Scattered

My mood this week has had at least one notable low, but is slightly above average now.

Today is day 2 of seeing if I can survive without allergy medication. So far, occasional itchy/watery eyes has been bearable. I think I most miss the clear sinuses of daily decongestant, though. Other side-effects are difficult to determine.

Strange dreams of late - and strange in that I've been having/remembering them upon waking. Today I recall being in a high school and signing up for the gymnastics team in order to work my way to the Olympics and spoil some assassination plot somehow. It was ridiculously easy due to some superhuman abilities (nanotech maybe? Somehow reminded of Bionix Six). A freakishly-quickly-earned gold medal and destroyed robots later, life was good.

I finished The Gunslinger last night. Short and quick read (somewhere between two and four hours maybe, I wasn't paying close attention). I have a lot of trouble reviewing it. I'm not a big King fan, or even a reader of his work. I know he envisioned the entire series as a book, but "book 1" as it stands feels woefully incomplete, like something that should be covered in the introduction of a novel, not a novel of its own. The climax feels wimpy at best. It's highly atmospheric, but I don't feel any real like or dislike toward the setting/character. It's like... a rice cake. Maybe there's a little flavor added, but when you're done it doesn't feel like there was anything there at all.

I've started Uncharted 2, though probably won't get real far in until this weekend. Definitely looks better and behaves at least as well as the preceding game. As long as I don't have a similar experience with the enemies changing the game into an exercise in frustration, I'll easily rate it higher.

I think I'm going to try running a World of Logs client while raiding this weekend. I'm curious what sort of data it collects and how we match up to other guilds in some areas.

After two nights of trying to get aging software to work under Windows 7 and being stymied in the end mostly be what appeared to be security defauls, I gave up and reverted a computer to Windows XP. Burning the restore disks, then using them, then setting up everything necessary probably took around a third of the time I'd spent trying ot make it work. Ugh. Some small consolation in that the only thing I didn't get working is software we're phasing out. It just happens to still be necessary now.

HOA meeting next week. Fun, fun. Going to discuss how we're proceeding with getting another contractor to finish patching up the buildings. I say "discuss" thought it might be more "tell people." The other board members have pretty well decided and while I don't like going into a general meeting from that position, I honestly don't see any other options anyway so maybe it's best. I'm still frustrated with our property manager, though trying to maintain a decent working relationship.

I need to get some new tires, though I'm not looking forward to the expense. Seriously, they're not quite smooth, but they're more worn than anything else I see in the parking spaces downtown. Probably original tires that were installed in Florida, so they've gone through a serious climate shift as well as a bit over 20,000 miles.