Mom Went Home!

Of course, now she is convinced that she'll be selling her house in the middle of the desert for much more than she paid for it and buying a home on a lake nearby for pennies on the dollar. The thought she'd blow through her entire retirement doesn't seem to faze her much. I told her though to get plenty of land where I could park my RV down there over the summer... and to make sure that they had a boat dock... and a pony.

It is finally raining today here in Alabama. For those of you under a rock, north Alabama is suffering a historic drought. The cotton crop was supposed to bloom last week and it's nothing but stunted growth. Corn ain't doing much better. Top that off with the entire peach crop being destroyed by a Spring hard freeze and some farmers are about to jump off their silos. This and Scottie Pippen gets $298K in farming subsidies for not planting stuff. We have some family friends who run a cotton gin around here and they are sweating serious bullets this year. Of course, they had an extremely good year a couple years back and bought two brand new IROCS for their +20 year old children still living with them (both of which were totaled without insurance in less than 6 months) and put in a new pool. Maybe they've planned for this.

To gaming, I pulled down the demo for Shadowrun. It's pretty fun so far against bots but I can't connect to a public game for the life of me. It'll bounce back and forth between "connecting" and "Searching" for 10 minutes them bounce back out to the main screen. Single player looks interesting on it but it's locked up on the demo. I'll probably see about renting it this weekend.

For father's day my kids watched me pull out an old favorite, Oblivion, and play it almost all day (with small breaks for Madden and GHII). I started a new assassin character and I'm using poisons for the first time. I never knew those things could be so effective! I love to see an arrow hit a target then watch the health bar gradually reduce to zero after the initial hit. Don't worry... i sent the kids out whenever I got to places with hanging cadavers. I never finished this game's main story line and now I'm hooked again. Now if I can just get the wife of the big TV at night.  We spent the last 4 weekends camping, going to dance recitals and on the river so parking my fat butt in front of the TV playing video games for a day was a welcome reprieve. 

I've also been playing a lot of Command and Conquer 3 on multiplayer which has been a blast. I have a group of 4 to 5 people I play with nightly though usually only 1 or 2 are on at any one time. Several are getting to old for gaming or just like going to sleep at the same time as my kids! The two biggies are C&C3 and Company of Heroes. If anyone owns these and would like to play with us, we usually play against a couple hard computers rather than against each other trying out new maps, smack talking and just having fun rather than competing. I have a 8 slot TS server I set up for us to use... I idle there most times but will be muted if I'm away. Server Address: ts11.light-speed.com:8016 IP:208.101.56.248:8016

Kitten is doing fine. Momma cat has this annoying habit of dropping the damn thing off in the middle of the night to romp around the house knocking shit over. about 3:30 every night we hear the little thing screaming as mommy has it around the neck dragging it to the bed. Awesome! Still... I'd rather have cats.