Day Off

I took a day off today, in the interest of culling my vacation herd. For some reason, my company allows you to carry over only exactly 40 hours of vacation. Not an hour more, not an hour less. As I conveniently have 4.5 days and not the requisite five, I'm pretty much screwed in the carry over departments, so instead I'm forced to take off 4.5 days between now and the end of the year. The horrors!

Today was day number one and what a glorious day it was. Nothing to exciting, started the day with some donuts for me and the missus, then we went to a parent teacher conference at my son's Pre-K to find out that he's a certified genius. Well, not certified, but he's quite smart. It's strange because most parents would have a feeling of "I made that kid, he's smart because I am" in these situations, but in this case, with him being adopted and all that, neither my wife nor I had a blasted thing to do with it. The best we can say is that we bought a very smart child.

After that, it was back to the house to hang out and play some Medal of Honor Heroes 2 like the good little reviewer that I am. I'm enjoying the game, but man they need to tighten up those checkpoints. This game throws a ridiculous number of enemies at you in a lot of places, many of which are far away from the last checkpoint and it can be a pain in the ass to get through such a battle and die because you were reloading as a Nazi surprised you, thereby causing you to do the battle all over again. Granted, this is the problem with any game that still uses the checkpoint save system, but for some reason, probably having to do with the fact that you have to be very slow, methodical and tactical with this game, I'm really feeling the pain of the spread out checkpoints.

After all the Nazi shooting Linda and I went out to Pure, a cool little Mexican place in out town. The food there is absolutely amazing and they have a surprisingly refreshing beer for 99 cents. It's hard to throw down four bucks on a beer when there's one on the menu for less than a dollar. Way I figure it, the buzz is the same, so why spend the extra cash. Despite the high number of tasty items on the menu, I always get the same thing which is this dish of these thick corn masa cakes split and stuffed with chile roast pork and queso fresca. It's a simple dish but it's so damn tasty I can't resist it. Add to it, the free melted cheese dip we had as an appetizer and we left with two very full stomachs.

Once lunch was finished, we wrapped up some Xmas shopping for my mom and sister and went back home. Linda was still working today so I returned to the basement to check out the online mode of Medal of Honor (I still suck at online WWII shooters, for those keeping score at home) and then busted out some tracks in Rock Band. The Queens of the Stone Age track "Go With the Flow" is giving me fits because I can't even 4-star it and I take it as a blemish on my otherwise sterling Rock Band record. It's a small timing issue and once I resolve it, I'll be back on track. This isn't the first time Queens of the Stone Age has caused me problems, but I conquered them once and I shall do so again.

As days off go, it was a pretty good one. I look forward to the other 3.5 of them being similarly splendiferous.