July 29, 2013

Last night I ended up staying up until one o'clock so I could finish reading Under The Dome. Later than I would have liked but I wanted to finish it and it didn't take as long as I had thought because the countdown on my Kindle included all the pages after the book ended, including a preview of one of Stephen King's other books, so I finished sooner than I thought I would.

The ending was alright. Happy-ish. It is mentioned that after the explosion the population drops to thirty-two survivors but the book only focuses on a handful of those and there is no mention of anyone else surviving. I want to know what happened to those other people. I would assume they died because the ones right next to the dome barely survived with the help of fans. But there is a possibility there were other survivors. The book also ends right after the dome goes away. I would have liked a little more exposition after that. At least an epilogue to see some of the consequences of the dome, other than almost an entire town self-destructing and being wiped off the map. Maybe the mini-series will offer that. I haven't decided if I am going to try and catch up with that or wait for the DVD and marathon it. I feel I would probably like it better if I waited for the DVD so I can forget some of the details and not be as disappointed with the changes.

Today I played a little bit of Rage and finally got around to playing Half-Life. It's only fifteen years old. And I've owned it for a year or two. But I Finally started it. And I like it. Even though I never played it, it gives me a sense of nostalgia. It reminds me of old N64 and early Xbox games with the gameplay and simple graphics. I think I played a bit of Half-Life 2 on the Xbox but not much and I wanted to experience the story, so I might as well start with the first game. Who the hell knows if I'll finish it, I'm not sure how long it is, but I'll keep playing it for as long as it holds my interest. Which may have come and gone already. Who knows.

I also played a little Euro Truck Simulator 2. I changed my truck paint job to bright pink and made one delivery. And came in at a lose because I hit a divider on the journey and ended up paying more in repairs than I made on the delivery. Oh well. I might change things up and still take freelance jobs so I won't have to spend extra money on gas and repairs for my own truck. The extra money I make for driving my own truck might be offset by those other expenses. But my truck is still pretty badass.

It has been raining pretty much non-stop all day long. I was hoping I'd get a window of reprieve when I had to go to work but I didn't. And the shoes I wear to work still soak up water like a sponge so when I got to work I immediately took them off, along with my socks, and put them in front of a fan. I planned ahead and brought another pair of socks with me but maybe I should have also brought a second pair of shoes? That didn't really cross my mind. Next time. I'm just glad I thought to bring the socks.

I wanted to work on my cross stitch but when I tried to open them on my tablet I couldn't get the pictures to zoom in enough so show the individual pixels (or stitches). I restarted the tablet thinking maybe that would help and it ended up wiping the pictures off the tablet. Thankfully I still had them in my email inbox so I tracked those down on my phone, turned my phone into a wi-fi hotspot so I could connect my tablet, found the email with the picture attachments on my tablet, and re-downloaded them. All is swell now. I have no idea what happened but as long as there is a solution, life goes on.

After all that, I spent my night switching off between cross stitching and reading my friend's book. I made good progress on my next cross stitch letter and then noticed two mistakes on the border in the last two squares. I was able to leave work whenever I wanted but I stayed long enough to add a bit of the border where I forgot it and tear out the border where I put a stitch in the wrong place. That way I won't forget it tomorrow, and I'll be able to quickly redo it before jumping back into the letter. It'll all work out.

Also at work, an old friend/coworker came to watch a movie and stopped upstairs for a bit. I was in his wedding however long ago and I don't think I've seen him since the reception. He is the third old friend I have seen in the last few weeks. I need to either do a better job at keeping up with old friends or do a better job at making new friends. Kind of a disconnected thought from seeing old friends, maybe, but it reminds me of how much fun it was when I had more friends to hang out with.