Corusca

I’ve slacked majorly regarding written posts here. Partly due to being busy but also because I’ve been lazy.

Some news, none are bombastic revelations, I’m afraid.

I started using Wii Fit again, in an attempt to become healthier. I’m not as heavy as I thought, but close to being above the ideal body mass index interval. Although small, the increase in weight would explain why my knees have been aching more than usual lately. Wii Fit is not as good as practicing Iaido, but for now it’s what’s doable, and Iaido will need to wait until September or so. Anyway, let’s see how long I keep up with this Wii Fit practice. Place your bets!

I stopped playing WoW again. On hiatus until further notice, but haven’t really felt the urge to play at all in a few weeks. Not even the prospect of possibly doing alt/social runs with my old guild on my Paladin seems that interesting, so this will likely be a long hiatus. I feel like playing one of the many single player RPGs that have been tempting me for a while now. Which reminds me, is there a kind soul that can advise me on where to buy The Witcher Enhanced Edition? Both Game.co.uk and Amazon UK are out of sock, and at least Game has been that way for months. What must a girl do to buy the damned game? :\

Thankfully Dragon Age: Origins is supposedly coming out on October, so I’ll get my BioWare single player RPG fix. I haven’t enjoyed a new game THAT much, since Mass Effect, and that’s been well over a year ago. Yeah I’m kind of a BioWare fangirl. With good reason, since there’s not a single game made by them that I disliked (exception being the Jade Empire PC port which was pretty crap and didn’t even seem like their work), and several I enjoyed a lot.

I ended up participating in Cookapalooza!’s blog earlier than anticipated since I made some strawberry ice cream (and this week some more with my sweety) and then some mustard-sauced chicken with mushrooms recently (OM NOM NOM!) and took photos of the process. Of course after these two posts it’s entirely possible I’ll not post anything new for ages there, depending on when I’m in the right mood (and have the time) to cook something fancier and take photos of it.

As you may have noticed from the post before this one, we have a new family member at the farm. Ramá is a six month old Alentejo Mastiff and she’s adorable. I thought I wouldn’t like as much as I would a young puppy, but I was wrong. She’s very sociable, playful and sweet. She’s also very calm considering her age, which is something I appreciate a lot.

I’ve been feeling the need for vacations a lot on the last couple of months. Two weeks to go until a one-week break, and I feel burned out every day. can’t wait to rest my head a bit.

Have a nice week.

It had already crossed my mind how this music’s lyrics fit Bram Stocker’s Dracula so very much, and it looks like someone else did too.

“And though my mind is cut by battles
fought so long ago
I return victorious
I am coming home
And if the paths that I have followed
have tread against the flow
there is no need for sorrow
I am coming home”

I really have to watch this movie again.

I’ve been excited about some of the video games that launch this year, and lately the one that has been getting my eye most of all is Dragon Age. Origins.

BioWare did the right decision and made it a mature rated game, instead of going for a lower rating to aim to a broader market. Good. If I had to take a semi-educated guess, most of the BioWare games’ fans are people over 18 years old anyway, a lot of them being a lot older than that and having played classics such as Baldur’s Gate. So. Mature rating is good, and why do I believe that? Because when you have a mature rating you can show all the blood and guts you want, thus depicting things more realisticaly, and also, no idiots can complain about there being a sex scene in the game (much like what happened with Mass Effect). This despite it being an expected consequence of the plot of the game itself and not just a ‘just because we felt like spicing things up’ scene.

Anyway, there was a new trailer out this week (check it out a bit further down in this post), and it looks awesome, which makes me want to go an pre order the game already. However, since there are still several months until it comes out, I decided to wait a bit longer, because with any luck BioWare will release a special edition or something. Not sure but better to hold off ordering the regular version for a while longer.

Meantime, I’ve noticed there’s a prequel novel for the game – Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne. It’s still out of stock on my regular online bookstore, and that can be a good thing actually after the mountain of books we purchased recently (four more books bought at the fair after the photo was taken) – and yesterday we got Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in hardcover on a cool bargain (we’d both been eyeing that novel for a while now) over at Fnac.

I admit I might be more excited about this one that about SW: TOR, despite the recent announcement of the Bounty Hunter class. I guess the rumors about it being RMT-based game turned me a bit off of it.

People usually do a New Years’ ‘what I want to do this year’ lists, and I did one myself this year, however due to a variety of things I have yet do do much on it.

I have sort of managed to do ‘Read more books and comics’ and ‘Watch more TV shows and animes’, but some of the other points I’ve either not been able to do at all or have failed miserably at so far. :P

Anyway, since there’s a ton of stuff I’ve been postponing due to the wedding planning, I’m going to go crazy here and do the same kind of list but for the ‘after the wedding context’.

So what do I want to achieve after the wedding/honeymoon?

• Start practicing a martial art. Been thinking of Tai Chi for ages now, but the class schedules are always sucky (need a post laboral or weekend schedule). Recently I found out that it’s easier to find weekend schedules for stuff like Iaido or Kendo than for Tai Chi. I’ll just have to warn the instructor about my bad knee so I don’t frak it up permanently. Leaning toward Iaido. Anyone knows of decent martial arts shops in Lisbon? (found one but the Iaitos there were… let’s say ‘pricey’, and we need to get two of those since kitten is also interested in practicing :p)
• ‘Hitting it’ on Cookapalooza!. What’s ‘Cookapalooza!’? So far, still a work-in-progress/prototype idea for a cooking group some friends of mine have decided to create and invited me to. I have some ideas for contributions to it which I’ll only mention AFTER I can actually do them. :p The ‘hitting it’ also includes cooking more elaborate stuff, which I’ve rarely done lately because I’ve been so very tired most the time, and I lack the energy to do anything other than basic stuff so we don’t starve.
• Start having Japanese lessons. Yeah, this one has a minor issue I think. The weekend class schedule of the course I was thinking of attending is probably going to overlapse with the martial arts class. I’ll have to investigate further. The downside? I was thinking of going to a comic book workshop, but that also overlapses with stuff. Decisions, decisions…
• Revamp Corusca. I’ve been wanting to do it for almost a year now. It’s not just a I-want-to-change-how-it-looks thing. It’s a let’s redo the organization, add some new sections and some other stuff I won’t tell you about right now.
• Play pen & paper RPGs. Been feeling like playing Dungeons & Dragons on a semi-regular basis for a while now. May opt to look for rotating between hosting events and doing them on a store where one can play for a few hours or something (like we used to on Devir), just so we’re not always stuck inside our house, so to speak. I like varying my surroundings or I end up heading toward depression. :p I’m completely out of the loop regarding these types of stores in the general Lisbon area – since Devir’s large store closed, I have no clue what are the current tabletop/card games/RPG hangout places. Anyone knows?
• Redecorate -or simply decorate- some parts of our house. The office is most likely getting a cool new desk, and we’re ‘modding’ it. Not a huge mod, a simple, pretty one. The kitchen needs some shelves so we can place some new plants there and host the ones we already have. The hall will probably get a new, discreet bookshelf.  (We need a new bookshelf. So many books, so little book-keeping space… ) And there will be all around framing of pretty images, movie posters and photos, so we hang them in our houses’ bare walls.

I’m probably forgetting something but if I don’t stop writing now, this will turn into a War & Peace-length text. Have a nice week.

Recorded by miss V on a very pleasent, unplanned evening with chinese food, starbucks decaf, no booze, and our awesome singing.

Tatadataaaaaaaaaaaaaa tatadaaaaaaa! Tatadataaaaaaaaaa! ta tada da daaaaaaaaaa!

It’s now less than two months until our wedding, and we still have craploads of stuff to do. :p

I don’t have time for anything, I’ve slacked in my health department a bit. Something I really shouldn’t do, since I feel like I’m playing ‘mommy’ to my own mother and telling her she should eat properly. She doesn’t really listen to me, and it’s frustrating but not unexpected. What she has is an aneurysm (to be confirmed 100% later on today), and it’s bigger than anticipated. So she should keep off salty food and such. But no. Let’s eat curry and spicy stuff. That will surely help. *sigh*

Also trying to play mommy to my grandmother who has a ton of signs of depression, including losing 13 kilograms in a short amount of time. I can’t do much about this, except call her on the phone, since she lives over 300Km away from me. This sucks.

Other than doing one million things for the wedding, we’ve managed to go to this year’s Lisbon Book Faire, where we bought a load of books in Portuguese for a decent price. I usually read in English since it’s usually half the price of the equivalent Portuguese editions, but missed reading in Portuguese. Now I can, because we got a grand total of seven novels this past Friday, including two I’ve been wanting to read for ages – Elric novels, published here by Saída de Emergência. I’m liking it so far, so I’ll probably pass by the Faire once more and get the third novel, and maybe try out a Conan novel or so.

About Elric – I’m liking that it’s not yet another Tolkien clone or derivate… It was written at a time where Tolkien wasn’t actually popular, or regarded in the (imho) extremely overrated fashion that he is today. To me, his writing is often plain boring – yawn – gief LOTR movies instead. So, we get a different kind of fantasy. So far no elves, dwarves or other stuff that always seems present in most fantasy novels written nowadays. Melikes. Give me more of that, because before this ‘discovery’, the only different fantasy I’ve read was George R.R. Martin’s stuff, which is really good, but I like to vary my readings. Much in the same way I like watching several TV shows concurrently – right now, Bones, House, and Fringe (Galactica too, but the show’s over).

Anyway, yeah, gotta go to Lisbon’s Book Faire again soon. One day after work, maybe, so I get a few more cool-priced books in my mother language.

At work, stuff’s complicated. I’m sick of configuring stuff that won’t work, and doing a million things at the same time. I need a break. My dizziness is not better, even though I’ve already taken all the pills the doctor had ordered. I should really schedule a visit to the medical facilities here. I know the dizzy stuff is probably related to stress/anxiety, but not really sure what I should do about it. *sigh*

Oh yeah, not even giving a rats’ arse about WoW (cut my WoW time by 90%). Doing dailies when I can, not even doing heroics with the Paladin (which I was enjoying a lot). Hopefully during this pause of mine everyone else will finally learn how to do the very complicated thing that is – DO NOT STAND IN THE BLUE FIRE on the Razorscale encounter. Complicated stuff really. Much like the Aran DO NOT MOVE WHILE IN THE CIRCLES OF FIRE. Rocket science! :p

Anyway, have a nice week. I’ll do my best to have one also.

Books Purchased at the 2009 Lisbon Book Fair. Very cool promotions made it worthwhile for us to get these in portuguese instead of english (which is usually cheaper).

A good thing, since I miss reading in portuguese and now I don’t have an excuse not to. Starting with ‘Elric’.