overt.org

Nothing special going on this week. Just slogging through the second-to-last week of school for Leslie. I’ve never anticipated the end of someone else’s year so much. We all know why it will be nice for her to finish. In addition, I’m selfishly looking forward to getting up at 8 again (die, alarm, die).

I bought a membership at a nearby climbing gym, and I’ve been trying to go a few times a week. I’m getting my old strength back quickly, which is encouraging. When I started, it was clear I didn’t have the mettle I did when I left UT. I’ve also been trying to go yoga every week, which is fine, except that there is really only one place in the south bay I can go to. The teacher there, while good, is a little too hardcore. He told me last week that he doesn’t think I should come to the led classes anymore, that “it’s time to take the training wheels off.” What this means is that I’m supposed to come several times a week (6, ideally) in the morning from 6:30-8:00 to do ashtanga so I can “move my practice forward.” Now, I would love to be able to do ashtanga 6 times a week. I’m sure I’d be in great shape if I did. But I’m just not going to rise at 5:15 every morning to drive to Mountain View and pay $11 a class for the pleasure.

Some people see yoga as a part of a religion, or a way to find personal spirituality. To them, it’s less about exercise and more about some abstract concept like wholeness or meditation. Some even pay exorbitant amounts of money to go to india and be abused. They say that if you’re only thinking about the physical aspect, you’re not doing yoga. You’re just stretching. I’d agree to an extent. Except ashtanga is the most ass-kicking type of streching that I’ve even done in my life. It makes me feel looser, gives me more energy, and makes almost all of my aches and pains disappear. The trouble is, the people who often embrace the religious aspects of yoga the most are the teachers. So, as I get better and want to learn more stuff, I have to put up with more spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Can’t I just do second series without bowing to the lotus-feet of Patanjali?

I had a great instructor in Austin who wasn’t at all hung up about the spiritual stuff, but now I’m stymied by the new age hippies here in the Bay.

Leslie suggested that when we’re looking for a new apartment, we could try to find a place that has a hardwood floor so that I could do yoga at home (carpet is too squishy, bad for the wrists). Brilliant. And George will be here soon, to the east, so hopefully that might motivate me to find another place to do ashtanga.

Another great thing that happened recently: I discovered that KUT is now offering an MP3 stream of their station. So now I can listen to Eklektikos with John Aielli every morning at work. It’s helped me to miss Austin a little less.

One other thing. I have sworn off the Xbox for various rational and irrational reasons, but I’ve still been taunted by a couple of games that have come out for it: Knights of the Old Republic and Halo. So, I pieced together a Windows (shudder) computer from spare parts I had, and bought a copy of the game for PC. It is indeed great. It offers more lattitude in the way you solve problems than I’ve seen in an RPG in a long time. Example: yesterday I had to work logarithms to solve a puzzle. If I’d wanted to, I could have solved the same problem by interrogating a prisoner or simply blasting my way through a bunch of guards. Also, you have the macroscopic option of choosing the light side or the dark side of the force. I’ve gone the light side, mostly because I made the decision early before I realized that being dark wasn’t a disadvantage. But the two paths are rich enough that I could see myself playing through again as dark just to see how evil I could get. Also, the game is broad enough that I’ve never felt hung up or frustrated, and it’s full of optional quests and side games. I haven’t once felt the need to hit up gamefaqs.

T-minus 7 days of teaching left for Leslie.

On the advice of someone who should know, I’ve traveled back in time to 1998 to play Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Since I already played Zelda: Windwaker on the Gamecube, everything seemed very familiar. Too familiar, almost. It’s as though the Zelda: WW game is just a copy of Ocarina with revamped, toon-shaded graphics and new dungeons. Same controls, same items, same sound effects. But I haven’t finished Ocarina yet, so maybe the comparison won’t hold true. Of course, I wouldn’t want that to leave the impression that the game isn’t any good; it’s great. Just fewer polygons.

In other gaming news, I polished off Metroid Prime. I think I rushed through the last half of the game. Played about 40% in one weekend, which in honesty is too much Metroid. In any case, the game kicks ass and you must play it.

You might be thinking to yourself: “Bryan never talks about anything except video games anymore.” Well, you could say that. And you’d be right. This is because I have a job, and although it would be fun to turn this into a blog about the new stuff coming out of Apple, talking about that stuff would probably get me fired fairly rapidly. There is probably a server somewhere on the Infinite Loop campus silently trawling all known employee blogs for any sensitive information, hooked to a machine that prints out pink slips.

And, besides work, my life is a vast and unchanging sea of waking up, coming home, eating, and sleeping. Sure, I try to exercise and go out sometimes. But even the aberrations from my schedule seem so mundane that I have trouble posting them up here. Maybe that’s my problem: I have too high an editorial filter on myself.

So, in an effort to reverse this self-imposed chilling effect, I’ll revisit the highlights of my week so far. Monday is one of the two days every week that Leslie goes to her credentially classes for six hours. Because, after all, it’s not enough to just teach all day and spend every other waking hour planning for teaching and grading. So, I usually have the evenings to myself. I recently leveraged my member’s 20% discount at REI to buy a nice new pair of climbing shoes (Anasazi Velcros, if you must know). I hadn’t broken them in yet, and my old Moccasyms were badly in need of a resole. So, I decided to spend my evening at the local over-priced climbing gym. I dropped off my old shoes for resoling (they should be done in a couple of weeks) and headed over to the bouldering area to see what was left of my climbing skillz after all these months of disuse.

It turned out that I did pretty well, and I also managed to meet and hit it off with a couple of other climbers. I’d sort of forgotten the automatic friendship and community that goes along with climbing. Maybe if I return next week, and I see the same people again, I might establish something like a routine.

Tuesday evening was spent with Les catching up with the daily show using our new PVR bliss. Wednesday was soaked up with ripping netflix DVDs and ocarina. And that brings us to today, which I’m clearly spending working in my cube.

Tomorrow is Friday and payday. Bliss. I might be coming to Austin in a couple of weeks for these alleged graduation shenanigans. We’ll see.

well, life seems to have settled down in into it’s post-vacation routine again. I go to work. I come home, sleep. And so forth.

Nothing really notable has been going on. I’ve been playing a lot more of Metroid Prime. It took me a while to get into, but it proved very rewarding once I did. Once I finish I’ll probably post my impressions of the game overall.

Also, after three months of self-imposed abstention, I bought a toy. It’s a PVR (personal video recorder). The idea is that, while I really don’t watch that much television, the stuff I do like (mostly on comedy central) is only once or twice a week, and I don’t care enough to change what i’m doing so i can sit in front of a TV. Also, I’ve gotten to the point where even one commercial is enough to make me recoil from the TV room in horror. So we got this ReplayTV thing that is supposed to automatically figure out when all your favorite shows are on and record them for you, and when you play them back it automagically skips all the commercials. All this for $120. Sign me up.

Finally, I should mention the freakish weather of the last couple of days. It’s been in the EIGHTIES AND NINETIES. I know. It’s amazing. How quickly I forget my roots.