Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

So I just got back from Colorado tonight(I'd gone for my mother's wedding, much happiness all around ^_^), and now I'm home, only six hours late, but without my luggage.

I tell ya, I travel a lot, but this weekend was a nightmare as far as the travel stuff goes. Every step of the way was a hassle. My flight was delayed on the way out, making me get into Denver after ten, which apparently means that Enterprise Rental Cars was closed, (even though all the other rental companies were running,) so even though I had a reservation, the 24-hour 1-800 number just told me: "Sorry, there's nothing we can do about it tonight..." So of course I had to rent from another company for 30% above my online deal that I had had from Enterprise. Then on the way back out here, my first flight itinerary was cancelled because of the weather in the Northeast, so they rebook me through Atlanta on a flight leaving 2 hours later than my original departure. So I sit in the airport for two extra hours, only to have THAT flight be delayed for another four hours for mechanical problems before they rebook me again through Dallas! That itinerary would have gotten me home at 1AM with another four hours sitting at the Dallas/Ft.Worth Airport, but fortunately I was able to skip two hours of that and get on an earlier flight into Raleigh on standby, getting me home at 11:45, except that, whoops! My luggage didn't make it on to the earlier flight. Nope, it's on the original flight getting here at 1AM. Instead of waiting for it, I'll go back for it tomorrow, but ugh! Now I'm home and... my cable's out. :P

I think I'm going to take the morning off and sleep in a little. Oof... *snore*

UPDATE: Of course, some people have it worse.

Aha! Take that, evil dark demon queen! Take that, alien-possessed giant ogre! I am the champion of all I survey!

Of course, when I am sitting at home alone playing video games, I suppose that is not really saying very much. Still, I have successfully triumphed over both of the obstacles that had faced me yesterday. With a new strategy in hand, I resumed my battle against the end boss of Paper Mario and this time I succeeded, finally completing the adventure. (Although it allows you to keep playing to finish all the side quests, if you want. A nice touch.) On the whole, an excellent game, even though I had to watch the final battle cinematics three times.

Likewise, I employed a little Legolas-style-climbing-up-onto-the-giant-thing action to carve my initials on that giant ogre in Resident Evil 4. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Just happy it didn't fall on me. At last, I have located the president's kidnapped daughter! Of course, the story there is still far from over.

The one down side to these dramatic victories is that I sacrificed about three hours of sleep to achieve them. *dozes off for a moment, then jerks awake* Huh?! What? Oh, sorry about that. Anyway, as far as short-term goals go, it was worth it.

Entirely unrelated to all of that, here is a music video directed by Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, two excellent pieces of entertainment that I've blogged about before. I found it at Aint-it-cool-news, and it is very cool, done in the style of a singing tabloid magazine. Check it out: Bastardo!

No wait, I can link the two after all. I fought the ogre in Resident Evil 4, a video game series that is usually about zombies, which are the subject of Shaun of the Dead, which was directed by Edgar Wright, who directed this video! Nice! Six Degrees of Giant Ogre!

Boy, oh boy, am I lazy. I have felt for several days now that I ought to be posting. I have stuff to post about and everything. Movie reviews. Current events. Random stuff that only interests me...

Just the same, actually mustering the energy to post has been a nearly insurmountable obstacle. I wish there was just some sort of brain-scan device that could, you know, scan my brain and automatically compose my posts for me. That way, I could put up topical, insightful comments on a wide variety of subjects without having to even look up from my video game. It would just report on whatever I was doing or thinking at any given moment...

*seriously considers this*

Dear God! What was I thinking?! Never mind, I think I will continue typing them in manually in order to avoid the extreme embarrassment such a device could bring to me, Johnny Depp and the Statue of Liberty.

Anyway...

I'll start with just a general *me* update. First, of course, is the lazy thing, but I am beginning to crawl out of that now, actually doing my laundry and paying my bills and everything. Things have been extremely slow at work for a couple of weeks now, but there's good news in that I will very likely be getting a new contract with a firm closer to my home than I am now. I have been driving 40 minutes each way out to Clayton every day recently and the new place will be more like ten minutes, so that is good.

I have been playing Resident Evil 4 and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on my Gamecube lately, though I'm presently stuck on boss-fights in each. Paper Mario is a fantastic RPG, by the way, but all the little cut-scenes associated with the final battle fight make it take half an hour every time I try again to beat it. I've died three times now and it's getting a little frustrating that I have to sit through 20 minutes of cinematics every time. That minor quibble aside, it's a really great game. A surprisingly deep RPG, all dressed up in bright colors and genuinely funny dialogue. Good stuff.

Resident Evil 4 is also good, though with fewer bright colors and funny dialogue. Very moody, great graphics and seriously intense fighting. I'm trying to work up the energy to give the next boss another shot. I'm currently recuperating after being stomped flat by a 20-foot-tall ogre.

On the writing front, I've gotten started again on writing my alien novel. It's been a long time with it and the engine is stuttering from disrepair, but it's running. At the moment, I'm slogging through a section with a lot of administrative/governmental type details that, if I can make them interesting, should help raise the stakes a little in the story. Now the trick is how to make the cessation of Biothren supply shipments and the scheduling of transport shuttle routes interesting.

Also, it's nearly Oscar time again, so my annual Oscar Movie Marathon is getting underway. (Okay, it's only the second time, but the first one was last year, so it's annual, all right?) Basically, I try to see as many of the Oscar nominated movies as possible before the awards ceremony. It can be pretty tricky with some of the smaller films, but it's fun sometimes to seek out something that's a little harder to find. When the nominations come out, I'll put up my official list, but for now, I'm just trying to catch the likely entries.

So, that's it for the me stuff for now. I've got a pair of movie reviews that I'll be putting up soon, assuming that I don't sink back into the doldrums... It will be very... pretty soon... just after I... take... a nap...

*Singing sleepily* Don't say there's nothing to do in the Dooooooooldrums! It's just... not... true...

*snore*

I just got a phone call that informed me that my dad has taken our old dog Ben to be put to sleep...

It's not really unexpected. He was nearly 14, and he had been having a lot of health problems in the last year or so, and in particular, the arthritis in his hips had gotten pretty bad in the last few months. I got a chance to go home and see him along with my Dad over Christmas and I pretty much knew that it would be the last time I would ever see him.

I remember when we first got him. It was near the end of my seventh grade year. I had actually gone from our home in Colorado to the Air Force Academy for a speech tournament. It was the first of many such tournaments that I would compete in throughout my high school years and into college. I didn't do very well at that one, however. In fact I did considerably worse than I had been expecting. Still, I couldn't get too depressed, because my parents were going to get our new puppy from the breeders and they were bringing him by for me to see before they took him home.

He was a Bouvier des Flandres. Belgian cattle-herding dogs, and they are sometimes used as police dogs in Europe. When we were researching the breed, we came across an anecdote where they were training police dogs. The man who wears the rubber padding to play the 'criminal' had never trained a Bouvier before. He was used to running out, then turning to watch the dog come the last few feet or so to attack. When he was training the Bouvier, he ran out, turned, and the dog was already in mid-air leaping at him.

That's not to say that they are mean dogs. Far from it. They are very good with people and children. They had to be, because my mom ran a day care out of our home, so any dog that was not good with kids was out of the question.

Anyway, I met my parents in the parking structure and met him for the first time. He was still little, only eight weeks old. Bouviers have cropped ears, and he still had these little plaster pieces on them, connected by a piece of wire that held them in the right shape while they healed. They were so silly looking that we toyed with the idea of calling him "Radar". We decided however, to comply with the Breeder's request that we name him according to their rules, (this allows them to keep track of litters more effectively. The rules were that the name should have something to do with Science Fiction and start with the letter "K". The first choice that came to mind was Kirk, but that was taken. In retrospect, I'm glad it was, because that name would not have suited him. Instead, we chose "Kenobi" as in Obi Wan. As in "Ben".

As a puppy, and like all puppies, Ben had two speeds: manic and coma. From the very start, he was a jumper. Whenever we went out onto the back porch, instead of merely stepping down out of the house, he would leap into the air like he was trying to jump the grand canyon. He also loved to pounce. Place your hand flat on the floor and he would stalk up to it, then leap high into the air to come straight down on it. When he got bigger, he was able to jump high enough to look over the top of our eight foot fence. As he got older, his herding instincts kicked in and it was a riot to see him literally herding my mom's day-care kids around the back yard. To them, they were just running around and playing, but to the outside observer, he was clearly herding them, first in one direction, then the other. As he aged though, he became considerably more mellow and easy-going. He'd put up with just about anything with nary a complaint, and he'd just follow you around, then look up with his head cocked as if to say: "That was fun. Now what?"

And boy, did he like to run. Just like in the story about the police dog training, he was fast. One of his favorite games was "Catch Me" wherein he would dash out the front door given the slightest opportunity and sprint across the street to the park, where he would run around at top speed for ten minutes or so until we either caught him or enticed him into the car. This was more fun for him than for us, but he was a beautiful sight when he was running. Once, my brother and I tied his leash to the front fork of my bicycle and we went out to a local nature trail that had a long straight stretch of even ground. He could pull me on my bike faster than I could have ever peddled on my own. We stopped doing that though, because of how obviously dangerous it was, to both me and Ben, but the few times we did it, it was like flying.

Some years later, we got our second dog, "Mountain mystique" aka Misty, also a Bouvier, and they were as different as night and day. Where he was mellow and easy-going, she was high-strung and eager to please. The two of them complemented each other perfectly. Many times, when I would be getting home late, I would be creeping to my bedroom in the dark and all of a sudden Misty would bark as though the world were coming to an end. This lasted until she got close enough to sniff me and verify my identity. Seconds later, Ben would lumber over to see what all the fuss was about. If you imagine them as a security system, Misty was the car alarm set to too high a sensitivity level, and Ben was the security guard, awakened by the alarm who comes over to roll his eyes and say: "You woke me up for that?"

Misty, by the virtue of being so eager to please, tended to be more popular. She certainly courted more attention, but Ben was always my favorite. I knew exactly which spots on his back would make him twitch his right hind leg, and which spots for his left hind leg. We called him "fastest tongue in the West" because of his tendency to slurp suddenly like a striking rattlesnake.

When I graduated and went off to College, I still saw him fairly frequently, and all the time over the Summers. But then I moved out of state, and for the last four and a half years, I've seen him only three or four times a year. For the last year, his age was really starting to show. The arthritis in his hips. His vision, his hearing. He developed a condition which is essentially the canine equivalent of Alzheimers, where he would wander, as though he were looking for something, but he would end up just walking in circles until you encouraged him to lie down. A few weeks before I went out for Christmas, my dad told me that this day would be coming soon and I assured him that if the time came, he shouldn't wait until I came out, just so that I could see him again, but I'm glad that didn't happen, and that I was able to say goodbye.

My dad says that last night was really bad, so he finally made the decision. He was relatively alert during the day today, and with a little help, he climbed into the car as good-natured as ever. The vet kept giving him treats at the end, to calm him down. He's at peace now... Good bye, Ben. You were a great friend.


Ben "Kenobi" Ellis
1991 - 2005