Definitely a Chill Developing

Heading out to work the other day I couldn't help but feel the chill of Autumn.

Most of the leaves haven't started turning yet but there's that definite damp cold, not quite crisp, hanging in the air. It's enough to sting your face if you're racing down a hill.

It makes me think of street hockey, light fading sooner and much more quickly, but also sleep and Halloween.

We've moved to a place where getting "trick or treaters" at the house might not happen. I'd wager that it won't happen unless we specifically invite them. There are community events planned but it looks like my kids are going to miss out on what I remember so well about Halloween: Sprinting from house to house with only sugar on my mind.

Foggy

My weekly commute is one long ferry ride. On this particular ride, the route was covered in intense fog. Besides an unreasonable terror with the thought that The Mist had finally become a reality, it created the feeling that we weren't moving.

The sway of the boat, the thrum of the engines were a couple of signs that at least the feeling of motion was present. Inching toward some destination. But a look out the window provided only a sliver of water visible close to the hull. It certainly looked like the boat was moving. But really, we could have been stuck in a giant fish tank with a jet of water pushing against the boat and the only thing preventing us from banging against the back of the tank was the throb of the engine. It was a really odd feeling of equilibrium.

No backward. No forward. Almost like Time had vanished. It was unnerving.

Septic Sure is Something Else

Up until a few weeks ago, I didn't give much thought to what happens to the contents of a toilet bowl when the handle is pushed down because, hey, who thinks about that stuff? Get it out of my sight so I don't have to look at it!

For the last couple of weeks, I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, pondering over it. That flushing action takes the contents somewhere and it's the process of getting to that somewhere and the somewhere itself that have stolen my attention.

Crash course on our septic system is this:

1. Flush the toilet (drain the sink, run the washing machine, etc.)
2. Water flows down the drain into a big concrete septic tank
3. The solids settle out toward the bottom
4. The liquid stays on top reaching a specific level before spilling into the pump chamber
5. Once the liquid in the pump chamber reaches a specific height, the septic pump activates and pushes the liquid in the pump chamber up to the distribution box
6. The distribution box is essentially a junction box with branching lines of perforated PVC pipe to distribute the liquid across an area that's known as the septic field.

It seems that at any point along the way the system could utterly fail.

The Welcoming Committee of One

After days and days of packing up our possessions and lives, and some days to move all of them out of the city and into a quiet -- more accurately, a small island -- setting, I had finally put my feet up on the recently assembled coffee table and let out a bone-weary sigh.

It was quiet outside.

No sirens. No cars. No commercial jets.

Birds, a slight rustle of some leaves in the late afternoon breeze... just the hint of ocean air but filtered through cedar, fir, and arbutus trees.

I let out another bone-weary sigh.

"Dad, Dad!" my oldest daughter yelled from the front yard. "You've gotta see this!"

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.

Brutal Legend Companion Video

A video companion piece to my recent Brutal Legend review on The Armchair Empire - Infinite. Here's a link to the full review in case you missed it.

Killing Data

The other day I cancelled the data plan for my phone.

For some, this might be the equivalent of suddenly deciding to live under a rock.

But it was a move that I needed to take after I realized how much time I frittered away scanning Twitter, Facebook, news sites, etc. looking for something to fill the time while I commuted, waited for the lights to change, went to the bathroom... It allowed me to avoid thinking for any length of time because I could always jump to something else in a bid to be entertained or somehow educated and kept up-to-date on what was happening in the world.