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Planning a Restful Weekend
Jan. 1st, 2005 02:01 amLast weekend was not restful.
It was 4 days long, but it was spent running hither and yon, sometimes both hither and yon on the same day.
We call this "the holidays".
This weekend I am planning for a bit more rest and relaxation, to recover from my four-day weekend.
Tonight Kimberly and I started said rest & relaxation by running up to El Cerrito, buying about 40 pounds of metal, and hauling it back via BART and walking.
Said 40 pounds of metal (perhaps just 30 at the start of the trip, definitely 40 or 50 by the end) were formed into a fireplace screen and a set of fireplace tools. After our success with our fireplace last week, we decided the tools would be useful and the screen would keep our cats from throwing themselves to an ashy death (or at least a bad burn).
However, our search online for such was quite non-useful. More precisely, everything was very expensive, not really within our current meager budget. A combo of fireplace screen + tools seemed to run from $150-$1500 dollars online. We can only presume that the higher cost ones were made out of gold.
However, while perusing online we discovered that Target had some very reasonably priced yet nice-looking options, so there we went tonight. All said, we spent about $60 on fireplace screen + tools. The tool stand is a bit cheap, made out of 3 pieces of wrought iron, but the tools seem to work fine and the screen is actually pretty nice: wrought iron that's been made to look a little rusty, with a nice tree inlaid onto the screen.
The trip home with the screen & tools was the tricky part.
Especially with the rain.
But it never did more than drizzle hard.
One of the reasons I was eager to go to Target even on the start of my restful weekend was so that I could buy a computer game. I typically get one new computer game a year, at the very end of December. Sometimes I get such as a gift, sometimes I'll go out and buy one on my own. When I do, I usually do so at Target, because it's the only close BARTable place that has a decent selection.
Unfortunately Target's selection is going down year by year. Today they just barely had enough to pique my interest. Next year I may have to go into The City to the Virgin store or something.
I picked out Rise of Nations. It's yet-another-realtime-strategy game. It reminds me of Warcraft, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and others that I've played in recent years. You collect resources, build units, and then destroy your foes.
It's got two features that make it stand out: a few elements from Cvilization (national boundaries, a teeny bit of technology), and a few places where the interface has been improved over older realtime strategies (e.g., the fact that you can grab all of a unit type by double-clicking).
I've played throough the tutorial scenarios so-far and it looks good, though one crashed on me. I expect I'll spend a lot of time on it this weekend, going through one or more of the campaigns.
We built a fire tonight.
We had tools.
It was 4 days long, but it was spent running hither and yon, sometimes both hither and yon on the same day.
We call this "the holidays".
This weekend I am planning for a bit more rest and relaxation, to recover from my four-day weekend.
Tonight Kimberly and I started said rest & relaxation by running up to El Cerrito, buying about 40 pounds of metal, and hauling it back via BART and walking.
Said 40 pounds of metal (perhaps just 30 at the start of the trip, definitely 40 or 50 by the end) were formed into a fireplace screen and a set of fireplace tools. After our success with our fireplace last week, we decided the tools would be useful and the screen would keep our cats from throwing themselves to an ashy death (or at least a bad burn).
However, our search online for such was quite non-useful. More precisely, everything was very expensive, not really within our current meager budget. A combo of fireplace screen + tools seemed to run from $150-$1500 dollars online. We can only presume that the higher cost ones were made out of gold.
However, while perusing online we discovered that Target had some very reasonably priced yet nice-looking options, so there we went tonight. All said, we spent about $60 on fireplace screen + tools. The tool stand is a bit cheap, made out of 3 pieces of wrought iron, but the tools seem to work fine and the screen is actually pretty nice: wrought iron that's been made to look a little rusty, with a nice tree inlaid onto the screen.
The trip home with the screen & tools was the tricky part.
Especially with the rain.
But it never did more than drizzle hard.
One of the reasons I was eager to go to Target even on the start of my restful weekend was so that I could buy a computer game. I typically get one new computer game a year, at the very end of December. Sometimes I get such as a gift, sometimes I'll go out and buy one on my own. When I do, I usually do so at Target, because it's the only close BARTable place that has a decent selection.
Unfortunately Target's selection is going down year by year. Today they just barely had enough to pique my interest. Next year I may have to go into The City to the Virgin store or something.
I picked out Rise of Nations. It's yet-another-realtime-strategy game. It reminds me of Warcraft, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and others that I've played in recent years. You collect resources, build units, and then destroy your foes.
It's got two features that make it stand out: a few elements from Cvilization (national boundaries, a teeny bit of technology), and a few places where the interface has been improved over older realtime strategies (e.g., the fact that you can grab all of a unit type by double-clicking).
I've played throough the tutorial scenarios so-far and it looks good, though one crashed on me. I expect I'll spend a lot of time on it this weekend, going through one or more of the campaigns.
We built a fire tonight.
We had tools.