(He was the only Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” anchor I could ever stand.  Well, of the ones I got to see, anyway.  I’m not that old, y’see, to have seen Dan Akyroyd.)

While Jodi was out for the weekend at a belly-dancing conference thing, I got to packing my basement.  I’ve packed ten boxes of books, media, computer bits, etc., so far, and there’s no end in sight to what still needs to be packed.  Boy do I hate packing.  With the intensity of a thousand suns.  This’d better be the last time I have to do it.

The mortgage officially came through, so all our ducks are lining up in a neat little row.  On Tuesday we have an inspector going to check things out, and though I doubt there’s going to be anything wrong with the place, enough people have nagged at me that I’m getting a family friend who’s qualified to go inspect the place.  Honestly, I would have been inclined not to bother despite all the nagging, save for the seller’s repeated and somewhat suspicious insistence that it’s absolutely unnecessary.  One of those cases where the more protest you make, the more likely I am to want to follow through.

I also tried out Sins of a Solar Empire.  As real-time sims go, excellent.  Probably better as a multiplayer game, though.  There wasn’t a single player campaign so I’m not really drawn to continue playing it.  That’s okay, because in packing my basement I rediscovered my “40 Years of Spider-Man” boxed set of CDs — PDF scans of the first 40 years of The Amazing Spider-Man — which will keep me occupied for a while.  I’d read it up til 1983 before I got distracted by other stuff my first time through, so I’m picking it up from there.  Of course, reading it sequentially leaves out a few story arcs, given that the Spider-Man series actually had more than one title running concurrently — Amazing, Spectacular, Web Of… and probably a few others.  I dunno.  If I had to multitask, juggle, that many ongoing villain clashes all at once, I would get out of the hero business in a hurry and do something more productive with my life, personally.  There’s a hell of a lot you could accomplish with super-strength, agility, and the ability to stick to walls.  You could build a house, for instance.  Or lift one.  Or climb onto the roof and do a little tap-dance.  Okay, so they wouldn’t all be productive, I guess.  But they’d be a hell of a lot less stressful than having to fight the Kingpin, Sandman, Electro, Kraven, and the Hobgoblin all simultaneously.

Anyway, yeah.  Productive weekend.  I didn’t get a hell of a lot of sleep though.  I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and I know it’s not because of the heat.  Stress, most likely.

Did I mention I got a raise on Friday?  No, I didn’t.  Mention it I mean, because I actually did get a raise, and it wasn’t just a cost-of-living increase like it’s been in the past.  Don’t look at me like that — I know exactly how unlikely what I just said is the truth.  But hey, there’s a first time for everything.

Also, Dr. Horrible was everything I hoped it would be.  My favorite song was the last one in Act 2 — “You’re Gonna Die.”  The Evil League of Evil is awesome, as well.  I was fully expecting Bad Horse to be a real horse, and of course of course, he was.  Too bad you only get to see them all (including Fake Thomas Jefferson, Dead Bowie, Snake Bite, Fury Leika, and Professor Normal — hopefully they get an actual role if there’s ever a sequel) for a full five seconds in the denouement of Act 3, when Dr. Horrible ascends to his rightful lot in life.  I will definitely be getting the DVD when it’s out.  For those of you who didn’t get to see it, you can get the three acts on iTunes (for a nominal fee), or of course they are available through less savoury channels, but I’d prefer that Joss Whedon et al get their just deserts for their sheer awesomeitude.

So yeah, that was my weekend.  How was yours?

I’ve been working like crazy over the past few days to deal with a few metaphorical fires that started burning both at my own site and a nearby one, due to the other site’s IT guy being out sick suddenly.  Between that, and the heat, and the stress of buying the house, and the overall general stress of existing (you must understand what I mean by that, since you all exist too!), I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately.

I also haven’t been biking to work at all this week.  Again, between the heat and lack of sleep, it’s hard to muster up the energy in the morning.  I did work from home yesterday, due to having worked until 2:30am the night before, which was good, except that I pretty well worked from 8:30am straight through until 10 or 11pm with a short break to play some Diablo 2 around suppertime.  Working from home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes.  Yes, you get to be home, not waste gas and thus money on going into the office, stay in your pyjamas (or in my case, due to the heat, nothing but a pair of shorts) all day, and eat and maybe even catch up on sleep at your leisure.  The downsides are that you don’t really actually stop working until people stop bothering you.  I easily put in over 10 hours of solid work yesterday.  I’m on salary though, so my only solace is that I got to stay home.  Well, that, and a member of the other site’s management, with whom I never get along, put in a kudos e-mail to both my direct boss and the president of the company for my efforts.  I’m sure we’ll turn around and go back to butting heads in due course.

I’m also reestablishing communications lately with my closest friend.  And yes, reestablishing, because we constantly lose and reestablish contact with one another.  This is a particular failing of mine, one which Jodi has in the past rightfully chastised me, and one to which I spoke in a recent post.  It’s nice to re-connect, and it seems to be coming at a timely juncture, as we can both hopefully help one another work through our particular stresses at the moment (granted, hers involves a thesis, so I think hers trumps mine).

The house situation is putting along.  I have to look into insurance, we’re considering getting an inspection anyway even though we don’t really need to, my dad’s money order arrived, and I’ve gotten the lease consent form, purchase and sale, and addenda, to the mortgage brokers.  It’s a waiting game again now, though I do have other issues and minutia I should address.

Should, and will.  Tomorrow, though.  I need sleep now.  More desperately than the last time I said so on this blog.

I promised Abby I’d upload some pictures I have of Bathurst, which is my hometown. There’s a map on Google with some pictures, as well, showing where they all are in relation to one another.

I haven’t actually put comments on most of them, as it’s rather late and I have work in the morning.  I’ll do what I can to comment them tomorrow.