I <3 cupcakes more than life itself. This reflects not only my love for cupcakes, but also my general dissatisfaction with life in general. Still, on a morning where I'm getting to scarf cupcakes, things don't seem all that bad. Surely it could be worse.

Despite my love of cupcakes, I don't actually get the opportunity to eat them very often. The only reason I have some now is due to a mini quirk of fate that started yesterday. It was another generic gameday at the Panera and I made the trek over hoping to give Agricola another whirl. It turns out that the Bills were hosting a birthday party for Andrea at their place that night but had forgotten to send out the evite invitations. That meant that everyone would\e cutting out of the gameday around 5:30 or so and there wouldn't be enough time to run through the game. Brian had also invited me over to his place that night but the lure of getting another Agricola runthrough at the Bills won out. When I went to call him to let him know, I discovered that I not only had forgotten my cell phone as well but my bottle of pills as well. The latter didn't turn out to be as much as a problem as I feared as the patches were working okay supplemented with some borrowed advil.

The party went over pretty well. I spent a good chunk of the evening getting that second play of Agricola and got my ass handed to me. We had a small rules snafu in the beginning that just ended up domino'ing into a disaster for me. Andrea had made a big mess of cupcakes as well and normally I would have been all over them but my stomach felt a bit off. I ended up snagging some and bringing them home with me and it ended up being a good decision. I'm not sure exactly what was the cause, be it medication or lack of sleep or something else but I was feeling nauseous and ill on the drive home. I didn't eat much at the party, only trying Bill's somosas as I was heading out the door and I ended up distributing it all over the street outside when I got home. I ended up with a stabbing headache interspersed with more nausea until I finally dozed off.

Still, all's well that ends well. I woke up feeling better and I have a plateful of cupcakes to eat. I just have to remember to give Brian a ring sometime today and apologize for last night's snafu. Karen and Bernie are holding a joint birthday party at their place today and if I'm lucky, there might be more cupcakes.

150 mgs of codeine in one go last night and neither nausea nor complete pain relief. That's hardly a good sign.

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The day just keeps getting worse. I keep popping more and more pills and I'm not hitting either nausea or complete pain relief. I have no clue what in the world is going on. I'm trying to decide if I should just really pop an obscene amount and see if that tips the scale. Of course, if I did that I'd probably spend the next few hours retching and flat on my back.

Brian invited me up to his place to play cards tonight but there's just no way in hell that's going to happen. The way things are going, I'm not sure I'll be functional tomorrow either. It's Evil Steve's game day and poker tournament and I had been planning to go.

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Yay! Finally caught up. I'm not sure how many pills it took in total but I'm finally feeling good. Pain is gone and I'm all mellow. It's too bad there's no easy way to just shortcut to this end. I'm not sure how long it's going to last though.

So this past saturday, I popped over to Brian's place for a night of card gaming. Unlike my previous visits to his place, I actually made a good faith attempt to be on time. I wanted to go and take a few photos of the spot where my car had been towed. I finally ended up submitting the challenge for the ticket and I'll be going to court soon. Shit. I just about had a panic attack for a moment there when I got mixed up and thought that the court date might have been for today. It's actually for a week from now. So at some point before then I have to make sure that I have all my ducks in a row, processing some of those pictures and making sure that I get a replacement disabled id. I still have my placard but when I went to search for the id that goes with it a couple days ago, it came up bupkis. I'll need to make a trip to the DMV to sort that out and it's no surprise why I've been putting that off.

Anyway, when I got to Brian's place and finished taking the pictures I needed, the neighborhood ice cream truck rolled up. Yay! I haven't seen an ice cream truck in years and I certainly wasn't going to pass up the opportunity. It was a little disapointing that the truck wasn't playing some incredibly obnoxious kids song designed to summon all the neighborhood rugrats and irritate their parents. Instead, it was some sort of voice recording that I guess serves the same purpose.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always gotten the same thing when it comes to ice cream trucks. My sisters would get various ice cream bars with bubblegum for noses or fruit pops, but this was always my favorite.



I mean, what's not to love? It's patriotic. It's big. It's nothing but sugar and water, mixed with all the artificial colors and flavors known to man. Actually, I'm looking at the ingredient list that goes into one of these things right now and I'm wondering if I should be worried about the 'LOCUST BEAN GUM'.

Anyway, I carried my prize along with me and spent some time with Brian's wife Jessy and their daughter Sammie. We watched the beginning of Troy and chatted for a bit about Greek mythology and Sammie's upcoming birthday party until Brian got back from dropping the other two kids off at his parents' place.

The game featured the usual suspects and was fun like always. I spent most of the game heavily in the loss column but managed to make somewhat of a comeback by the end. I managed to finish up $.80 which is better than nothing. I'm now got oodles of change that I've been packing into all the empty pill bottles I've got lying around. One of these days I'll have to find something to do with it all or get it changed out at a bank.

I'm also happy to report that my car was exactly where I had left it when poker night ended. I avoided all the handicapped parking spots this time around, but you still never know. I mean, I was in Elizabeth after all.

So, I ended up getting almost everything done yesterday that I was supposed to. I zipped around to a couple of gamestops and picked up the psp games I wanted to, did the whole test drive thing (Yay! $50!), and went to meetup and dropped off all the prize support stuff with Lori. I've spent most of the time since then watching Babylon 5 episodes (Up to the middle of season 4 now) and playing Patapon.

My fears of a lack of rhythm have been proven true in large part. I just can't seem to maintain Fever during the game. I think I'm hitting the damn buttons when I'm supposed to but the machine keeps telling I'm wrong. No doubt the game is mistaken, but until they come out with a patch fixing it so that it sees things my way, I'm sort of stuck. It's still addictive as ever so I keep plugging away at it with minimal results.

I also picked up the Nightmare Before Christmas on UMD. It's the second video whozit I've gotten for the PSP. The bundle originally came with a disk that had 4-5 Family Guy episodes on it. I'm one of those people who don't usually tend to watch movies over and over, so in general I've refrained from picking up more video UMDs. I figure I can make an exception for the NBC because it'll give me something to sing along with if I'm ever stuck somewhere and bored.

I should also mention that I got lucky with the test drive whozit. The dealer just signed my slip and filled out all the info without actually requiring me to take a test drive. No doubt, he took one look at me and realized that it would just be a tremendous waste of his time. There was no way I was there to seriously buy a car. On one hand, I'm happy I was able to skip the drive and sales pitch but on another level, it is a bit depressing. I was instantly sized up and judged not new car purchase worthy. Oh well, I'm sure the $50 bestbuy giftcard will more than soothe my ego.

In addition to handing out the prize support at the meetup, I also sat in on a game of Hex-Hex and then of Goa. Things went pretty well overall thought by the end of it, I was feeling sorta bloody and bleh. I ended up passing on the birthday party and that means I'll have to find some time in the next few weeks to pop over to Brian's place and drop off his gift.

I think I've finally decided to stop waiting on Amazon to cough up something I'm interested in. I just got the weekly Gamestop newsletter email and in it, they had a 25% off coupon for used PSP games and UMD movies. I spent some time on their website trying to track down copies. I finally got a hit and then called the place just to double check. So, tommorrow, I will doft my role as a shut-in and actually venture out into the world. No doubt there have been many new and wonderous changes since I last emerged.

Things to do:

• Have breakfast? It might be nice to head out and snag breakfast at the Hometown. I haven't done that in a couple of weeks and it could be a nice way to start the day if I get up at a reasonable hour.


• Buy PSP Games. This is of course the most important part of the venture. With my Edge Card, I'll be getting 35% off any used games and that's not an opertunity to be missed. In addition to picking up Patapon, there are a couple of other items I also want to get. All in all, I'll be visiting 3 different gamestop stores in the area and maybe a couple of Circuit City ones as well.


• Ford Test Drive. Been putting this off for months now. People have finally started getting their gift cards on dealnews and I have to get around to cashing in on this.


• Making copies. Gotta head to Staples and make more copies. Need to claim more of those $5 Pricegrabber rebates. It seems like I put in an inordinate amount of work for those $5's.


• Boardgame Meetup. Curt from Smirk and Dagger came through like gangbusters. The first package must've just been lost in the mail but the replacement arrived yesterday and it's chock full of stuff. It's pretty damn spiffy. Not only will I be able to dole out some more items to the people who participated in the tourney, but there's ample prize support left for when I run Hex-Hex and Cutthroat caverns at ubercon later this month.


• Birthday. Brian's having a birthday party for his son. I should stop by if I can. A lot will depend on how well I'm holding up by then.

So it's not exactly a huge itinerary, but it's more than I often have on my list.

Alrighty, so here's what happened on Saturday.

Everything actually started out pretty spiffy. I had gotten up early and since it was a weekend, my grandmother and mom weren't on Madelaine-duty. We went out for lunch at a local Chinese restaurant for Dim Sum. I <3 but Dim Sum but it gets so pricey so fast. All those little hatch marks on your bill start piling up and the next thing you know you find that the multiplier is in the stratosphere.

After that, I drove them around shopping for a bit and then it was back home. I loafed around for a few hours playing with my PSP and headed over to Brian's place around 6 or so. When I got there, I couldn't find any street parking right away near his place. It's always been sort of hit or miss there. On the plus side though, there are bunches of handicapped parking spaces on his street. They're not sketched out on the road in paint or anything, but they have those little poles with the handicap sign on it and all the various info. I found a spot with a sign, parked, and went to play cards.

It was a lot of fun like always. I did pretty well for most of the night, up a couple bucks here or there. Then we ended up playing 'Acey Duecey'. It's one of those risk assessment games where you randomly deal two cards to each player and then they have to bet an amount to see if the third flippped card lands in between the values of the other two. There's a lot of hand-wringing randomness, ecspecially because if you're wrong, you have to keep paying to the pot. After losing around $7 to it, I finally hit it big on an 'all in' bet and swept it. By the end of the night, I was up something close to $20, which is practical a Scrooge McDuck fortune when you're playing with small change. Hell, most pots in our games ended up being around 50-75 cents in size. There was also a cake, thoughtfully prepared by Brian's wife Jessy as a surprise for my birthday.

All in all, it was a very spiffy night. Eventually though, I needed to get going and around 3am I ventured out only to find my car missing. Unsurprisingly, considering that I had spent an entire night sitting at one place, I was a pretty good bloody mess at the time too. I had really counted on just being able to limp my way to the car and go home. All I could do at that point was head back to their place and we called the cops to figure out what happened. Frankly, I had no clue at the time. I had parked in a clearly marked handicap spot and I had handicap tags on my car. The cops suggested that maybe it had been because some of the handicap spots on the street are reserved for specific handicapped people. If so, they should have an ID number written on them and your tag would have to match for you to park there.

Frankly, I had never heard of any such thing in my life. A handicapped spot is just a handicapped spot, right? Besides, none of the signs said anything about needing a particular ID number. They were all just the generic signs listing fines and crap or said 'Handicap reserved'. There was nothing to do at that point except bum a ride from Brian back home. By that point, it was 4am in the morning and we were lucky enough to hit some huge backup on the highway home. We spent around 30 minutes sitting in bumper to bumper traffic before they ended up clearing the corpses or whatever caused the logjam.

When I finally got home, I was feeling pretty awful. It ended up taking until around 7am to clean myself up and wait for the inflammation and issues to die down. I spent most of that time surfing around trying to find information on what could have possibly caused my car to get yanked and how to get it back the next day. The best part is that the car I'm currently driving is in my Dad's name and I wouldn't even be able to get it out without having to drag him along with me. Not exactly a fun prospect for anyone involved.

Anyway, that's how Saturday ended for me.

There's another poker night at Brian's place tonight and like usual, I'm feeling more than a bit ambivalent about it. On one hand, it's fun and I could win a few bucks. On the other hand, even if the meds work pretty well and I hold up through the night, I'm a bloody achy mess by the end of it. And that's the best case senario. The others involve the meds not kicking in right and I'm in pain throughout the night instead of just by the end of it. Feh. If I had a choice, sometimes I just think I'd stay a shut-in for the rest of my life. I'm not sure the world's all that interesting to compensate for the pain of it all.

Things have been ecspecially sort of problematic the past couple weeks. There's definitely been an uptick in the amount of inflammation and pain I'm getting and it takes the pills hours sometimes to start locking it down. This morning was unpleasant that way. All in all, it was three hours of stabby before I finally hit a plateau and things started to get better. I'm starting to think that I really need to rethink those steroids. They're the only things that have always worked out for me but the last time I took them on a daily basis, the therapeutic effect diminished. I dunno if it was simple tolerance or what, but I'm worried that taking them more often will blunt them.

I sometimes think about going back to the doctors and seeing if there's anything else they can do, but I'm just feeling sort of dejected about it. I'm not sure it's worth the extended pain and problems of general surgery again. Surgery was the suxxors. Sure, life sucks right now, but at least it's a familiar sort of suck. Surgery would add whole different levels of suck to my life. Occassionally I read the blogs of people in the same boat as me and they list therapy after therapy after therapy that they try. I just can't relate to that anymore. They obviously still feel that their life has some value worth salvaging. Personally, on that front, I've just given up.

I got back from playing cards at Brian's place and ended up walking away almost $16 richer. Not bad considering we were playing mostly with large stacks of change. In addition to winning money, which is always appreciated, I was able to keep ahead of most problems by downing codeine and ibuprofen. Everything was pretty spiffy until it was time to get up and leave, which is pretty much the way things end up going. Sitting for any length of time is going to be a problem and that includes playing cards for 5 hours.

I'm glad I actually went, though if I hadn't told Brian I'd be there I would have probably blown it off. I've been running a bit sleep deprived at the moment and it would have been nice to have gotten to bed early if I could have managed it. It's just the way it goes really. There's always an added price of some sort whenever I choose to do anything, ecspecially if it involves heading out. Because of that, it's often easier to just pass on events rather than making the effort. I wouldn't be surprised if I eventually evolved into becoming a complete shut-in one of these days.

BTW, spiffy hand of the night: 5-card draw where I ended up with a wildcard and a buncha useless crap. I just decided to keep the wild and draw 4 new cards. Ended up getting 2 Aces and 2 more Wilds for Quints. Spiffyness.

New Years Eve went off pretty well. Spent most of the day at the Bills playing games and scarfing swedish meatballs and other things. Halfway through their party I went off to visit Brian and his family. I had been planning to spend part of christmas with them but his wife had picked up a stomach flu that day and they decided to postpone the party aspect until yesterday. There was some gift giving and then I got to play some creepy game where a skeleton pops out of a treasure chest everytime you hit a monkey on the head and it sometimes snatches the little magnet whozit off of your piece. From a quick search of boardgame geek, it's apparently called Captain Bone's Gold. I'm be surprised if it didn't freak the hell out of some kids quite frankly. Large skeletons popping out of boxes to snatch at you would usually inspire boogleman fears I would think.

Anyway, I picked up an eeyore doll and a copy of the collector's edition of Mulan from Brian and his family. That makes it the 4th or 5th eeyore I've got kicking around the room somewhere. Randy also gave me a gift while at the Bills, the cast recording of Avenue Q. I'm really looking forward to popping that into the old cd player. It's apparently a musical involving muppets singing songs like 'The internet is for porn' and 'Everyone's a little bit racist'. It sounds like it's right up my alley quite frankly. In fact, words to action, I'm popping it into the computer's cdrom drive right now.

On a sidenote, I've got the Bowling for Soup song 1985 in my head going on repeat. Maybe it's just because it's another year dead and I'm just feeling sort of old. Part of me just wants to put it on repeat for a while or maybe dig through the mp3's and play nothing but 80's songs for a while.

Blah.