10 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 4 days.

“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among men the greatest asset I possess. The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.” – Charles Schwab

Only two weeks to go until we are into the “baby could come any day” zone.  Sure the baby could arrive any day already but the “official baby window” starts in about two to three weeks.  Once we are in that window the baby has a pretty good likelihood of arriving at any moment.  We should just be done moving when we enter “the window.”

The weather is much nicer today.  An actual autumn day.  I got up as Dominica was leaving to go to work so that I could get ready and head into the office.  I spent a little bit of time before leaving just checking my emails and getting Handbrake set up to run throughout the day.

On the ride in this morning I began reading the classic 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.  It is quite the classic.

I had a busy morning and was very excited when one o’clock rolled around and it was time to head to the gym.  I am feeling really good today.  I am really loving this whole gym thing.  I needed a locker lock and Dan needed to buy some goggles so we took a “quick” one and a half mile detour on foot up to Modell’s to pick up our supplies before heading south to the gym at Battery Park.

I got a really good workout today.  The gym was a little busier than I have seen it other days so I was “stuck” in the fast lane with multiple people swimming so that we had to do traditional circular swimming which makes it far less easy to take a break between laps.  That pushed me to do more than I might have done had I been there on my own.  It was a good workout and I am looking forward to Monday.  On Monday I am intending to officially join the gym.  This week was a free trial.

I spoke to Katie today.  She has open enrollment at the gym starting November 1st so she is planning to get a membership as well and will be swimming with me from time to time.  I am not sure if Dan is going to be able to join the club or not but he really likes it there and wants to use that has his health club.  Overall we were really impressed with the club all week.  The people there are great.

Lunch was a gigantic salad from a shop down near the gym.  Yummy.

No sooner was I back to the office and only halfway through my giant salad than I was grabbed to head down to the chocolate shop for hot chocolates to celebrate the chaning of the seasons.  I got quite the extensive walking done today.  This has to be a record day for me of late.

I worked at the office until seven thirty.  I had originally thought that I was going to be done rather early but one deployment took a really long time and I needed to stay to take care of it.  So it was pretty late when I started walking to the PATH station.

There are not too many more times that I need to make this walk to the PATH station.  There are only two more weeks of me living in New Jersey and in those two weeks I will only be taking the PATH about five more time.  That is weird to think about.

I got home around nine. Dominica is doing a ton of cooking tonight.  She made peanut butter and chocolate brownies, BBQ Tofu over chinese noodles and harvest apple salads with apple cider dressing.  Quite a delicious dinner.  (Don’t worry, the Chinese noodles were not actually made in China.)

We finished watching the second season of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air while we ate.  Then we turned on the Wii.  I wanted to race Dominica in Mario Kart Wii, but she did not have the energy.  So we played around with the Wii shopping system and bought the first episode of the new Strong Bad game (of Homestar Runner fame.)  We also found that one of my all time favourite Super Nintendo games, Secret of Mana, is now available for the Wii Virtual Console.  I am very excited about this.

The Mana game series is a gaiden, or side story, of Final Fantasy that originally appeared for the Game Boy under the name Final Fantasy Adventure (a.k.a. Seiken Densetsu) in 1991. I bought this original Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy when it first released and was one of my favourite Game Boy titles and one of the rare games that I actually played all of the way through.

I bought Secret of Mana in 1994 shortly after its release in North America.  It was one of the games that I took to college with me.  I did not have a television or computer at college that first year and all that I had was my Super Nintendo and a 13″ monitor on which to play it.  Secret of Mana was my favourite game at the time.  It was a really great game and I am very excited to be able to play it on the Virtual Console.

I am encouraged that Secret of Mana is now out for the VC.  This is the first, serious RPG to be released for the Virtual Console and I am hopeful that with enough interest from the gaming community that more will follow.  So far the only games available on the VC have been silly action games and puzzle games in which I am not interested.  There have been a few Nintendo 64 games that were interesting but very, very few.  The Super Nintendo, being one of the great classic RPG platforms along with the original Playstation, has an amazing catalogue of awesome titles that have the potential to be released but thus far have all but been ignored.  I am excited to potentially see games that were previously Japan-only releases such as Seiken Densetsu 3 or Mother 3 (a.k.a. EarthBound 2.)

I have to work early tomorrow morning.  Eight o’clock as usual.  Then, at noon, I have a dentist appointment and Dominica has one at one thirty.  Other than that, it is a packing day for us.

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.