Nothing left to hide

March – Start full time employment at work and did wedding planning.

April – More and more work. I can’t really think of much else that wouldn’t be me just talking about things at work… which is probably only interesting to me.

May – Work is really picking up, involved in projects and always super busy doing stuff which is great. This weekend is my old Childhood friend’s wedding, so I’ll be back in Vancouver this coming weekend.  I was sick a few days last week and had to actually take two sick days.  I started play through, of all the games in the world, Jade Empire and really enjoyed it.  After going through the first KOTOR and loving it I found that as I’ve matured I enjoy the Jade Empire perspective on the whole Bioware RPG game. Far more fast paced, an intersting active battle system, leveling up is streamline, no items or gear, just a couple simple concepts for adding increased character status.  Only 3 characters classes and plenty of fighting styles to choose from.  The quests don’t branch out too much and they finish quickly and interstingly instead of say KOTOR where you sit around watching some movies for 10 minutes. While I do enjoy a narrative, I find that it’s nicer to be engaged in smaller intervals then the very drawn out stuff you’ll see in KOTOR.  Anyway, I really enjoyed it and it was the last game I’ve actually beaten.

Jen’s brother came up to visit us and his Amtrak Cascades North bound to Seattle hit a tree.  Sounds scary right? It was actually a small sappling that fell down on the track right as they came by. This is only about 45 minutes North of Vancouver so they hadn’t been on the train for too long at this point, but the entire ordeal takes several hours to resolve.  They can’t just check it out and keep rolling, of course not, Amtrak super great service is to sit there for almost 4 or 5 hours. They stay there so long that they have to switch crews because the shift was about to end and god forbid they work more then 8 hours, so they switch to another crew which the whole train has to wait for.  Talk about not taking ownership of a problem… anyway they eventually roll out of their, but they never offer any compensation for basically only moving these people 1 hour north from the first stop and then letting them sit for 6 hours.  They denied the request of a bus to move people out, no free food, not vouchers for tickets.  He left Vancouver around 8 PM Friday and arrived in Seattle at 4 AM Saturday.  With gas prices as high as they are I STILL wouldn’t take Amtrak down to Vancouver, especially after this astounding display of service.

That same weekend we tried to go out to the Seattle Film Festival which I wasn’t looking forward to at all.  Why would I not want to enjoy the SFF you may ask? Well… you think about what this endeavor will take and realize that the fun versus work factor is completely out of whack.  Due to the fact that the Festival is a limited time event that happens once a year, it’s held in venues that don’t really support this level of customers interaction.  These screening theaters don’t have the parking, the staff, the anything to handle this sort of volume.  Standing in line, buying ticket in advanced, only works well when whoever is doing it, does it all the time, like the Paramount, as can be seen by our  crappy experience.  We buy tickets in advance, we show up 30 minutes early, we move swiftly through the very long line, and they over sell the theater.  They counted seats wrong and sold more then they had despite denying festival pass owners seats and only allowing those who bought tickets for the showing to have seats.  Not even single seats were left, and 15 people including us sat in the back and were given free vouchers.  While we were at least compensated in some way, we cannot see the film since the other showings were already sold out, we can’t see any other movies since we don’t have time later in the week… so we have 6 vouchers that are useless to us.

Anyway, my WoW guy is 68 thanks to Jen’s brother and soon enough he should get me to 70… excellent.