Today was quite busy again.  And the rain has returned after having just a single day off.

Dominica and I decided to go out and get some lunch today.  So we went out to Pastel’s and got omelets.  They were yummy.  Liesl sat in a high chair at the table beside me and clearly had a look about her like she felt that she was being a big girl and was very proud to be sitting at the table instead of sitting in her car seat.  She was very happy all through the meal and was very engaging with everyone who passed by.

After lunch we ran out to Yorktown Heights to hit Clemente Cleaners to drop off our dry cleaning and to talk to their tailor about my newest suit.  The sleeves on my suit are far too long.  The tailor thinks that she can have my suit fixed by Friday which is important because I need it for the wedding this weekend.  I am having the sleeves fixed, a button moved and buttons added to my suit pants so that I can use suspenders instead of a belt.  Nothing from Casual XL Male has suspenders buttons in it which is really frustrating that a shop dedicated to larger sized men doesn’t accommodate the most obvious things that they would need.

Back to work once the errands were done.  Oreo and I stayed home while Dominica and Liesl went back to head to the post office, Kohl’s and some other shopping.  She had a bit of shopping that she had wanted to do so that worked out well.

The new drives for the Proliant DL185 G5 arrived today and I had a chance to finally get that server built and tested out.  I had thought that those drives would not be arriving until the end of the week and that I might not have enough time to get the server put together before we had to leave for the weekend so this was a real blessing.

I had a lot of work to do today and ended up working solidly until eleven thirty at night.  Normally I like to be in bed by ten thirty but there was just far too much to do.  I have been really wanting to play a video game for days and have not had the chance at all.  So tonight I decided that I was just going to do it anyway.  So at eleven thirty I popped in Oblivion on the PS3 and started playing.

Dominica stayed up with me and read a book on her Amazon Kindle while I played Oblivion.  I had a really good time.  I really missed having this downtime.  I played for four hours!

When I started playing I found that my last saved game was from February 4th!!  Four and a half months since I have been able to play anything at all.  Crazy.

In my four hours I managed to complete one entire new quest that was triggered right as I started playing (Lifting the Vale) which was pretty fun and I also completed one quest that had begun just before I had last saved the game (Spies).  I also raised my character from level five to level seven.  It was very good progress for one night of gaming.  Too bad I won’t get a chance to play again for a really long time.

It was three thirty in the morning when we finally headed up to bed.  Ramona is coming down to visit us tomorrow sometime in the morning.  She is expecting to arrive around noon or so.

First, let me attempt to define Oblivion is terms that most gamers can understand.  In today’s video game marketplace the concepts of adventure, RPG, jRPG (Japanese RPG – interactive fiction with RPG elements) and first person shooters (FPS) are beginning to merge in many instances and Oblivion is one of these examples.  Oblivion is an action traditional RPG.  It is action (i.e. real time and not turn based) but is a true RPG unlike Diablo or Dungeon Siege which are action games with some RPG elements added.  Oblivion’s goal is its role playing whereas Dungeon Siege’s goal is its action.  In Oblivion most of the action can simply be avoided if the player so wishes.  It is a traditional RPG in that the player maker character decisions and significantly affects gameplay.  The game is not linear and interactive fiction like a jRPG (a la Final Fantasy.)  Oblivion is obviously a rendered, three-dimensional game that would appear, in many ways, like a first person shooter but with RPG goals rather than action goals.  And, of course, there are some amount of puzzles built into the game bringing in adventure characteristics.  It is redundant to mention but Oblivion is a sandbox game (like Grand Theft Auto III) in that you can freely move around and go wherever you like.  This is a key tenent of the RPG genre but one that people not used to true RPGs are often surprised by.  In many ways the newer members of the GTA series are closer to RPG and Adventure games than to any other genre.  It takes a lot to define a game these days.

The original Oblivion game is often said to be one to two hundred hours of gameplay.  Being an open-ended RPG there is no good means of determining exactly what constitutes being “done” with the game so measurements vary dramatically.  Completing the core storyline can be done quickly while numerous sidequests, not all available to all players based on in-game decisions, make up the bulk of the storyline portion of the game, and then there is the exploring that needs to be done!  The Shivering Isles expansion adds, what is said to be, another thirty hours of main quests not including side quests and exploration time which is mount to a total, likely, of fifty or more hours.  The Knights of the Nine expansion is said, according to Guide2Games, to add at least another six hours of content again.  In total, I am guessing that I have around two hundred and fifty or more hours of gaming to which to look forward in the world of Oblivion.

Oblivion first released in 2006 so it is hardly a new game, but even now in early 2009 Oblivion still stands as the finest example of traditional role playing games on the market.  The graphics are amazing, the game is immense, the voice acting is suppurb and the score is just amazing.

I put in about twenty hours at this point and have seen a lot of the game including a good chunk of the main storyline, several side quests and lots of world exploration.  The main storyline grabs you right as the game begins and thrusts you right into the action.  It does not take too long before you are given the flexibility to set off on your own to explore the world as you would like which may include racing along to fulfill the main quest as quickly as possible or ignoring it completely.  Oblivion is full of options.

Oblivion, like the other Elder Scrolls titles, is an action RPG and is not a console RPG (aka a Japanese RPG.)  The gameplay is very non-linear and events happen as you interact with the world around you.  Your own style of gameplay will alter the gaming experience is many ways and everyone’s game is very unique.

If you have played Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor, one of the first things that you will notice is that the world is smaller and very densley populated with creatures, ruins, cities, dungeons, etc.  It is so densley populated that it feels very, very awkward.  When the Oblivion gates start opening you might notice them popping up several hundred yards away from each other!  While Oblivion is very large it does not have the expansive space feel that you would expect from a game of this type and makes you feel more confined than Morrowind did.  The close proximity of people and places makes it feel much more realistic as you stumble from one “major ruins” to another every few seconds.  Everything is so close that people in the major cities should be able to hear people talking in “long lost ruins” as well as the worshipers at the secret woodland altars.

One of the great things about Oblivion is that everything is voice acted.  Every character that you meet talks to you.  This benefit is tempered by a lack of recorded dialoge and a paucity of voice actors.  It is very obvious very early on in the game that even main characters are often voiced by the same few voice actors which takes away from the game and the range of recorded dialogues is very limited.  You will tire of speaking with the locals very quickly except for those involved in the main quests.

I am disappointed in the world “integrity” within the game.  By this I mean that events or character interactions in one place don’t always seem consistent.  For example, there is a woman in a chapel that I rescued from the horde of evil things attacking her.  Her dialogue with me did not change from the time that I first discovered her and she didn’t know who I was through the time that I rescued her until the time that she went to the camp away from town for safety after I had defeated the evil creatures destroying her town.  The game would have been a lot more interesting if her character was made aware of the fact that we knew each other and that I had saved her, that she had changed locations or that I would be asking different questions of her.  Characters seem to react to basic “world” level stimulous rather than to direct character interactions such as is seen in the Fable series.

Overall the initial impression of Oblivion is that it is gorgeous, sounds great, is expansive and exciting.  Oblivion is consistently rated as one of the top RPGs of all time and an instant classic.  It has held its ground for two years, at this point, as the definitive RPG for the PC over the last three years and of the PS3 and XBOX 360 consoles.  Impressive to say the least.  I am excited to delve into the story, explore the sidequests, take in the grand vistas and see what all this game and its expansion sets have to offer.

The time changed this morning which was great.  It was well after the new nine when we got up this morning.  Both of us were still really tired.  I have a feeling that that isn’t going to change for a very, very long time.

I started the day playing some Oblivion which I am liking more and more as I get used to it.  It is a really neat game.  I hope that I manage to keep playing it for a while.  Somehow I doubt that I will have much time for it.  Right now I am still at the very beginning of the game and have just set foot through the first Oblivion Gate.

Dominica did a wonderful job getting the kitchen organized today.  There are just two food boxes left.  I got the basement office set up.  Not completely but enough to get us back to basic functionality.  We are back on wireless, Dominica’s laptop is up and running and the telephone is on again so we are able to make and receive telephone calls.  With the wireless up and running the PS3 is now online and updated as well.

Dominica played her new game, Folklore, on the PS3 today.  This is the very first that she has used the system herself at all.  She likes the game, which is good because it is the only one that she has.  I might even try playing it at some point.  She will have a lot more time to play the PS3 soon once she is home all of the time.

We downloaded the playable demo of Eternal Sonata for the PS3.  Wow are those some amazing graphics.  I don’t like the fact that the game is a “linear path” that you take to walk through the game but I really like the graphics, score (it is all Frederick Chopin), battle system and overall feel of the game.  I definitely want to play it.  I would much prefer if it had the open feel of Dragon Quest VIII rather than the “press a button to advance the dialogue” feel like Final Fantasy VII.

I had a pretty busy day working out of the basement.  I had several small items come up at the office that needed my attention and, as it is Sunday, I had to spend a lot of time working on stuff for my class at RIT.  There is no way to avoid that on Sundays.  This is the last Sunday of my class.  The class ends on Friday at midnight.  My final is due then so I am going to be very, very busy this week working to get that completed.

Dominica watched several episodes of Bones on DVD while I worked.  She may even have finished the disc.  Once she is done with that then Netflix can begin to send up BluRays.  Sweet.

I got PlayOn hooked up and working from Dominica’s laptop to the PS3.  It was really easy to set up and it started working right away.  We did experience some problems with it involving playback continuity but I am thinking that those problems are very likely related to the way in which we are using the system with the wireless.  Once we have all of the computers switched over to wired, Gigabit Ethernet and have the PlayOn doing its local caching off of faster, desktop speed hard drive(s) then it will, I am guessing, work flawlessly.  The playback was choppy (leading me to believe that the issue was our network and not our Internet connection) the actual image and sound quality were amazing.

We watched two episodes of The Family Guy and they looked just as good or better than regular television.  That was through Hulu.  We don’t have Netflix working yet but will soon.  Hulu is the only thing working thus far but it sure is enough to make the software well worth it.  Very cool.  Mostly we will be watching Netflix as we pay to have our content be commercial free.  But when things are Hulu only that’s fine too.  The commercials are minimal.

This evening, when I took Oreo out for his late night walk, we had a surprise run in with a skunk.  I was holding Oreo’s leash in one hand and his full poop bag in the other and fumbling with the gate to the trash area up the hill from our house.  When the gate opened he was right there, just a few feet from us.  He was pretty surprised to see us as well but was trapped inside the gated area with nowhere to run to get away from us.  He immediately turned to spray us but luckily Oreo came with me as I backed away and we were able to get out of his threatened zone and he cautiously snuck out and ran down to the pond to get away from us.  Boy was that close.  Closest that I have ever been to a skunk that I could see like that.  I was sure that we were done for.

Katie said that she found gas in southern New Jersey today for $2.01!  That is amazing.  We are going to be seeing gas below the $2 mark this week almost for sure.  Who would have thought?

Dominica went to bed at nine thirty.  She has to be up extremely early tomorrow because her office has a really busy day planned and she is supposed to be in very early to help out.  Yes, she is going to work tomorrow and, we expect, Tuesday.  To help her out tomorrow I am staying home with Oreo so that she does not have to drive Oreo to daycare which takes at least another half an hour.  She also does not need to drop me at the train station which takes easily five to ten minutes.

So I am home tomorrow working a normal day.  My swim schedule for the week is going to be all messed up again.  At least I will still be in the city most of the week to get to the pool.  Just not on my usual days.  My life does not allow for schedules at the best of times.  I suppose that that makes me more able to adapt to changing schedules since that is just the norm for me.  I do not rely upon set schedules throughout my life.

My goal for tomorrow is to get as much of my final done as possible (I got my feedback tonight for the portion that I have done so far and I was told that I am on the right track, about which I was quite concerned, so tomorrow I can really hit it.)  Then, as time allows, to get the basement office assembled as much as possible.  The hardest part is figuring out how to deal with some of the temporary cabling issues and finding parts that are packed away never to be seen again like Dominica’s laptop’s basestation which would be very handy right about now.

Dominica is officially done with her scheduled job and is now going to work on a day-by-day basis (dato-a-dato) until she is no longer able to work because of the baby.  Our expectation is that she is going to manage two more days in the office, Monday and Tuesday, before she won’t be able to drive in any more.  She is off Wednesday through Friday because of her bereavement days so by the time that she would be driving back down to Totowa another five days will have passed and that is a lot of time this late in the pregnancy.  We are into the “baby any day” zone at this point.

I managed to get back to Peekskill at 9:23 on the first off-peak train from Manhattan.  It took a while to fight by way through Grand Central Terminal as thousands of halloweenies were descending upon the city as I was heading out.  It was early enough that the family was able to wait for me to get back to Peekskill before eating dinner.  They picked me up at the Peekskill train station (which, by the way, our GPS unit does not list as even existing!) and we drove out to the New City Diner for dinner.  It is very handy that such a versatile restaurant is so near to our home.

After dinner we got back and it was pretty late so we pretty much just went straight to bed.  We are all really exhausted from this week.  Dad and aunt Sharon completed all of the painting that needed to be done in the nursery, master bedroom and the master bathroom which involved even pulling the medicine cabinet off of the wall to get the paint deep into the corner between it and the main mirror.  It was a huge amount of work.  Unfortuantely I have only been at home in Peekskill late at night and there are very few lights in the house so far and thus it has been so dark that I can barely tell what colour anything is.

Dominica and I slept in this morning until almost nine.  We are really exhausted after a very long and busy two weeks.  Now we need to do a little catch up on that so that we can remain functional.  There is a whole lot of “busy” coming up on us very quickly.

We had thought about doing breakfast with dad and aunt Sharon this morning but there was so little time before we all had to leave that we decided against it.  So we just visited for a little while before Dominica and I had to get ready to go to her ultrasound appointment which was at ten thirty.  We have an “emergency” ultrasound today because there was some fear that the baby was oblique and not completely head-down so today we are getting confirmation on the baby’s position.  If the baby is oblique it will raise the chances of having a Caesarean section dramatically.

Dominica and I had to leave for the hospital at a quarter after ten.  Dad and aunt Sharon were just loading up the car to head out themselves.  Just as we were leaving Dominica discovered that her referral paperwork was missing from the car so we searched the car and house in a panic and then decided that our best bet was to run downtown and get new papers issued from the clinic.

It was a bit of a panic but the clinic got us copies of the paperwork and we were up to the hospital by a quarter till eleven.  Late but they took us anyway.

The ultrasound went well.  The baby is actually head-down and not oblique so we are still in the clear for avoiding a Caesarean section.  Little baby Miller is currently estimated to be seven pounds three ounces although there is some growing left to be done and an ultrasound-based weight measurement has a very wide margin of error.

After the ultrasound we got a quick tour of the birthing department at the hospital.  It is very nice and I think that we both feel better after having had a chance to see the facilities.  They are very small and it is a very personal facility.  They are only really designed to handle about five new babies at a time which means that they only receive one or two per day, I think.  When we are there Dominica will have a private room and the new baby will be able to stay in the room with her as long as nothing goes wrong.  I am able to stay there twenty-four per day as well.  Visiting hours for the rest of you are from noon until eight in the evening.

After the tour we went down to the Beach Shopping Center near to the hospital and checked out the Stop and Shop which is our local supermarket.  This is our very first time buying groceries or any type of commodity supply while in Peekskill.  We really liked the market.  It is a lot like a well-lit Wegmans.  We aren’t sure but it may be open twenty-four hours per day as well.  We will figure that out.  It is very close to the house.

We picked up a copy of Hudson Valley Magazine today.  We are Hudson Valleyers now; time to get to know the lay of the land.  It was the “best of” issue with all of the best restaurants and stuff from around the region which runs from Yonkers to Albany.  It is a very large part of the state with a lot of really interesting communities.  We are also on the lookout for Westchester Magazine.  We’ve been looking for it but have no idea who might sell it.  No one appears to be selling it anywhere.

After shopping we came home and worked on cleaning and unpacking for a little while.  Then I made lunch which was vegetarian BLTs with thick sliced Stop and Shop Bakery sesame bread, Roma tomatoes, Boston Bibb lettuce and mayo with Morningstar Vegetarian Bacon.  They were really delicious.  We also got a Stop and Shop Bakery lemon crunch half-pie for dessert.

I got the Playstation 3 hooked up today.  It is sitting on our wire-frame printer stand and hooked to the television which is sitting on the floor leaning against the wall.  Not the best setup but we wanted to be able to use the system.  Immediately Dominica discovered why I have been talking about getting a larger screen very soon.  The current screen is absolutely miniscule in our large living room.  We have to move the furniture closer just to be able to see it.  We are used to it being in our bedroom where it was right at the foot of our bed.  It wasn’t large there but it was adequate.  In the living room though, it looks awkwardly small in addition to being hard to see.

I got the PS3 running and played a little bit of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which I have been looking forward to playing for about three years now, it seems.  Jeremy had Elder Scrolls III on the PC back when I still lived in Geneseo and I bought it for my own PC when I was living in North Brunswick by myself in early 2006.  I liked Elder Scrolls III and was looking forward to the updated and larger sequel but just never had the time or the platform on which to play it.  It is a really neat, sandbox style traditional RPG with some action and amazing graphics and sound.  According to many sources that I have read the PS3 version of the game is the very best one to play as it came out later and had more time to be perfected before being released.

Oreo was sleeping innocently by the back door (glass sliding doors) this afternoon when the neighbour’s cat, Bella, jumped on over to our deck and came right up to Oreo at the glass and scared the crap out of him.  Oreo ran into the kitchen to get Dominica to come help him and then ran back to the window and attempted to attack Bella through the glass!  The two of them, I was told, were really going at it both being extra brave with the solid glass between them.  It was quite entertaining.  I was upstairs and was not aware that this was going on.  Very funny.

Because of the Oreo/Bella display we got a chance to visit with the neighbours a little.  They were pretty shocked to find their cat launching herself over onto our deck!  I don’t think that they were as surprised as Oreo.  He is not a cat loving dog.  He is terrified of cats.  He was on high alert for a long time and exhausted himself doing house patrols for the rest of the afternoon making sure that no other rogue cats were invading his domain.

After we were tired of doing things around the house, which didn’t take long after our long week, we decided to just go out and do some exploring and shopping and to pick up, if possible, something on BluRay to watch on our new BluRay player.  Dominica has Heroes Season Two but I have not completed the first season yet so we can’t watch that together until I do.   I have a few episodes left to go but each one is an hour and they are on the AppleTV so there will be no watching that until the AppleTV is hooked up.

We went exploring looking for Cortlandt Center which dad had found on a map and thought must be close to us, but we were not sure where it was.  It turns out that Cortlandt Center is right around the corner.  We just head over to Main Street and head east for a very short distance and there are a ton of shops that we will use all of the time including a good-sized Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Dunkit Donuts, Applebee’s and much more.

We shopped at Walmart and picked up some basic house supplies and Shrek the Third on BluRay.  It was inexpensive and we assumed that a CG Dreamworks movie from the Shrek franchise would at least show off the BD capabilities and be mildly entertaining.  Neither of us had seen this latest Shrek movie (and in actuality we were not really clear on its existance – we are dramatically out of the mainstream media world at this point.)

We decided to get dinner out since we were someplace new rather than going home to eat even though there is food in the fridge.  We will have that tomorrow.  We tried out the Piazza Roma that is in the Cortlandt Center plaza.  It was very good.  I had coconut crusted sea bass over mangoes which was excellent.  Min had the pasta trevi and really liked that as well.  The service was a bit slow but there was a roast (not the pig kind, the jabbing kind) going on that had quite a crowd and we think that that was what was affecting the staff.  We will definitely be trying them again down the road.

We got back home and discovered, at ten thirty at night, that Walmart had not removed their security packaging from the BluRay that we had bought.  It is not the kind of thing that you can just remove and if you do it sets of a piercing alarm which you cannot turn off.  I know this because I know someone who had this exact thing happen to them with CAT5 cables and ended up with two alarms going off for hours and they had to bury the stupid things in a dumpster to get them to not be overpoweringly loud.  So I was not about to set off one of those in our new home with the windows open!

I drove back to Walmart as quickly as I could.  Luckily they didn’t close until eleven tonight and I got back there at a quarter till.  I got right in to customer service but ended up having to wait there for over twenty minutes while the electronics department flatly refused to help them at all.  In fact, the customer service manager also refused to respond when needed for other customers and the store manager never reacted at all.  Twenty minutes I stood there waiting for Walmart to give me a product for which they had happily taken my money just two hours earlier.  I couldn’t believe that little they were willing to help me.  The poor customer service kids were stuck there without any way to get anything done.

Not one single person who arrived after me even got into customer service.  There was a line the entire time and all of those people ended up just leaving without getting any resolutions to their problems at all.  Unbelievable.  I only got service because I wasn’t willing to leave and had already purchased the product.  I was there after the store closed.  Completely ridiculous.

I got back home and we watched Shrek the Third which was mildly entertaining, as we had guessed.  Not a great movie and definitely just playing off of the franchise but a decent film and definitely one that looked great on the BD player.  We are very glad that we now have BD capability.  It has solved a lot of problems.  Our Netflix queue should begin sending us BD films later this week too, which will be nice.

It was a pretty late night but we were energized just being in our new home.  There is very visible progress on the unpacking as well.  The office is still not set up and we are just doing without today.  That is a project for tomorrow as there is much that I need to do down in the office anyway.  It cannot be delayed any further.

We will be home tomorrow.  No plans to go anywhere at all.  Unpacking, homework, etc.