PixlBit

It was a busy, busy week for me at the park last week, both in terms of getting the park ready for the holiday weekend and dealing with the huge number of people enjoying the park on the weekend. More on that in the Ranger Stuff section. In other news, I bought a new-to-me car yesterday. I am the happy owner of a 2007 Subaru Forester in a lovely sage green, it's the LL Bean package, so it's loaded with all kinds of goodies. But not the weather radio, which I will miss. Told the salesman at the dealership that it would be happy going to live in Freeport, which is where LL Bean is headquartered. Most of us in the area have worked there at least once in our lives.

This year is flying by, next weekend is the 4th of July weekend and it will be insane at work if the weather is good. I'm a little frustrated that the park is looking shabby, but due to a serious infestation of browntail moth caterpillars and their toxic hairs, we haven't been able to mow or weedwhack much at all in the past six weeks. I'm one of the lucky people that all I have to do is get out of my car on a dry windy day and I walk into park HQ with a rash. So no mowing, weedwhacking, or sweeping at all, and I have to be careful when repairing picnic tables, painting the buildings, etc. But there is supposed to be some rain in the next couple of days, so hopefully if we bust our butts, we can have the place looking decent by Friday evening.

It was sitting there, mocking me, from the top of the pile of DVDs and video games piled precariously next to my TV. "you were almost done and then you forgot about me" it seemed to say. And I was pretty close to the end when I put it down and wandered off to do something else and promptly forgot about it. What was this game, you ask? Tales of Symphona Chronicles. And the game was Tales of Symphonia. It took me a bit, but I finished it, as well as knocked several sidequests that I missed in the original Game Cube version, found all the recipes, and restored the town of Luin. I also didn't realize that there's a point in the game where you have to make a choice, and that influences who is in your party from that point on. So now I may play through again at a later date with the other character, just because I can.

Not too much to report here. Since we've been short one person up until this point (new guy starts on Sunday! Yay!), I've been spending a chunk of time in the booth. Some of that time is very, very slow, as the kiddos aren't out of school yet up here. I've been taking the 3DS with me and have gone back to Fantasy Life. I'm mopping up quests and then I'll move on to the next part of the main story. I have to say that this game has so much to it that I really haven't felt too compelled to hurry up and finish the story.

I'd just gotten back from Florida and I got a message from some friends wanting to know if I'd be interested in taking care of their farm for a week and a half. They'd pay me and I could help myself to whatever was in the pantry and freezers, as well as to as many eggs as I wanted. There's a three and a half week wait between when I start at the park and when the first paycheck comes in, so the answer was an emphatic "YES!".

My next-door neighbor, good friend/honorary little brother, and landlady's son shares his internet with me. We have a download cap, and I came very close to exceeding that this month, so I'm on a self-imposed Netflix moratorium at the moment. So I figured I might as well finish Tales of Zestiria, since I was so close to the end anyway. As anyone who has ever played a "Tales of" game will know, you're never really done, even after you beat the "final" boss of the storyline. In true JRPG fashion, he was a pain in the ass with multiple forms, but I did him in on the second try. That opened up a bonus dungeon, as well as New Game+. And there's also a dlc bonus chapter that was free. I'm not going to bother with a new game at this point, and I'm debating about finshing the bonus dungeon. I'm not sure if it adds anything to the story, or if it's just there to kill more monsters and bosses and to get more stuff that won't do me any good if I never bother to play the game a second time. The bonus chapter does add more to the story, so I'll definitely play through that, but I have a feeling it won't take me all that long.

After a really crappy winter, I decided I needed a change of scenery and found myself on Southwest Airlines' website pricing tickets to various locations. There was a sale going on and I found cheap tix to Tampa, which is an hour away from my oldest friend. We've known each other since we were five, and she's the kind of friend that we may not see or speak to each other for years, but when we do, we pick up right where we left off. I didn't have many days to spend, and it was such short notice that she wasn't able to take time off from work, but we had a blast anyway.

I just looked at my last post, and it's from the beginning of February. Holy cow, where does the time go?

I started watching Occupied not so much for the series itself, but to practice my very rusty Norwegian. By the middle of the first episode, I was hooked. Occupied is set in a near future where the new prime minister, a member of the Green Party, has started building a Thorium reactor for green energy and has halted all fossil fuel production. This is a big deal, Norway is one of the top non-Arab oil producing countries in the world, if you didn't know that already. The EU, faced with the cutting off of their closest source of fossil fuels, decides to step in and force the Norwegians to turn the oil and gas production back on. They do this by allowing the Russians to persuade, by use of the threat of full-scale military occupation, the Norwegians. They take over all the oil platforms in the North Sea, and maintain a large presence in Oslo to make sure the oil keeps flowing. They claim they're there to “help” the Norwegians and supposedly, they'll all go home again once gas and oil production levels reach and are maintained at the earlier rates.

I've been playing this nonagram game called Pixelo on Kongregate for a long time. There are multiple levels, and, once you meet certain criteria, you can unlock a daily puzzle. I'd been playing almost daily for at least a year and half, had beaucoup XP, had unlocked almost all the badges and prizes, and was happily working my way through the recently released 2015 daily puzzles puzzle pack. And then I decided to clean out my cookies because Pixlbit hasn't been running all that great on my laptop and I though that might help. I went to play yesterday's daily puzzle last evening, and remembered why I hadn't cleaned out my cookies in forever - my saved game is saved as a freaking cookie! I lost all my save progress from at least a year and a half, including my high scores, my XP and my gold. And Pixlbit isn't loading any better for me after all that. I'm going to go pour myself a shot of single malt Scotch and whimper.