* You are viewing the archive for January, 2009
If you played the Auditorium demo before, the full version appears to be up now still isn’t up. Good stuff. I found another quick game, again courtesy of Penny Arcade, called Grow Tower that’s worth messing around with a bit. It’s not as deep as Auditorium (not that either of them would really be categorized as deep), but it’s good for 20-30 minutes.
[Update:] So, I was wrong. Auditorium is still just a demo at this point… My bad. 
As I mentioned before, I’ve been rolling through an embracing the winter series up here in D-town. I’ll be honest. It’s keeping me sane. Last weekend was my birthday weekend, and it was also MLK day on Monday. I love getting a 3 day weekend every year on my birthday. It pretty much rocks the house. For my 3 day weekend, I headed over to Chicago and then on to Madison for some skiing with Al. That meant about 5 hours in my car after work on Friday and then another 2.5 on Sat morning in the backseat of another car with 2 other dudes. And you know what? It was absolutely, 100%, totally worth it. It was hands down the best weekend of skiing in my life. Mostly, because I only fell about 3-4x per day. Moved up to doing a decent job on the black diamond as well. I was proud of the progress.
Moving on to last Tuesday, I went out for a belated birthday dinner. I went to a Brazilian steakhouse called Gaucho’s here in Northville. The fifteen cuts of the all you can eat meat are so delicious you just can’t stop eating. It’s pretty much the best meal you can ever have. My favorite meat was the Parmesan encrusted pork tenderloin, and I don’t even like pork that much.
My sister came up to visit on Wednesday and just left this afternoon. I had a pretty good time with her here. We went to see The Killers on Thursday night. I hadn’t been to a concert in several years, and I had forgotten how cool the atmosphere is. The Killers are probably one of my favorite bands as well, so it was pretty sweet.
Saturday night, we headed down to Ann Arbor to see a stand-up comic. He was pretty good, though I’d never heard of him. The star of the evening was the Ethiopian food though. It was my second all you can eat meal of the week, though this one was much, much healthier. They bring out a bunch of entrees and some bread-like stuff. You use the bread-like stuff to scoop up the entrees. Pretty sweet.
Yesterday was tobogganing. I thought it was going to be like sledding, but it was more like a slide, covered with ice. They put the toboggan on the slide, you jump on, they kick you off, and blam, you fly down the hill at 30mph. It’s pretty fun.
On Saturday, I played this game called Whirlyball with my outdoors group. It wasn’t outdoors though. It is played on bumper cars, 5 on 5. Each person has a scoop, and the object of the game is to get the ball in the goal. I just did a terrible job of explaining that so here’s a picture:
It snowed all day too. I was out running errands after Whirlyball, and every time I went to my car, there was a good inch of snow on it. So I decided to take advantage of it. I went snowshoeing on Sunday afternoon. In hindsight, there really wasn’t enough snow to justify the snowshoes. Although, if there were more of it, it would have been crazy hard. So I guess it’s a bit of a paradox. The snowshoes really didn’t keep on top of the snow all that well. I sunk about 80% into the the 8 inches. I did go through some drifts though, and the seemed pretty helpful there. They sunk in a lot, but they kept the snow out of your shoes, making the walk bearable.
On a side note, I think one of the keys to happiness is taking advantage of what the area has to offer. That’s why I’ve kicked off my Embrace the Winter series. So far, I’ve done cross country skiing, downhill skiing, and now snowshoeing. I still really want to go snowmobiling, and a guy at work today made a list of other stuff I need to try. It included ice fishing, pond hockey, and dog sledding. I think I’d rather be waterboared than go ice fishing, but dog sledding peaked my interest a bit.
In other news, I was utterly shocked that the Cardinals upset the Panthers last weekend. I guess it’s a bit redundant to say that though as pretty much everyone feels that way. I’m jumping on the Cardinals bandwagon now though. Like most people, I like a good underdog story, even if they are division rivals of the Rams.