picked up Escape from Monkey Island for the PS2 – a serious adventure game classic that we also own on the PC, I think.  Dominica got herself Blue Dragon for the 360 which I have really been wanting to play.  It was the first game that I really wanted to get the 360 to be able to play.  She got it used very inexpensively.  She also got Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for the Wii.  And finally I picked up Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for the PSP.  Lots of great games for us to play!  I am looking forward to getting a chance to really play them.

After GameStop, Art, Michael and I went back to Home Depot for a quick run just to get a few small items.  That didn’t take too long.

Once we got back to the house it was back to the basement where Art worked for several hours getting the new electrical outlet in place next to the cable outlet that he had rewired last night.  Then he added the first four runs of CAT6 so that Dominica’s desk, including our Vonage phone, were back online.  Now we are functional again after the new wiring has been put in place.  There was not nearly enough time to do any more work beyond that or else the Ralstons would not be able to get back home to York tonight.  I will be doing the next block of CAT6 wiring on my own.  The next task is getting the wires run that will go to my desk.  Right now I am just using dangling patch cables.

I forgot to mention several things yesterday.  One was that Art fixed the constantly flowing toilet in the guest bathroom upstairs and taught me how to fix them myself.  I then fixed the toilet in the master bath upstairs.  That is going to save us a fortune on our water bill!  Those things were just pouring water every moment that they we have lived in this house.  Also, the new Onkyo receiver for the living room arrived although I did not get a chance to get it set up yesterday.  I also got another Ruby on Rails book from Amazon.

The Ralstons took off at five in the evening to head for home.  Their trip should take less than six hours if all goes well.

After the Ralstons left I hooked up the Onkyo receiver in the living room.  Now that we have the receiver in place we are able to hook up the XBOX 360, PS3 and the AppleTV all via HDMI and once I find all of the cables the Wii will be hooked up as well and upconverted to the HDMI digital output.

Dominica spent the evening playing Blue Dragon on the XBOX 360.  That meant that Liesl was my responsibility for the evening.  Blue Dragon is very cool.  It is from the creators of CronoTrigger, one of my all time favourite games.  The graphics and sound are very good and the storyline is engaging and extremely reminiscent to the Final Fantasy series.  I am enjoying watching the game for a chance rather than being the person playing.  Dominica gets to play all of the grinding and character advancement portions and then I get to watch the plot portions like a long movie.  A very long movie when you consider that it takes three DVDs to hold this game!

I have had to start wearing earplugs because of the eardrum damage to my left ear.  My ear drum ruptured two years ago on a flight to Florida and it has never healed.  It improved for a long time but then I get into situations where there is so much noise that it sets it back to quite some degree.  Now with Liesl I have to be very careful as she will often scream right in my ear and do real damage to my ear.  Tonight she really got me and left me barely able to hear out of that ear and with pain down into my jaw.  I have had to just accept the fact that I cannot leave my ear unprotected much of the time and I have to keep an ear plug in most of the time.  There is no getting around it.

We have no plans tomorrow and will be sleeping in as much as possible.  We are doing nothing but relaxing around the house.

The Ralstons got home at twenty until eleven.  Not bad for such a long trip.  They are very good about taking really fast rest stops.  Each rest stop for us takes twenty minutes at best and easily can go way over an hour.

The mailbox keys have still not been found.  We are pretty sure that we are just going to have to have the mailbox lock replaced by the post office. 

And today’s SGL award goes to: Andrew T. West for the proper use of the word “verily” in a sentence not involving sheep, angels, shepherds or choirs.

Today was busy at work but nothing like Friday. That was awful. Today was just normal busy. But busy enough to keep me tied to my workstation all day long.

Our big excitement today is the expected delivery of our new futon. For some reason it managed to pass the chair and is arriving first even though it was ordered several days later.

I had to make a run out to the post office today. I had a bunch of stuff to mail. The mail… is it really true that we still need the mail? Can’t we do without it at this point? When do we need it? For birthday cards? That isn’t a good enough reason. To mail checks to people? If they can’t use PayPal or some other simple, standard, cheap, immediate form of payment then they really don’t care enough about the money to justify bothering to send it to them. For magazines? Yes, deforestation is a great reason for keeping the post around. So that tons of big companies that I don’t like can pay some guy to deliver their garbage (you all know what I mean) and put it into our mailboxes instead of into a landfill so that we have to deal with it instead of them?

I had to deal with my first ever major issue with an eBay seller today. I had one once that sold me a $6 video game and never sent it to me and just took off with the money. But it was $6. This time it was $210 and a software pirate. Not as bad as the time that Andy got hit for over $1,000 from an online pirate but still pretty bad. Luckily eBay and PayPal have some major mechanism for dealing with this stuff so I am confident that the issue will be resolved quickly.

Dominica got home with Oreo and we immediately ran out to Subway to grab dinner. It was a quick bite and then we walked down to GameStop to do some Christmas shopping. We are loving have a nice GameStop so close. It is hard to believe that such a nice shop can exist on that corner. If anything is a sign of the times changing in Newark it is that store surviving there. Dominica found two games for the girls for Christmas that she has not been able to find anywhere else. We also picked up, used, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for ourselves as well as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door so that Dominica can go straight on to that after finishing the original Paper Mario for the N64.

On the way home we stopped at Starbucks and got ourselves hot chocolate and gingerbread scones. For some reason, even though we live just one block from a Starbucks, we have only ever been there a few times in the more than a year that we have lived here. This was, in fact, Dominica’s first time into that Starbucks and no more than my third! But perhaps we will be there more often now. Walking to GameStop to do some shopping and stopping off for coffee or other treats is so very handy.

After dinner we came back to the apartment and I did some work online and aided Dominica as she worked on assembling our new loveseat that arrived today from Target and Amazon (some arrangement that I am not clear about.) It wasn’t too bad to put together and in no time it was assembled and set up in our living room. It is a deep chocolate brown simple affair. We have it set between the east facing windows as the center piece of what is now, more or less, a real living room.

We did some shopping on Amazon tonight for Chessex game dice.  We don’t have any here at all and it has become a problem.

And today I leave you with this.

While I was at GameStop, though, I did pick up some needed supplies like the Classic Controller for the Wii which allows us to play games that are downloaded via the Wii’s Virtual Console (you can store them onto an SD memory card.) The games are normally re-releases of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis / MegaDrive, Neo Geo or TurboGrafx 16 games. I think that they need to figure out how to emulate the Sega Saturn. That would probably have a few games (Panzer Dragoon, anyone?) that people would really be willing to shell out for. Perhaps the games are too large or the Wii doesn’t have the power to emulate the Saturn. I also think that they should get it to emulate the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems. Those games are small and I bet that there are many people who would be happy to be able to play some of their favourite games on the big screen for a change. My plan is to get Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 via the Virtual Console to try out the system. This is a handy list of all games available for the virtual console.

I also picked up a third party wireless GameCube controller to use with the Wii. The biggest draw, for me, in getting the Wii is that it is able to play Nintendo GameCube games. Since I never owned a GameCube I am now able to go and get all of the old GC games used very inexpensively and have a nice collection of just the best games after all of the wheat has been separated from the chaff after years of people playing these games. So in addition to the wireless controller I picked up three games for the system that Dominica will be very happy with: Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventure and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She pretty much has the definitive Zelda collection sans the old Game Boy titles in the series. We own the GBA remakes of the original three titles (Z1 and Z2 from the NES and Z3 from the SNES), all of the N64 titles (the collector’s editions even), all of the GBA original titles, all of the GC titles (as of today) and the one Wii title. There is one new game for the DS that is just now out that she does not have yet.

Dominica and I made some Christmas plans today. The plan is that we are going to leave New Jersey on December 21st, that is Friday, after work and drive up to Frankfort and spend the night at Dominica’s parents’ house. In the morning they will take Oreo by car and drive with him to Houston, Texas. Hopefully that long of a trip with Dexter panicking will not teach Oreo to worry about car travel. Then Min and I will go to my dad’s house that Saturday morning and stay there until Christmas morning.

At six in the morning on Christmas day Dominica and I are flying out of Rochester to go to Houston to meet everyone there for Christmas. I will be working both from “home” and from the Houston office while we are down there. It will give me a chance to scope out the Houston facility. We will be in Houston all week and will come back the weekend after Christmas. Dominica will ride back with her parents and Oreo and I will most likely fly back to Newark but might ride back with them as well. While in Houston I will be working from Williams Tower – the fourth tallest building in the state of Texas and the fourth tallest in Houston and the tallest outside of downtown (Williams Tower is in the heart of uptown.)

I ordered my textbook for my class from Amazon today. It turns out that one of my two remaining textbooks for my class is available online through the university so I only need to buy one of the four since I already own the other two (and have read them both in the bast nine months.) I overnighted the textbook so that I can work on my homework this weekend easily. I can’t be falling behind or I will never catch up again.

My day was pretty busy today. Lot’s of work rolling in all day long. I can never decide if I should be coming into the office to “be in the office” or staying home to actually get work done.

Tomorrow, after work, we are planning on having a Dungeons & Dragons game at our apartment but, at the moment, we have no managed to secure a dungeon master yet nor do Dominica and I even have so much as dice to play with so we are in pretty rough shape. We are waiting to see how this plays out. Tomorrow night is rather up in the air at the moment.

The chair that Dominica ordered from Target had a matching love seat that is currently on sale so we needed to make a decision about it before we got the chair. We decided to just bite the bullet and get the loveseat too. So now we are going to be going from a rather spartan living room to a rather cozy one with a lot of seating locations. But no television to watch yet so just a lot of seating. Hopefully we can address that after Christmas spending is over or when the year end budget is a little more clear. Getting the chair and loveseat didn’t help things any.

After work Dominica took Oreo to the vet for his regular checkup. So far he is looking to be pretty healthy. They love him at the vet. He is everyone’s favourite little boy.

I got back to Newark around seven and walked over to GameStop on my way home (it isn’t really on the way home) and found out that Wiis had come in this morning just ten or fifteen minutes after I had left there! No Wii love for us I guess. I did pick up a memory card for the GameCube that I had forgotten about this morning and also got Skies of Arcadia Legends and Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube used.

I also walked over to the comic book shop on Broad in the hopes that they would carry game dice but neither do they appear to carry them nor were they open.  It was a lot of walking for me this evening.

I got home and ordered in pizza from Nino’s for dinner.  Dominica was home just minutes after me.  She had done some shopping and had not found any dice either but had, finally, managed to find a ten foot long white grounded extension cord.

Dinner arrived and we hooked up the GameCube stuff and started playing Skies of Arcadia Legends.  We have the original Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast but this very has the wireless controller, no disk swapping and supposedly better graphics.  We only got about thirty minutes into the game tonight though but so far it looks pretty good.

Ryan came over to test out some of his stereo equipment that he was having problems with.  His “new” stereo from eBay is having issues and he wanted to see how ours was working to verify which piece of equipment is not functioning correctly.

After Ryan left we tried using the Wii Virtual Console and downloaded the Nintendo 64 version of Paper Mario.  Neither of us ever player this game back when the N64 was our main systems (we each independently had the Nintendo 64 back in the day.)  Dominica had never even heard of it.  We fired it up and it played well.  The graphics are very impressive for the N64.  This must have been quite the game in its day.  It was released in the United States in early 2001.

We were tired and were off to sleep a little earlier than usual.