Corusca

As you read this, I’m probably too busy playing Torchlight to write a proper review, or at least, a mini review of the game.

As such I leave you with this more recent trailer.

Iaido. We’ve had our first class this Saturday, and we liked it. I think the instructor who was teaching us beginners was thinking that we might get bored of the class because it mostly consisted of repeating the same exercise (two variations of it) for the whole class. But it wasn’t boring, and we were already expecting to have to repeat the same things over and over, since it’s usually what happens in martial arts training.

In fact, Tai Chi was the one which was a bit of a surprise for us, since the teaching method, despite including some repetition, does not work the same way as other martial arts. While in Iaido we will be repeating the exact same thing until we do it right, and it’s natural to us, in Tai Chi, we repeat a small sequence of moves a few times, and then add it to another sequence we learned earlier and repeat that a few times also, and work on the ‘right form’ of doing it later.

We already got our bokkens, and kneepads. Hakamas an Gis will be harder to get, and I’ll have to investigate where we can buy them, since hakamas are always sold out at Decathlon.

Have a nice weekend.

No this is not the title of a crappy self-help book. This is a post about me taking slow, but steady steps toward becoming who I want myself to be.

The chaos that was the wedding planning, which lasted nearly a year is fading away. Most of the loose ends, like fixing my wedding ring, have been dealt with and most of what’s left has to do with the photos. In short, mostly we still need to meet with the photographer a few times for the album and such.

Anyway, now we’re starting to do the stuff we’d been putting off.

The still not started steps toward this objective, include me starting to draw and write again. I haven’t done an illustration in ages and have lost most of the training skill benefits I’d gathered when I practiced before.

I’ve wanted to do physical activity in the form of martial arts for a while, and I’ve started Tai Chi lessons, as well as Iaido lessons. so far I’m enjoying both and don’t foresee me giving up on either as what would likely happen if I subscribed to a gym. Being a hamster by running or cycling on the same spot for hours on end, doesn’t appeal to me at all. Same goes for aerobics and such since, I’m neither learning anything as I’m exercising not am I enjoying a nice view while exercising.

Which leads me to…

Wanting to have occasional weekend bicycle rides with my sweetie and hopefully also some friends. I’ll need to practically relearn how to ride it again, but this part of the plan will need to be put on hold for a few more months, since right now we’re taking care of our other physical activities’ equipment. Between that, the new PC for kitten and my new graphics card (an ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB GDDR5 PCIe), plus the soon-to-happen purchase of our new office desk (and then comes Christmas and all the gifts that need buying :p), we will have to be restraining our expenses for a bit. Also, I’d prefer not to ride the bike when it’s cold and raining, so Spring seems like the most adequate time to start. ;)

Reading more? Check! In the last couple of months I’ve read at least four novels, plus a few comics (not many, I admit).

We’re also organizing and decorating the house more to our liking, even though IKEA, sadly, has not boon cooperating by keeping ‘our’ desk top out of stock. It seems that it will be in stock this week, so let’s see how that goes.

I’ve been wanting write letters and send them via smail to my grandma. I can hardly spend any time with her so, since she lives so far, writing to her about what I’ve been up to, and with some photos, seems like a good way to share what I’m doing. This would serve as a double purpose, to give her a morale boost, since she has to deal with a lot of stress in her current situation and probably feels lonely a lot. Plus she’s had eye surgery in one of her eyes which is recovering nicely (I’m hoping the other one goes the same way), and it will be nice for her to be able to read things well again.

Oh, and we recently started playing video games again, which is something we hadn’t really done in ages. A bit here and there, but never a couple of consecutive hours or anything. I missed playing games, and do notice the plural there, since playing WoW  only had become repetitive and uninteresting. Aside from my side project of slowly leveling my horde Paladin, that is, and even that I haven’t done in ages since I’m not even subscribed for over a month now.

Speaking of games, one of my next ’steps’ is to attend one of the Portuguese boardgamers group gaming session.It’s a scene I want to check out. I used to go to Devir with some friends to play RPGs, and to another store to play card games, but both are gone now. Well, one remains but smaller and with no huge basement where to play. I kind of miss immersing myself into that sort of environment, even though I’d prefer getting a group for D&D sessions instead of board games.

I’m surely forgetting several things I want to do on this path to turning myself into what I want to be but here are the main ones.

My Sunday afternoon’s amusement for a couple of hours was Batman: Arkham Asylum. So far, I’m liking it, especially the visual of it which I’m finding very pleasant.

I went to BD Amadora and Ramón Pérez was there. I asked him to autograph my copy of TX Comics and also if he could make me a Darth Vader drawing. The result was awesome, and will be framed and put on our home office wall.

I’m really liking this song, awesome epic music and lyrics. And this fan-made video is pretty cool too.

The one game I’ve been exited about this year, Dragon Age: Origins, is less than three weeks away from launch.

This means I’ll need to upgrade my PC’s graphics card in a couple of weeks at most, and install the RAM I purchased ages ago and ended up never installing (I just hope it’s not defective :P). It will also mean migrating my desktop PC to the other house, where I spend most of my time, and start using my laptop on the place which currently houses the desktop.

The idea was to have our new desk-for-two at our place by the time my desktop was there – IKEA sadly doesn’t have the kitchen table in the size we wanted to act as a double desk anymore. But we’ve always been busy lately, at IKEA-open hours, and as such we’ve been postponing the ordering the desk from IKEA part of the thing. I just hope they do deliveries on weekends or at the end of other weekdays.

This switching the PCs operation also involves relocating our current desks, so I’m going to check if they would be useful in our storage room when they aren’t needed anymore, since we’ll need to relocate some old hardware to the storage anyway and it wouldn’t be great if they were just on the floor.

Anyway, the graphics card I’ll likely get is a GTX 275 55NM 896MB GDDR3 -N1170. Which is sold out at the store where we were planning to get it from at the moment. Hm. I’m only planning on using around 200 euros at most to upgrade the graphics card, so I’ll have to analyze my options.