Jennifer's 365 Project

Today is a much less action-packed day than yesterday. But that's ok.  That's how Sundays (or in this case Monday) are supposed to be.

So I made some strawberry pancakes for breakfast and then set about to homework and blog post work.  Chris spent a few hours helping me create a flash file for a screenshot tips post that I'm working on.  I guess I should say he all but did the entire thing. He was very patient - which is great because I'm a horribly impatient student.

I made some chocolate chip cookies and hung out a bit enjoying the weather. It has been cooler this weekend - which means no air conditioning running and Leki is able to enjoy his cat tower.  He's also been able to enjoy lurking in all of the various open windows.  I have to make a periodic circuit through the apartment to make sure he's not damaging any of the screens after his escape last year (which apparently I never blogged about).

Now I'm just looking forward to finishing up the night playing some of the open beta of Final Fantasy XIV. It's still a little nuts in terms of lag, but stumbled across an "enable hardware mouse" patch someone wrote that fixes the mouse lag and makes it more playable.

The weather was warmer and the sun was shining so we headed out in the morning to PJ Hoffmaster State Park.

We made a few stops before we hit the park, checking out a comic store and the Lakes Mall.

PJ Hoffmaster was great.  Not too hot, not too cold.  The only real complaint I had was the sand.  I'm not a huge fan of climbing sand dunes or hiking on sand, but that's to be expected when you go to a beach.  Luckily the sandy portion of the Walk-A-Mile trail was short and we did minimal dune climbing.

Since it's the last day of the week for it, Chris and I decided to head down to the Fulton Street Farmers Market to see if there was anything tasty around.

There were plenty of tasty foods, from fruits and vegetables to baked goods.  There were also lots of flowers and a few stalls that sold hand-crafted jewelry as well.

It was fairly busy, which is to be expected on a holiday weekend.  Lots of tasty piles of fruit but I couldn't think of what I would do with a pint of blueberries or 8 peaches.  Still, if I need to make a pie or anything anytime soon I know where to go.

<-- This is a very beefy mouse.  It's not your average mouse. It's a Razer Naga mouse.  It has 17 customizable buttons.  Why? It's designed for computer gaming, but you can also program the buttons for anything.  So if you do a lot of work in photoshop or something else you can map those items to the individual buttons. Yeah, I know. It's excessive. But it's cool (and it glows blue, so extra brownie points).

Today has been a relatively windy and overcast kind of day.  I'd hoped to get out to the PJ Hoffmaster park and take some photos for the Lord of the Rings Online photo comparison blog, but the rain made me think better of it.

Of course in the afternoon there was a long dry period. So Chris and I took a long walk (just under 6 miles) and enjoyed the cooler weather.  We hit the overpriced used computer store on 28th while we were out and about.

I also decided to make a mithra-reskin on Gyshal.  I tried to maker her as orange as possible and named her after Leki.  She's way cooler and more graceful though. Well..and female...

Yeah, I could talk about the nap I took, the errands we ran, the laundry we did, or the 4th SATA drive I installed in my main desktop.  I could have even snapped photos of all of that.  But no - I completely forgot.  I spent most of the day waiting patiently until other things were finished up (since the weather was so lackluster for the first day of vacation) to play the open beta of Final Fantasy XIV.

It's a beautiful game.  I love Lord of the Rings Online. I love it to death and I think it's stellar but this game is newer and at first glance has a bit more detail going on - graphics-wise.

So yeah, it's pretty.  And if you're a fan of Final Fantasy XI then you'll probably feel at home and love the feel of this game.  As for me - I spent most of the time annoyed at how menu-intense the game is, just like Final Fantasy XI.

Still, there are plenty more days left in the open beta so I'm going to keep trying and get over the annoyance with the controls to try to enjoy the game. And maybe tomorrow I'll figure out how to turn off the UI for better screenshots...

Right now it's a game that both Chris and I are new to which means I don't have an advantage over him like I do in Lord of the Rings in terms of mechanics and quest familiarity.  So that's awesome.

The day was a crazy whirlwind of activity.  I spent all day Monday and Tuesday in training so that left me with Wednesday to get everything in order before I leave for vacation until after Labor Day.

That also means I didn't take a moment to think about a photo for this blog until about 11pm.

So what are you looking at? The "this page cannot be displayed" screen I kept getting trying to register for the Final Fantasy XIV open beta that launched at 10pm today.

I finally received the beta key in my email a little after 11pm, which meant I could go to sleep.  I'd have tried it in the morning but I wouldn't be surprised if Square-Enix closed the beta key giveaway because of the number of people already signed up.

What better way to celebrate the last free Tuesday before next semester begins (and our tradition of Tuesday-night movies is on hold for a few months) than to see Flash Gordon?

I'd never watched the campy film, riddled with Freddie Mercury's voice thanks to an all Queen soundtrack.  When I was little I had caught a piece of it when my dad was watching it and I spent a very long time thinking Flash Gordon and The Flash were the same (hey, the word flash and the color red were involved here people).

Needless to say I was set right tonight.  It was a crazy movie, and I'm glad I finally saw it - if only to finally get some popculture references.

Leki had a pretty rough day.  His feeding has been scaled back and he's not fully adjusted to the new 1/2c (total) diet.  He's kind of a pig with food and he'd started ramping up his eating to eating all of the 3/4c he was receiving so we adjusted the auto-feeder.

So Leki spent most of the evening terrorizing the both of us and then running over to the food dish quickly, to see if anything fell out.

Luckily he hasn't figure out how to break into the top food portion...yet.