Wax On! Wax Off! WAX WAX!

I really did think I would be blogging up a storm about games lately, especially with E3 in the rear-view mirror and the very recent flip-flop from Microsoft regarding their DRM/always on plan and the battle against used game sales, but I'm struggling with actually caring very much about games at the moment.

I'm not sure I want to turn this into a "Dear Diary..." exposition of my personal life but I feel comfortable enough to say that there are a lot of changes happening in my life and a particularly big change in a few weeks: moving.

I'll be honest, I hate moving.

It has a lot to do with the last time we packed up the house and moved everything.

We'd just returned from three weeks away in Florida and after a long drive back home from Seattle -- riding the bleeding edge of a snow/ice storm that turned the highways into bobsled runs -- and thought we were relatively prepared to move prior to leaving on vacation. How wrong we were! During the night, while we tried to shake jet lag, it snowed. Not a ton, but just enough to make manoeuvring a large moving truck extremely tricky. And, well, the list of things that went wrong extended from there -- more snow, taking way too long to pack our truck, etc. -- and at 1:00AM I was single-handedly trying to extricate the moving truck from the alley behind our new home with a shovel, handfuls of salt, and tubs of hot water. It was nasty! That was the first time I've ever been able to honestly say I was "bone tired" because I was barely functioning at the end of it and every step felt like an effort.

This time, instead of moving in February, we're moving in July and we've had a couple months to prepare by throwing out/giving away things we didn't think were worth moving, and packing away anything that could be packed. The house is looking more empty all the time and hopefully by zero-hour it's simply a matter of packing stuff into the van rather than running around the house with empty boxes dumping the random contents of drawers into the boxes.

It does shine a light on just how much "stuff" we've managed to accumulate over the last 5 or so years so I'm happy that we're trying to get things in order so that when we do arrive at our new place we're getting off on the right foot rather than digging through junk boxes again.

I've found my interest in video games waning recently, and this seems to be the reason why.

My interest in action figures has jumped though thanks to a local collectibles shop -- Big Pete's Collectibles -- moving a few doors down from their old location. In an effort to make the move easier, almost everything in the old shop was put slashed by 50%. I had to physically restrain myself from running to the nearest bank to stuff my pockets with cash! It's like advertising half-off booze to an alcoholic.

Big Pete's is such a good place to browse. It ranks second behind Toy Traders in Langley for the pure spectacle of it (more pictures below):