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Last night I was supposed to go down to Scottsburg to visit with Sara, Grason, and my mom, but I wasn’t feeling well the last couple hours at work and ended up just going home. I did stop and pick up a 200GB hard drive for my Xbox that Circuit City had on sale for $100 and got that installed, and everything there seems to be going really well. I forgot to FTP the stuff from the C: drive on the old hard drive over to my computer first, though, so tonight I have to put the old one back in, copy that stuff over to the computer, then put the new drive back in and copy over all the files and settings after I reformat it for larger HD support. For game copying purposes, right now it’s better than it was with the old drive since the DVD2Xbox software, which copies directly to the HD from the DVD drive, is working now, and it didn’t work before. I think that mostly has to do with me flashing a different BIOS to my modchip last night, but I’m not positive.

To make up for not going to visit mom last night, I’m skipping class tonight and hanging out with her and Steph. I’ll still need to go down and visit Sara this weekend, though, as she won’t be making the trip up tonight. Mom leaves to go back to CA tomorrow.

While I was copying stuff over last night, I watched Underworld, a movie my buddy Mike was gracious enough to let me borrow. I had heard from Spook that it was a kickass movie, and it was alright, but I was mildly disappointed, mostly by the werewolves in the movie. If you haven’t seen it, Underworld is about an ancient war between vampires and werewolves that continues in the modern era. The whole time I was watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think that was watching The Matrix, except with vampires. The art style, costumes, locations — everything — seemed like a ripoff of the Matrix, except that Underworld didn’t contain any pretentious philosophical issues and didn’t take itself nearly as seriously. Of movies starring Kate Beckinsale and featuring vampires and werewolves, I prefer Van Helsing.

It’s been a long, long time since I made any posts on here, and it’s not from lack of stuff to post about. Not sure what the deal is, actually, other than me just not being in the mood. Oh well, with any luck it was just a brief lapse in my posting behavior and it won’t happen again. Odds are that it will, however. You’ve been forewarned.

So what’s new? Sara had her baby on Friday, May 28th. Pictures are available by clicking on the Pictures link to the right side of the page. Grason and Sara are both home and happy and healthy, so that’s good.

A week ago yesterday, a series of storms and tornadoes came rolling thru the Indpls area; luckily no one I know was hurt or killed, though my buddy Tom’s office bldg was pretty much laid to waste. They’ve got their office set back up in a new building, though, and things are going okay now. You can see pictures of the damage in that vicinity at this site. EDIT: That link isn’t quite right, I’ll have to fix it when I get home and can get the link back out of my email.

School is just the same old crap, different day. Not much to say there. I used to have a plain white T-shirt that said SCHOOL SUCKS in big black letters on the front. I wish I still had it. I got in trouble for repeatedly wearing it to school in high school. That and a shirt I had that had a picture of an alien holding a bottle of liquid (looked a lot like beer, but was not labeled as such, which was my defense) that said “Take me to your liter”. I tried to pass it off as a science/unit of measurement joke, but no one was buying it.

Got my first Xbox game installed on the hard drive and verified that it works (NCAA Football 2004). Now I get to buy a new drive for it. Thinking of spending a little more and getting something bigger than 120GB, like maybe a 200GB drive. I’m not sure, though, since most of the games I play are played online and I can’t play those off the hard drive. We’ll see what happens.

Mom got into town late Thursday night to visit Sara and the baby and also for my uncle Mike’s funeral. This is a pretty weird story, and if you have a weak stomach, you might want to skip the remainder of the paragraph. This past Monday (Memorial Day) my cousin Jim gets a call from his parents’ neighbors saying that their newspapers have not been touched for the past couple days, which is something Mike would never let happen, so he goes over to check things out. He gets to the house and asks his mom (my aunt Mary) where Mike is, and she says, “he’s in the kitchen resting”. Jim goes in the kitchen and finds his father lying on the floor, dead. He’d apparently been there like that since sometime Saturday morning. They think that he slipped, hit his head, and bled to death. My mom is the youngest of 11 kids, and Mary is the oldest, her and Mike both being 76. She’s just completely mentally gone at this point, as evidenced by the fact that she walked around the house for two days with a dead body and a lot of blood (and other fluids that started seeping out as the body decomposed) and didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with it. It’s a sad way for him to go, and I feel really badly for my aunt for being in such a state. She’s probably going to be put in a home at this point since she needs constant supervision. I found out a couple days ago that Mike had set up the doors in the house to need a key to get in or out of to keep Mary from wandering out of the house. I haven’t seen either of them in a very, very long time since they live in Ft. Wayne, but I wish her and the family all the best.

In happier news: actually, I don’t know that I have any happy news right now. I hate to end my first post in so long on such a down note, but according to Dante in Clerks, “That’s what life is, a series of down endings.” I don’t necessarily agree with that, but there it is.