Monday's Revenge

Ahh, another lovely Monday morning! (pausing to puke)

If I believed in such things, I would swear Mondays are the work of Satan. They are the Dark One's revenge upon humankind for causing his humiliating downfall and eternal suffering. (That and "The Bachelor". Only a being of true evil could create such heinous concepts!) Ah well, forgive my bitching; I started exercising this morning for the first time in. . . well, at least I started, okay? I am sore, tired, and feeling just a wee bit cranky because I was (forcibly!) shown exactly how out of shape I really am. It is at times like this that I very much want to go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and forget that the very concept of Monday was ever invented.

The weekend was fun though. It poured non-stop here in Jersey (in fact, we got some very serious flooding) so I couldn't do any of the yardwork the wife wanted done (I was SO disappointed!). Instead, I spent the entire weekend with my son, demolishing legions of evil orcs, trolls, and sundry other baddies on his PS2. We have been playing "LOTR Third Age" together whenever we have a few free moments (need more of those!) and this weekend was a ton of fun. We played straight through with only a few breaks for food and a couple of hours sleep. We devastated Middle Earth and laughed our butts off along the way. The wife doesn't understand how we could spend so much time playing a video game. She gets bored with them after about 20 minutes. Quite frankly, I do to. . . unless I'm playing with my son.

If you've never taken the time to sit and play a video game with your kids, I strongly recommend it. The game is okay, but the time spent talking and laughing with them is priceless. As we play, my son and I have more fun teasing and torturing each other and making fun of each others skills (or in my case: lack of!) and abusing the characters on screen than we do with the playing. For example: my son was playing the "Knight-in-Shining Armor" character, a huge guy in more metal than a Sherman Tank and wearing a huge helm with flowing white wings on it. He has some very heroic name on screen, but my son immediately re-titled him: "Big Chief Feather Head of the Tin-Can Tuna Clan". We also created various battle cries and voices to go along with our characters. It was an extended version of make-believe with a whole lot of laughter, sword fights, and explosions mixed in. Great weekend!

I did get some writing done as well; a few thousand words on GS add-ins (It's handwritten so I don't have an exact count) and a few pages of line edits. Speaking of writing, Holly Lisle had a great post on "Why do you write". It's some pretty interesting stuff. I also got a big kick out of her article on profanity. Reminded me of my Aunt Margie. She was a tough old broad who cursed like a truck driver. My mother -a very old fashioned Roman Catholic lady- was always mortified by her choice of colorful adjectives and was forever rushing us children out of the room when Aunt Marge would start popping off. I remember a conversation I had with my Aunt about it once. She was staying at our house and it was very late (she was an insomniac). I was about 14 and we were the only two awake in the house:

"Your mother doesn't like me very much," she said.
"What makes you say that," I asked.
"She gets mad and leaves the room when I curse. It's ridiculous. Just because I say 'fuck' once in a while doesn't make me a bad person and it doesn't offend God like she says. God's not stupid, he knows exactly what I mean no matter what words I use. I could say 'fudge' or 'screw' and that would make your mom happy but God still knows I mean 'fuck', so I just say 'fuck'. She says 'fudge' and means the same thing, I'm just more honest about it."

I'm paraphrasing of course, but that was the gist of it. Thinking about that always makes me smile. My Aunt was one hell of a woman! I learned a lot from her.

The boy and I also watched the season finale of "Battlestar Galactica" Friday night. Oh man, that was some great TV!! I love that the show has such a dark and desperate edge to it. That was always missing from the original. I loved the first series as a kid but even then I wondered how the main characters could seem so happy-go-lucky when their entire civilization had been destroyed and they were still being hunted. The new show provides a lot of twists and solid back story. It even has a solid reasoning behnd why the bad guys are pursuing the good guys. (The scary part is that it's getting harder to figure if the baddies are actually bad at all or just pursuing a path necessary for their own survival as a species!) The cliffhanger at the end caught me completely by surprise (no spoilers here: go watch it!) and that almost never happens on TV. My son sat there with a glazed look on his face and his jaw hanging open for a good two minutes after he saw it. That's good story telling. Lee Goldberg also had some thoughts on the finale on his Blog. Don't worry Lee, you're not the only one who becomes a fan-boy whenever this show is on!

Later!