Paul has taken this week as part of his vacation. It’s been quite a lot of fun. We thought about heading out of town, but instead chose to stay local. I was hoping to learn a little more about where we live, and I’ve succeeded. For instance, we discovered a Dairy Queen just a few miles away. This happens to be a Big Deal since we’ve only found one other in the metroplex these three (or is it four-?) years we’ve lived here. And that one was so awful, we’ve never been back. This means we can only get a blizzard fix when we go out of town to visit family. Tragic.

Anyway, earlier this week we spent two of our days fishing. The first day, we spent about two hours in the afternoon at a nearby lake. I was the only one who caught anything. In fact, the first catch was a beer can.

You CAN’T litter.

My second catch was a white bass. It was shiny, and a lot easier to reel in than the previously mentioned beer can. The second day at the lake was a lot more interesting. We started by waking up way too early and spending about four hours at the lake. We both caught about half a dozen fish each. I only caught striped bass, but two of them were considerably larger than the others. Paul managed to catch a catfish and I’m not sure who was the most surprised: Paul, me, or the fish. I also managed to catch a shoelace and a partially disintegrated t-shirt.

The time we haven’t been spending at the lake we’ve been spending at the theater, playing games, reading books, and catching up on things we’ve been meaning to do for awhile. It’s been a nice change of pace.

I am now pretty much forbidden to play Animal Crossing on my DS late at night and it’s all because of the events of yesterday evening. I chose to play the game at night to look for what I thought was a Luna Moth (It turned out to be a Japanese Oak Silk moth) and to see if I could find the menacing bug that knocked my character out and deposited her at the front door of the house in the game. Unfortunately while I was strolling along through town at night a very large and very red scorpion came out of absolutely nowhere and attacked my character. Once again, the screen went black and the character was placed in front of her own house. I was so surprised by the sudden appearance of the scorpion that I actually screamed rather loudly. It’s possible that I was loud enough to wake up a few of my neighbors, and I may have caused Paul to go temporarily deaf in one ear. (He was sitting next to me playing Castlevania.). After this, I became completely determined to find the ugly little blighter, capture him, and add him to the bug collection in the game’s museum.

Fate conspired against me. I came across the scorpion again about 5 minutes later, but the exact same thing happened: it came out of nowhere, it was large and red, my character didn’t stand a chance. And yes, another very loud and embarrassing scream escaped me.

A pattern develops, except this time I’m upset enough that my eyes begin watering. I also decide that in order to preserve Paul’s poor eardrums, and to keep our neighbors from calling 911 that Paul has to catch it for me. Paul has a much cooler head on his shoulders, and within no time at all he adds a scorpion to the museum collection.

As a result, I am no longer allowed to play Animal Crossing at night for my sudden inexplicable fear of scorpions, which thankfully does not carry over into real life.

For the past two days, during the dull moments of life, I’ve been playing Animal Crossing on my DS. I had stopped playing in late March for a combination of reasons; lack of interest in the game, the realization that it was sucking time away from my day, and the business of real life. So now I’ve taken it up again with a vengeance. And strange things have been going on in the game. Things that I never encountered in the Gamecube version, though that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. The biggest of which occurred last night. I saw a large bug on the ground, there was cloud cover and the moon was half full, so not the best lighting. When I swung my net to catch, I missed … and then the nasty little thing scurried across the ground and attacked my character. My little person fainted, the screen went black and then my character was briefly laying unconscious in front of the house before coming to as if nothing had ever happened.

It freaked me out a bit, and I decided to stop for the night just in case I was going to have to deal with the sudden appearance of vampires or if the UFO that keeps flying across the sky (and I can never seem to hit with my pathetic little slingshot) was going to start abducting the citizens from my town. It was late, and I just wasn’t prepared to deal with any more surprises.

It took me about a year (that’s when I re-set things) but I’m finally leet. Need proof?

Fairly impressive, since I haven’t said anything useful here in a very long time. Actually, I haven’t been blessing this place with useless ramblings either. My site traffic has dwindled to about one person a day, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s probably my grandmother.

And with that information I just destroyed whatever 1337n3$$ I’d achieved.