Wednesday, 25th of August 2010 at 03:43:08 AM 
Dear Diary, today I lost three pounds, and punted a gnome. Happy!
Day 1: Today weighed self. Ouch! Worse than I thought. This is the day I begin. I deserve to be healthy.
Day 2: Walked two miles and lifted one set. Go me! Still fat, though.
Day 10: Doing great, no weight gone yet, lifting two sets now . Also? Fat.
Day 14: Down two pounds, increased weights. V. v. good. Kids brought me a treat. Chocolate. Ate it. Patted my fatness.
Day 31: Appear to have shingles. All the pain, fever and sick feeling, but no rash. Fat still there.
Day 33: Didn’t sleep. Didn’t exercise. Suffered. Played a video game all day. Scale blinks my BMI at me furiously. Appears to be a health emergency. Decided that I ought to have some wine and chocolate and stop weighing in. Also, still fat.
Day 40: See day 33 for the last seven days. Some exercise, ate Motrin like candy, but bleh. Ill. Excruciating pain precisely at C3 dermatome area. Dr. can’t diagnose for sure w/o rash. Don’t mind, glad I don’t have rash.
Day 47: Feel much better. Weighed in. Very, very fat.
Today, Day 48: Got up early to work out and write FFP post. Worked out, and promply forgot everything about FFP post. Gave self pedicure, shaved legs to a baby-face perfection. Darling extra daughter came over for gaming session. Got too hot here in the house, daughters and self trekked to see Scott Pilgrim. Ate Raisinets, buttered popcorn and drank Coke Zero. Remembered FFP at 10 p.m. Not only fat, but also suck. Won’t give up! Tomorrow is another day.
Remember when I told you about how cold the summer has been? Today it was 99 degress, but that’s okay, Friday’s high is predicted to be 60 degrees. Oh California, YOU SO NUTTY.
This week I ended up at Farmer M’s, mile 63. Tomorrow I head out after dark to Buckleberry Ferry, hiding in the back of a wagon. Scary. In Real Life tomorrow I have to get up at the crack of dawn to get a couple of miles in before the heat turns up to the “torment” setting.
Scott Pilgrim was so fun. It was full of anime and video game references (some of which I am sure I didn’t get, but I laughed at LOT of them. NO SPOILERS.)
I was thinking about my gaming cred as I wrote this post, and remembered my dad bringing home Pong when we lived in the Quartz Hill house. I went to look up the history of Pong just now and learned that it was only an arcade game until the home version offered in the 1975 sears Christmas catalog…but we moved from that house in 1973.
Dad brought home a tangle of wires and a plastic box from “a guy at work” (he worked for Lockheed then) and hooked it up to our television, all excited and secretive until he turned it on and let us try it.
The controls looked like this Wikipedia pic from late 1975, though I don’t remember there being any graphics on it. He passed away a few years ago, or I’d ask him to tell me the story of how he got a home version of Pong at least two years before there WAS a home version available.
This is the sassypants I play now. Look at her, giving us the rasberry. She is very good at killing things. Very, very good.
In college I went to the local arcade with a little of my tip money. I was cute (also not fat) back then, and the arcade quarter guy would come around and give me red quarters to play (quarters painted red belonged to the house, they gave them out to girls to keep them playing so boys would come in.) My friend Alec and I would play for hours. He’d play Mario and other cartoony games, and I’d play the tank one (the graphics were awesome) and other first-person-shooter games. BLAM BLAM.
The table games were fun, too. The restaurant where I worked (before I got into work-study at school) had red quarters, and late at night after my shift I’d play Caterpillar while my boyfriend (now husband) cl0sed out the bar.
Now we play WoW, but after five and a half years, we’re getting sick of it. (Have dabbled in Lotro and FF, not interested in playing much else.) We only log on these days to run friends though low-level content. I have 100,000 gold saved for the next expansion, so even making in-game money, usually one of my favorite ways to play, is boring. Tera Online has potential, but I don’t expect to be able to play it before 2012 (although I signed up for the focus group testing. Brb checking email again.)
I used to tell people about my gaming, but the looks of pity and disdain finally got to me. But now I’m spilling it all the time at FFP!
Who I will play in Tera Online, if it ever goes live, and if it's actually good.
One time, this dear lady at church and I were on the reception committee together, and we were hosting a memorial service. We sat in the back, behind the kitchen, to take a short break and swap stories. I mentioned that I was going to play a game with my husband later. She asked me if I thought that murdering other players in the game was godly.
I was all “…” and asked her if she thought that playing chess and killing hapless pawns or murdering the king was godly (she and her husband are MASSIVE football fans, too.) Had to remind her that it was a game, and that it was just for fun. (Although, I CANNOT play an undead in WoW. They’re gross, they look like they stink [sorry, Viva] their clothes are tatty, their breasts floppy and their quests are MEAN. Poison a dog! Poison a dwarf! Be mean to people for no reason! My main character is a blood elf, an addict, which is why she’s SKINNY so of course I love her.)
Wii fitness is cool and all, but my gaming dream is for an MMORPG (game where you run around in a world with other people, doing stuff) that is controlled by voice and body movement, like Kinect, so I could work out AND kill stuff. I’d be all over that.
Am I the only middle-aged geek? I know only a couple (some of them YOU KNOW, TOO but I won’t out them. Some of them played MMO’s long before I ever did, and one of them is the best healer I’ve ever played with IN MY LIFE.) What games do you play, if any? And yes, Tetris counts. So does Farmville. Confess!
I can’t get into RPGs, but I love manymanymanymany other games. I have a subscription to Big Fish Games. I have a billion on my iPod and my laptop. Most recent addictions have been Plants vs. Zombies, Angry Birds, Helsing’s Fire, Words with Friends (aka Scrabble), and Cake Mania. Rock Band is fun, and I like to watch my husband play Super Mario World Wii and Super Mario Galaxy (I am too terrible to actually play them, but it’s fun to watch). I also love a good old-fashioned board or card game – Apples to Apples is probably my favorite of all time.
Oh, agreed. Apples to Apples is extremely fun and monstrously popular with my kids and their cousins
C’est moi, C’est moi, I blush to disclose, the healer she speaks of is me… (AND a Broadway geek, too, and YOU can out yourself as one as well if you catch the reference!)
Right now though, I am all about starcraft 2. I am ALWAYS zerg. I will completely swarm and eat your faces. NOM NOM NOM. Please make sure your faces are low fat and high in lean protein and fiber when the zerg come for you.
I also love it when you give me that haste buff. SO HAWT. /hands you Focus Magic
Holy hell, a Camelot reference before I’ve had my coffee?
I played Farmville for a while but got bored. My main addiction is word games, with a slight side addiction for puzzle games. I love Pathwords and Scrabble, but I also love Tetris and Bejeweled. Ooh, and Bookworm! Yes, I’m a geek.
I forgot about Scrabble. I had it on my computer back in the 90′s. And Bejeweled is like CRACK. Have that one on my phone.
I love table-top RPGs but I’ve never gotten much into computer gaming. I like the puzzle/solitaire style computer games, though, and if somebody took away the Solitaire game I bought for my BlackBerry, I’d have to hurt them badly. I adore board games, I’m depressingly good at trivia games, and I’m STILL sorting and inventorying my MTG collection.
Oh, and Joss? That particular song is soooo over rated. I prefer The Seven Deadly Virtues, myself
Oooh, when you said “puzzle” I remembered how much I live the Myst games. Did you ever play those?
I heart Pogo.com games. Mostly because they have a really good version of Monopoly and my family refuses to play with me. (I slaughter them every time.) But they also have a good variety of puzzle and card games that are a lot of fun too. Most are free, and if you do pay for the membership it’s worth it. Plenty of good times on Pogo.
Started gaming for the first time in my life, other than Q-bert and Space Invaders with Atari when I was 10, with my DH (Bane) which is how we met the awesome healer who must out herself. Bane played UO (Ultima Online) back before WoW took over the gaming world. We got tired of WoW as well and now we are on the search for something new. I understand about the undead and would only play that character when it was that time of the month, because at least she could get away with being rude. I like the idea about gaming that is controlled by voice and body movement, but I’m afraid all my game would do would be sit at a desk and type on a keyboard all day.
Do I know you from old Piece Corpse?
If I confess to enjoying playing Jumbleberry Fields on Webkinz using my kids’ accounts will you bar me from FFP forever? I don’t do undead, and I have not one competitive bone in my body. . .but I love me some knock-off Yahtzee that comes in festive colors.
I live in a house with a serious gamer (my husband) and we are raising 2 gamers-in-training (our kids), though if I’m honest I would have to admit that I’m lowest on the gamer totem pole — bejewelled is the only game I play on a regular basis. So while I have little to no serious gamer cred (though I understand all of the gamer-speak in everyone’s comments so far) I have access to far more games than one person deserves. My husband’s mid-life crisis project was to build himself a virtual video arcade machine – you want to play all those games you used to use red-quarters in for free again? Come by my house — I’ve got them all housed in 1 machine in my basement, no quarters required.
Omw, brt. Drinks included?
JOUST?????????????
Ooooohhhhh I HEARTED Joust with big pink heartsparklediamonds!
I have avoided WOW for years. But my 9-year-old really wanted a game we could play together as a family. So as of August 1 all four of us have WOW characters. I’ve made it to level 60 with my primary, 20 with the one I use for “family” raiding group. The 9 year old logged 900 minutes of on-line time last week. I think I had more. This could be a problem, but I’m enjoying it right now!
That is so awesome. My kids play also, though one just fiddles with a Death Knight (the other is a raid leader and excellent tree drood.)
I have a passion for pets an mounts, too, which has cause me to spend more hours that I ought in-game, over the years. (113 mounts, 128 pets so far.)
My family always had computer (as opposed to console) games, so that’s what I’m used to. Used to play Diablo II and waiting (and waiting) for Diablo III to come out. For now, though, my husband and I play WoW and are currently wiping on the Lich King in our 10-man.
Funny you should mention that, WE ARE ALSO wiping on LK 10-man. It’s kind of embarrassing to me, what with the 30% buff and all. I really want that title, though.
I expect that there will be Diablo III info and beta-test computers at Blizzcon in October. I’m intrigued by the sekrit “Next-gen” MMO in development at Blizz. They’ve been hiring for it for over a year. WHAT COULD IT BE?
In other gossip: a Very High Blizz Guy just bought the house of one of my BFFs! Trying to get a beta invite out of it. No luck so far.
I HATE THE LK — killed everything but him :/
He hates our freedom. But…he’s kinda…hot. Is it just me? I always wanna go up the steps and sit in his lap before we start the fight. I know it’s wrong.
I play Bejeweled on my iPhone, and lo, it is addictive. It’s great for turning off my brain right before I go to bed