it's valentine's day, and jen just called to tell me that her flowers have arrived. we're going to a reasonably nice dinner tonight, but overall it's going to be pretty low key. i can't say i have any fondness for valentine's day, but i do have quite a fondness for jen.

so i don't know if you heard, but we had a blizzard on sunday. a veritable nor'easter! 19 inches of snow in boston, 22 inches in central park, woe is all of us. except, here's the thing. the snow came on a sunday, boston did an incredibly good job of clearing the roads, and it took me... maybe 5 extra minutes to get in to work on monday morning. while it did lead to me slipping for the first (and if history is any indicator, only) time this winter season, it really didn't do much else as long as you didn't drive on sunday when it was all coming down. also, it's going to be somewhere between the 40s and 50s today, tomorrow, and thursday. oh, and friday. and friday its going to rain. let's see how fast 18 inches of snow can turn into a crap load of water!

so before i get into my epic spill, let me get this rant off my chest. all day thursday, friday, and saturday, we were told that we were facing a blizzard - anywhere from 6 to 12 inches of snow and huge gusts of wind. so can someone PLEASE explain to me why we needed live coverage of snow falling on sunday, all day. abc and nbc even went so far as to supplant their regularly scheduled programming (which included nba basketball) to tell me that ... it was snowing outside and it wasn't done snowing yet. thanks, you fuckheads. really, thanks a lot. cbs handled it the best and it was still awful - a little ticker across the bottom of the illinois-osu game and constant updates that supplanted advertisements. and sometimes they went splitscreen and overrode the basketball game audio. i mean, everyone knows local news is sensationalist and stupid, but that shit was possibly the dumbest thing i've ever encountered with these dumb boston-area tv stations. and that includes the time that the local abc aired some the football game between west virginia and east carolina instead of the osu-iowa game because they had a deal in place that let them air patriots sunday night nfl games if they showed big east football games. anyways, thank you local news for being complete jackass idiots.

so yesterday i get home from work/gym. i'm wearing a hooded sweatshirt and shorts. i've got a backpack with a few groceries in it, including a thing of milk. i have my gym bag over my right shoulder, and i'm carrying a snow shovel back inside, because i had to shovel my car out in the morning (it snowed a little, right) and just took it in the car for the day instead of going back into my apartment. anyways, this is the state i'm in, and i'm a little sore because i'm a giant wuss and can't do lower back exercises for more than three seconds without hurting. so from my parking lot i have to walk down 3 little steps, then go underneath the building to the back door, and let myself in there and go up a flight of stairs to my floor (which is actually the first floor, if you can believe it). so i take the first set of steps, and on the third one, woosh up goes my foot and bam down i fall on my back. just totally wiped out. and yet, somehow, i didn't bruise anything. i was left with a moderate scrape on my right leg... on TOP of my right leg, and a slight protuberance (ha ha (sebben style)) on my right elbow. i think i cut myself with the snow shovel. anyways, it was epic, but all i got were those two injuries, none of the groceries broke, including the milk somehow, even though i think it also broke my fall, and i didn't die. it was a freaking miracle. though my entire left side was covered in snow, which kinda sucked.

i would be remiss to not mention the season (series?) finale of one of my favorite shows, arrested development. last friday was the fox finale, at least. or, i think it was. no one really knows where that show is going... might be fox, might be showtime, might be dead. given the content of s03e13 ("Development Arrested" or "Harboring Resentment"), i would guess the show's done. but that's just a guess. it was a great run, and i can't wait for season 3 dvds. also if you have no idea what i'm talking about, you are part of the problem.

let's continue these ramblings, yeah? i wrote an email to zach yesterday with some video game content, something severely lacking from this site as of late. mostly because civ4 was the only video game i was touching for a long time there. anyways, let's look at what i wrote zach

i picked up tiger woods 06 for xbox, it's pretty fun. i got resident evil 4 because it was 20 bucks and look at the ratings for that freakin game. i worked some more on metroid prime 2 - i'd say i'm 75% done with that game... maybe closer to 66%. but on the down slope, which is nice. if i beat that and then finally beat paper mario, i'll be ready to move into the horror genre games that i got just based on their amazing ratings (resident evil 4, eternal darkness)

so allow me to expound a bit. i got tiger woods 06 for two reasons, neither involve playing by myself. one is to play with jen, who pushed in favor of the game when i told her i was considering it. really, when your girlfriend is voting in favor of video games, you shouldn't argue with her. second was to play online, which hasn't happened just yet, but it will soon. i need to keep my push with metroid prime 2 going. both metroid prime games are so fucking incredible, it's really too bad that people discounted the gamecube so long ago and will never get to try them out. kind of like arrested development in a sense, i guess. so sad.

i realized just now that i haven't mentioned the soccer challenge on elscorcho yet, though i have told a few of you about it. this is how it worked: it's a fifa 06 challenge encompassing 16 games with four distinct groups of games - premiership, serie a (italian), la liga (spanish), and 'rest of the world' (france and germany, basically). so geoff and i would draft 16 teams a piece. sundays are premiership days, so we would have to put forth a premiership team on sundays. tuesdays are la liga, thursdays are serie a, and saturdays are rest of the world. it's full-bodied challenge, to say the least, starting with the drafting, then with the order in which we put out our teams, and then finally in the actual games.

i'm not one to talk shit, but feel free to look at the results to date (halfway through the schedule) here.

i'm working on other challenges - a golf one, and possibly a supermarathon one that crosses over 3+ video games. i'll post them as they happen.

here's another mini-story, taken straight from googletalk (again with zach):

me: yesterday i was driving to work
zach: ok
me: and i came to a traffic circle
and this woman was going through the circle
with a kid in the back seat
clearly stuck with him due to the snow
cuz he woulda been in school i'm sure
so anyways, the woman is going slow as hell
and i can tell she seems to think that people coming IN to the circle have the right of way
and not people already in the circle
so she's going slow and finally gets by me
and i start accelerating
only to break suddently because shes stopped right in front of me, still in the circle, waiting for someone to come in to the circle
and let me fucking tell you
i laid on that horn
for like
15 seconds solid
until she got out of the way
then i honked some more as i drove by her
and then 30 seconds later i thought that my honking had been too harsh
and i felt bad
is that weird?

feel free to chide me in comments. i'm a complete asshole on the road now. it's half unfortunate, and half thank-god-cuz-otherwise-i'd-never-get-anywhere.

i am going to dc this weekend. jen is also going, but i'm not going with jen per se, even though we're taking a flight down together. geoff is flying in from kc and i'm supposed to crash over at trilling's house. nick and phil are roaming the greater DC area, so hopefully i'll meet up with them one night, and i guess there's a slight chance of rosskamm being down from nyc, but we'll see if he actually follows through on that. it should be a cool weekend - maybe i'll post pictures? one can only hope.

let me leave off this post with a question: i am struggling with whether or not i should put the effort in to the pixies, as a band. on one hand, they helped define alternative music (which is why i listened to the velvet underground recently) and they have a few songs that are pretty sweet. on the other hand, if i was doing this in 8th grade it woulda been ahead of its time, but now its clearly way too late to get in on the whole pixies thing. so what happens when you totally miss a band? do you get in on the whole thing way too late, or do you just accept it and move on, learning from the experience that you should maybe pay more attention to bands that have the potential to be completely groundbreaking?

thanks for indulging me.