To be at home
is to eat. A lot of food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Thanksgiving or not
there is a whole lot of stuff to eat during each meal. Whether I'm
hungry or not I'll eat and after the first meal I'm not hungry the rest
of the weekend. Today for breakfast there was fried wontons and for
lunch there was something else I can't remember.
Auntie Ming came over for dinner. Ming is mom's best friend from
Indonesia and she's been living in Sacramento since a few years after
we moved there ourselves. She used to be married to an American named
Scott. Tall white guy, rather hippie-like especially for a conservative
city like Sacramento. They split up years and years ago and I have no
idea what happened to him.
For Thanksgiving dinner we had the requisite turkey. It was good but a
bit salty. Christopher made mashed potatoes which were very good
considering it's so simple to make. Certainly better than my mashed
potatoes though I basically just boil mine a lot and add butter and
salt. There was green beans, bread rolls, and mom made cranberry
casserole side dish though it was cold like a dessert.
One thing about being there is that everything is so loud. People
talking, the sound of cooking, television on, it's all much more noise
than I'm used to. Part of it is that dad is going a bit deaf in one ear
so he keeps television on loud and likes to watch television when he's
cooking. It makes it hard for me to concentrate and get work done. I
can still read and play games. Writing though is hard.
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Really it only
gets quiet when mom and dad go to sleep, usually before midnight. Then
it is just the kids staying up reading and playing games. Of course the
problem then is that I'm tired so I tend to go to sleep right about
that time too. Thursday night I slept downstairs on the couch-bed which
is big and not too uncomfortable.
So I did get a bunch of playing Elite Force 2. It's not too bad if I
play it for short bursts. Maybe I'm getting used to it since the
headaches aren't as bad. Although you can still do the strategy where
you let your teammates do all of the fighting since they won't usually
die, there seem to be a lot more instances where you are all alone.
They also introduced the concept of NPC health. In several scenarios
you have to keep someone alive so you need to get up there and absorb
some damage. There other scenarios where you have a timer: do a task
quickly -- usually find a switch -- before something bad happens and
the game ends.
You now have this Assault Compression Rifle that sucks. It's a shotgun
but you have to get really close to do any damage and it doesn't tend
to kill bad guys in one shot. I'd rather just have a normal phaser
rifle. Also even in normal mode you can run out of ammo quickly so try
to use the hand phaser more.
One annoying bug is that sometimes night vision mode gets screwy such
that everything is totally black. When you go back to normal vision
mode you get a split second of night vision. Not too sure what's
causing it.
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