A Shacker put together a set of Guild Wars panoramas; whether you play or not, they're pretty neat.

Wrath of the Lich King beta - woo! That first arrival into Northrend is quite spectacular, and the Death Knight quests are fantastic. I wonder what the Bears will do - descend to the Death fortress en masse to wreak noob (level 55 noob that is) havoc together, or frantically level their 70s to 80? I know which one I'm doing first ...

I think Mass Effect is so good that it's melting down my 360. I've had a ton and a half of freezes with it, which hasn't been the case since Saints Row. Either it's a very buggy game, or my 360 is starting to give up. Or, well, the disc could be bad - unfortunately all my games are now packed so I can't verify with another game. Heh.

24 boxes packed, so I was pretty spot on with the book+game completion estimate. Did you know comic books are heavier (more dense) than regular books? Holy hernia, batman. Next step, the various fragiles off of the shelves. Whee?

16 boxes of books - about 2.5 shelves' worth - packed. I estimate 8-10 more for the upstairs half-shelves and the remainder of my desk, and then on to the fragile stuffs off the shelves. The goal is to have all furniture emptied out (not worried about the kitchen since that's the slowest process by far; we'll only move what we're able to get to) by Friday evening, and the floors cleaned at the new house in preparation. We should probably do that tonight, hmm. The lawn needs watering anyway. Our lawn, that is. Hee hee!

I've explored a few more planets, beat down some mercenaries and smugglers, and barely escaped getting devoured by a zombie horde. There was also a nasty encounter with a tank and some snipers that took a few tries. I still don't really get who I should be taking with me on the various trips, but it's fun anyway. Also, whoever said that driving the Mako is the worst part is certifiable. So there.

Packing this week, and moving end of the week. Pics to follow.

In the meantime, I play Mass Effect with great relish. If you ever wanted to compose your own "away team" and explore new planets and civilizations (with upgrades and combat galore), you can't really do better than ME.

And it looks great. The floor should be done tomorrow, along with roof treatment, a small cabling fix, and maybe some solutions for a big scratch in the dining room that we've never seen before. We were in fact nearly convinced the ceiling guy did it, but we have to apologize for our assumptions - we watched our home movie and it's pretty visible even in the fraction of a second that the camera panned over it. Weird, since it seems like a mighty scratch.

Of course, there's a strip near a corner where the paint just doesn't match at all from top to bottom, and we didn't see that either. It's funny how you start noticing things more once the house actually belongs to you ...

Walter's coming in tomorrow evening, and we'll probably head to PRI, and then maybe a tour of the house if it's done (should be). Then it's off to the coast for winery tour shenanigans and perhaps some hiking. Hmm, we should maybe go tubing Saturday ... I hear the Wilamette is quite pleasant around the city park.

Went to Maraudon last night. It was all right. It's good to be on a "can take it or leave it" relationship with WoW. The addiction has definitely taking a breather from pestering me right now.

After a week of trying to figure out what to do with our one odd duck room, we finally have a vaguely economic solution. Here's how it went down.

So there's this room. It has carpet. It's the only room in the entire house that has carpet - so we want it out. But here's the thing - the rest of the floor downstairs is engineered hardwood (which is hardwood bits with other fake bits added to it for easy installation) which isn't made anymore, so matching it is a futile endeavor. So we figure, we'll go with something completely different.

Well. That was certainly a good idea, but it went kinda like this.

1. Oooh, laminate! It's a decent price, and we can get it pre-padded and looking good. Let's try it out (we grab samples).
2. Ok, laminate looks flat and fake next to our engineered hardwood. Next!
3. Oooh, bamboo! That's fairly cheap, natural, and nice-looking, let's give that a shot.
4. Can't use bamboo; same deal as hardwood on the ground floor - we can't nail it to the stuff that's underneath. Crap!
5. Ok, back to square one, let's check out more laminate samples (6 more).
6. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope .... hmm. Yeah, nope.
7. Ok, time to raise the $ limit. Let's see what we got. Aha - let's try these 3 real wood samples.
8. Nope, nope, nope - wrong shade, too dark, slats are too small, and that one looks fake.
9. ARGH!!!! Beer time.

And so on. We eventually found stuff we could live with for 3.69/sq ft., and stuff we really really liked for 5.29/sq ft. Unfortunately, those 2 bucks per foot translate to 600 dollah for our den of 200 sq ft! Alas, we talked ourselves into it, and literally at the last moment we found engineered bamboo for 3.29 per. Turns out there is such a thing, and it's quite a relief, since we still have our driveway to deal with (you know, the one we can't actually use).

Sigh.

In other news, we got a sprinkler, a sprayer hose attachment (Whee! I never had one of those of my very own!) that I had to play with for 5 minutes straight, and some shelving for the garage. There was a brief moment where we hoped our former owners would leave theirs, but alas, no. It's too bad, since their shelving was on the order of 200 bucks a pop ... ah well.

Turns out we have deer. This might be an issue when we decide to do an "edible plant garden" thing some time in the future, but that's most likely far off. Right now, it's hard to focus on anything but actually moving in!

In other news, I rediscovered EV Nova. Great game, very Nethackish but with multiple storylines - if a bit less gear to mess with. I keep being too cocky and get blown up every time I get a bit of disposable cash ... I'll get there eventually. Also, Dead Rising is enjoying a lot of playtime on my 360 - I once again recommend it to anyone up for a bit of zombie survival.

This feels a bit disjointed, but so am I. I can't wait to move in ...

I guess this E3 is fairly productive after all ... here's a 3 page interview about Borderlands, the open-world, quest-driven, drop-in and drop-out coop shooter. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

We have a few days of peace now, while the ceiling is being scraped and reformed from "popcorn" type to the much more spiffing "skip-trowel" type. It's expensive, but not really, when you consider the entire house is being done. While that's done, the house is pretty much off-limits so we are no longer trying to chase down paperwork or answer countless questions by phone and email. After that, the floor, which we're having a wee bit of a hard time with. Thing is, they don't make the type of floor we have anymore, so we have to either try to match (nearly impossible) or just settle on something completely different, yet still thematically solid (also hard). There have been many trips for floor samples ... okay, just two, but it feels like a lot since it always happens at the end of the day. Here's hoping one from this batch will do!

Then, the move ... but before that, we have visitors from down South

Brilliantly mad FPS/space shooter/adventure/RPG from the people behind Boiling Point. Can't wait, I'm buying two copies on launch.

Friday was Garage Games outing day, and boy did we out. There was volleyball, which I'm happy to say I rallied at least two people towards - turns out the game gets better the more people you have (well, up to 6 on 6 anyway). Who knew? Not me - I always figured 4 on 4 would be more action-packed, but nope. Six is where it's at! Then we had dodgeball, which I missed due to a random burst of affection for volleyball - I stuck around for 3 games. Water pistol fights were random and spontaneous, although I did avoid getting soaked probably since I stayed on the defensive ...

And then there was ... BOFFING. Or LARPing as it may be known, except all we did was swordfight. Can't really go wrong with swordfighting, and it's a surprisingly good workout. You have to pay attention to every direction at once, be ready to dodge in any direction, and be ready to swing when an opening happens - tense! So yeah, I won't look funny at those larpers anymore ... well, unless they start flinging magic missiles, that is. That's just silly! Pics for all the above at the usual spot.

Saturday we went berry picking. 45 minutes, 15 bucks, 5 pounds of blueberries - woo! That's just an estimate, but the bag was huge and heavy; you can see it below.

Am I forgetting anything ... oh yeah, we bought a house!